Other than that, though, I’ve never had the chance to participate in some round robin writing, but it must produce some really interesting stories, and it sounds like fun. I almost wish that MR (in this case) had written a full version of Flavia’s Solution him/herself, so we could compare and see where other peoples’ ideas had taken the story. Purely curiosity, but still.

Back in the early days of online computing, before public Internet access became the norm, I participated in a round robin writing forum on Prodigy that we called Sanctuary Dark. (Very different arrangement than what you’re describing here.) It can be very stimulating to the brain cells to have to look at what someone else wrote, and come up with the next chapter, or even the next ten or twenty lines. The same storyline was kept going for, oh, I don’t know, over two years… it grew and grew, with subplots growing and shrinking all over the place. It was an amazing exercise, and my first exposure to the kind of round robin writing that can really help a person grow as a writer.

I’ve actually tried to get something like what you guys do started with my online writer friends. I miss that kind of collaborative feeling, where you have to give up control of your words to someone else and see what they do with them.