Each witness, no further
Pass it on · 30 minutes · Published
Read this first
“We have certain events to relate,” Mr. Franklin proceeded; “and we have certain persons concerned in those events who are capable of relating them. Starting from these plain facts, the idea is that we should all write the story of the Moonstone in turn—as far as our own personal experience extends, and no farther. We must begin by showing how the Diamond first fell into the hands of my uncle Herncastle, when he was serving in India fifty years since. This prefatory narrative I have already got by me in the form of an old family paper, which relates the necessary particulars on the authority of an eye-witness.
Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone (1868). Project Gutenberg #155
The prompt
Choose one event your group will never fully see, a theft at a party, a dog gone missing, a wedding called off, and pass the page round so that each writer tells only what their character personally witnessed, and no further. Each account begins where the previous one went blind and may contradict it. When the page returns to the first writer, they add the one sentence that ties the accounts together, or shows that nothing does.
Set a timer for 30 minutes.
Short version · 10 minutes
Alone, in ten minutes: write three witnesses of one small event, each starting where the last one went blind and allowed to contradict them.
The move
Pass it on. Write in company, each extending the previous writer's piece, linking to it and moving it on.
Tags: structure, dialogue and constraint.
Where the page goes next
Scrin is a home where pages grow into books: you keep writing, from an untitled line to a chapter, and Scrin keeps the rest.