Exquisite Corpse 2021
It's time once again to kick off our annual run of exquisite corpses! An exquisite corpse is a writing game where where participants come together to write a story... with each only being able to see the last couple sentences of the previous writer's work! Anything can happen as the story passes from one writer to the next, changing dramatically with each scene.
Once it's your turn to write for a particular corpse you'll receive a message from the organizer with the last two sentences of the previous writer's scene. (Or, if you're the first writer for a story, you'll get a simple go-ahead instead; you start with a blank slate!) At that point you will have one week to write a scene of 250-1500 words to continue the story. Once you're done, send your scene back to the organizer and wait to see how it fits into the final story.
After the last writer in a corpse has sent in their segment, the organizer will arrange a Discord voice chat where volunteers will collaborate to read the entire corpse. For extra fun, the organizer won't reveal who wrote each segment right away--we'll see if we can guess who wrote what first! If you can't make it to the voice chat or don't have Discord at all, don't worry; the full corpse will be posted here on the forums for everyone to view and come back to as often as they'd like.
Check out last year's thread for an example of how this all works in practice!
This year's theme poll ended up being pretty close! While there were clear first and second place options, there was a three-way tie for third. We'll only be running four corpses, but I'll make sure all the top themes end up getting used anyway--check out the details of the Genre Switch corpse. ;)
Genre Switch: Rather than having a consistent theme, this corpse mixes things up even further by changing genre after each scene! In addition to their usual prompt, each participant in this corpse will receive two genres to choose from and write their scene around. These genres may be mainstream (e.g. adventure or romance) or fanfic-specific (e.g. PMD or angst). And, since NPC POV and Detective Pikachu were both popular options on this year's theme poll, we'll make sure those both appear as genres in this corpse!
Pokémon POV: Witness the exquisite corpse insanity through the eyes of a Pokémon--or perhaps many Pokémon? Whether alien intelligence style or semi-humanized PMD variant, all the protagonists in this corpse will be Pokémon of one sort or another.
Reverse: Ordinarily, an exquisite corpse starts at the beginning and moves straight towards the end, with each writer using the end of the previous writer's scene as a prompt. This corpse goes in reverse: it begins with the final scene and progresses towards the beginning. Rather than using the final two sentences of the last scene as a prompt, each writer will instead receive the first two sentences of the scene by the writer that came before them. No particular genre or theme besides the backwards style--it's anything goes here!
Sinnoh Journeyfic: We're returning to Sinnoh this year to celebrate the next big pokémon game releases! Scale snowy mountains, put Galactic grunts in their place, and collect eight gym badges--or get completely derailed by a sidequest outside Sandgem Town! Enjoy a no-doubt disastrous journey through nostalgic Sinnoh scenery in this journeyfic corpse.
Sound like fun? To sign up, just post in this thread stating:
a) which corpse(s) you'd like to participate in; you can write for as many as you want
b) if there are any weeks where you're going to be busy and would prefer not to write
c) whether you're interested in being the first writer for any of the corpse(s) you're signing up for
Sign-ups are open until midnight UTC on Tuesday, July 27th (8 PM July 26th EST), and the corpses will kick off a couple days later!
Many thanks to this year's hosts: Chibi Pika, IFBench, Sinderella, SparklingEspeon, and windskull! Depending on how much interest we get, we may want to open additional iterations for some of the themes, so there may still be opportunity to run a corpse if you're interested; I'll put out a call if it turns out we need more people.
Feel free to post any questions you might have in this thread. Happy writing!
