Write a Story Together

A collaborative story told using the last letter, first letter writing pattern. This pattern has only one simple rule: the first letter of the first word in a sentence must match the previous sentence’s last word’s last letter.

Read the story so far at the-story.md.

An Example of How It Works

If this is the latest sentence of the story:

Under a dull, slate-gray sky, the wind-swept beach was empty, save for a few piles of driftwood, the odd seashell, and Harold the Forgetful Hedgehog.

The last word in the sentence — Hedgehog — ends in the letter G. This means that, according to the last letter, first letter rule, the first word of the next sentence must start with a G. For example:

Gazing out at the indifferent sea, Harold’s absent-minded mind tried in vain to mould his mushy memory into a shape from which he could divine why he was at the seashore, alone, carrying an oversized novelty rubber mallet.

This verbose sentence could then be followed by a sentence starting with a T such as:

“This,” thought Harold, “sucks.”

As you can see, save for the letter rule, building a story like this holds boundless freedom to be creative, concise, comical, or cerebral.

A Few Guidelines

• Keep submissions short. The joy of this project comes from the unexpected. While submitting an entire 500-word entry in this style would be a noteworthy accomplishment, trading off 1-3 sentences with other participants will create a more interesting end result.
• Build on and add to the existing plot. You’re free to throw in whatever randomness you like. However, this exercise works best when each proceeding sentence advances, rather than negates, the previous one.
• Keep it clean! Racist, sexist, hateful, or extremely profane language will likely be rejected.
• Don’t be a one-hit wonder. Multiple submissions are more than welcome. That said, refrain from building upon your own accepted addition.

How to Participate

An underlying goal of this repo is to offer more people — especially non-developers — the opportunity to contribute to open source projects. It is also a low-stakes way to practice GitHub workflows.

What You Need to Get Started

1. A GitHub account
2. Git installed locally

How to Contribute

1. Fork this repo
2. Clone your fork locally
3. Make a new branch and switch to it
4. Add to the-story.md file (using the last-first rule)
5. Save your updated version of the-story.md
6. git add and git commit your work
7. git push your branch to origin
8. On GitHub, submit a pull request (PR) to suggest your addition to the story. Your PR will be reviewed and considered for merging!

Digital Ocean has a nice walkthrough of the above steps, if you need a little more direction.