If you know me pretty well you’ll already be familiar with the fact that every year myself and two good friends collaborate on a story together. They’re by no means literary masterpieces but they serve an entertaining purpose, for us at least. It began six years ago when we decided to try writing a book in 12 months whilst never talking to each other about what we were writing.. together. The idea was it would be fun, challenging and would throw up some interesting and amusing ideas as we bundled along trying to piece together a story on the fly. One person would start, write 200 words and pass the chapter to the next person to continue. Nothing would be discussed about intentions, plans for plotlines and so forth and the next person would write 1000 words then hand on to the third person, who would write their 1000 words and it would go back to person one for chapter 4. This would continue to the calendar year and three endings would be written at Christmas.

The first year was great fun, the story is apawling as each of us kill off each others favourite characters, introduce changes of genre, style and so forth, but it is fun. The following years helped us refine the format a bit more, still keeping with the non-discussion theme which leaves each of us dying to find out what happens next and whether our own plans for the story have been dashed or supported, but each year producing something quite different.

This year however we have gone for our most challenging format yet, we’re writing it backwards. One of us has written the very last chapter and presented the ending to us at our first get together. Everyone is dead, the world is ending, something tragic has happened blah blah blah etc.. etc.. etc.. How depressing, yet also strangely amusing (you’ll have to take my word for it).

We’ve each written a chapter now, working backwards of course and this has given us an insight into how challenging this year might be. Not only have we got to try and structure a complete story in 12 months without discussing the possible plot with one another, but we’ve got to try and piece it together backwards and arrive at a beginning. This could be messy. In writing my first part (the penultimate chapter) I found myself dissecting the ending and trying to figure out a chain of events that might have led it there. I then tried to write the very end of those chain of events that would leave on to the existing ending. But that chain of events is not written of course, and now it passed on to my colleague to interpret my chapter and imagine his very own chain of events, which completely altered what I thought had happened to cause me to write what I did. Now even my head hurts.

Anyway, it’s all in the name of fun, and I wager we end up with a story of some nature at the end of it all, but as to how legible it is when read FORWARDS remains to be seen. I’d recommend anyone who enjoys writing and working with other people to try writing something in this manner, it’s a very interesting experience. Incidentally, if you know where I could get printed and bound 3 or 4 single copies of a book of about 120,000 words so I can finally commit 3 of our previous efforts to paper, please let me know. Now I’m off to bed to try and imagine what will happen yesterday.