Relay Writing - collaborative story telling

Picture the scene: it's 2003, and I and my (then to-be) wife are sat in a bar in Nottingham, throwing around ideas about writing stories, novels, screenplays and suchlike. We often find ourselves making up little screenplays and stories, and 99% of the time, nothing comes of them.

That night, however, we came up with an idea. Why not create a website where everyone can write a bit of the story? This being 2003, there wasn't too much in the way of social media and web 2.0, so it was more of a novel idea than it would seem now. We came up with a name: "Relay Writing" and decided to initially have four genres of story for visitors to read and add to - Romance, Thriller, SciFi, and Horror. A few days later, the website was live, though pretty ugly, and a few days after that, a new one was online that looked much nicer!

Over the following few years, we received the odd submission, and accept most of them. Some of the rejected ones were either plainly insane, or simply terribly written. We never rejected any on plot alone, as that seemed to go against the ethic of allowing the world to write the story. It's pretty clear that the romance and thriller stories are by far the most popular, but we're not sure why. It's either that these genres are both easier and more enjoyable to write, or that our initial chapter wasn't good or interesting enough to inspire people to follow it up (or maybe it was too good!...)

In 2006, the website got listed in the Writer's Digest top 100 web sites, which got us quite a bit more traffic and a lot more submissions.

Then after a while, essentially, we forgot about it. 

Up until March 2010. After redeveloping another web site using Word Press, I realised that it'd be a great way to reinvigorate Relay Writing, and improve the functionality of it, making it far easier for people to subscribe to updates, post replies, comments, share the stories, and of course submit new chapters. I'm still trying to work out how to order the chapters in the correct way though...

So there we have it - the new Relay Writing web site. Head over and check it out, let us know what you think, and get writing.

Posted via email from Tom Geraghty