Hot Potato Fiction!

When I was but a lad, sitting by myself in some classroom in my suburban Canadian high school enduring the periodic, emetic seizures of boredom familiar to anyone who has ever been trapped for their adolescent years in such an institution, one of my favorite things to do was to write little stories on crumpled up scraps of binder paper and stuff these into my desk whenever the teacher wasn't looking. These inky treasures would always resurface a few days later with some additional lines scrawled underneath by some unidentified fellow sufferer. Some of these weird little offerings to the muse developed into fairly long, semi-coherent narratives, and what they lacked in artfulness they more than made up for in sheer therapeutic value. Savvy readers of this column will note that such narratives neatly conform to my own definition of interactive fiction, seeing as how, in the first place, the participant always makes his contribution to the story in partial ignorance of it's total structure, and in the second place, the dominant voice is always (at least in some broad, metaphysical sense) the second person, since the implicit instruction at the end of each section is always "add your contribution here." Perhaps the most famous example of this sort of work, however, was the famous pulp novel NAKED CAME THE STRANGER, written in the 1960s by a bunch of journalists under the pseudonym "Penelope Ash""- a marvelously awful piece of literature that was a short-lived cult classic of the post-war era.But the web is the perfect venue for this sort of writing and recently a number of interesting sites have sprung up that allow the budding scribe in all of us to attach our two-cents worth to some continuing narrative. For a particular messy and amusing set of examples, check out the entries at http://www.writealong.com . For a more serious attempt to construct these sorts of conjoined, multi-author narratives, take a look at the NET NOVEL page, (http://www.lumenary.com/NET-NOVEL.html) where a number of "first sentences" have been provided for genre writers to sharpen their wits on. What should we call this bastard sub-genre of interactive storytelling? Describing it as "collaborative" does not really get to the heart of the matter, since there have been many literary collaborations that did not involve one participant stopping at a particular point in a story in order to let another continue the thread. I think the best name for it should be that of the non-literary game upon which it is clearly based: Hot Potato. In the coming weeks I'll be searching out as many links as I can find to sites on the web where Hot Potato Fiction (HPF) is at its flourishing best. Perhaps we'll even start a game of literary "Hot Potato" on this site if the interest is great enough. Stay tuned, as always...

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