Interactive Storytelling Experience

Most storytelling events involve one person talking and everyone else listening. This one inverts that. You will be building the story, and the writers in the room are there mainly to keep it moving.

How it works

The room splits into four groups, each given the same opening situation: a house, a will, and three people who cannot agree. Every fifteen minutes the groups face a decision point and vote. Every thirty minutes the groups swap the story they have made with the group beside them and continue somebody else’s.

By the end there are four novels’ worth of premise in the room and four very different books, all grown from the same first paragraph. We read the openings aloud in the last half hour.

Why come

Because the fastest way to understand how a plot actually works is to be responsible for one for two hours. Every group discovers the same things — that a decision only matters if both options cost something, that a character who agrees with everyone stops the story dead, that the interesting question is never what happens next but who has to pay for it.

It is also, by all accounts, extremely funny. Group three always burns the house down.

How to take part

No writing experience is needed and nothing is written alone — the whole session is spoken and argued, with one volunteer scribe per group. Bring nothing. Tea and something to eat at the halfway point are included.

Places are limited to forty and are allocated in advance through the reading room. If you are coming with a friend, expect to be put in different groups; it works better that way.