Spineless Fiction » Spineless Manifesto

Spineless Manifesto

People have always enjoyed a good story. In the beginning people came up with their own stories and told them to each other by adding or subtracting from stories they had heard from someone else. Storytelling was a free group activity.

Then, writing and printing came along and many people could enjoy exactly the same story over and over again. This was very good, but it came with a price. Since the story was already set, most people went from being storytellers to being consumers. The enjoyment of stories was no longer free and it was a primarily solitary pastime.

We love books, but why limit yourself to books when technology allows us to move far beyond the limitations of sun faded spines on a shelf? The aim of Spinless Fiction is to once more make people part of the story, make the enjoyment of stories a group activity and to make it free for all.

Spineless is indeed more. It’s not a static story printed in a book or even blog fiction. It’s a living story that shifts and changes with the help of it’s readers.

A Spineless Fiction project has to include:

A main story
The main story has to be written as you go along. Spineless Fiction requires reader interaction, so you cannot write 200 pages in advance and portion them out two pages a day. You can, of course sketch a possible chain of events for the next week or two, but be prepared to change it if the story takes you elsewhere. Spineless Fiction is for adventurous writers.

At least one add-on story commenting on the main story
This can be one of the character’s secret diary, someone’s picture diary or someone’s mail conversations. The possibilities are endless.

A virtual meetingplace
A forum where the readers can create their own characters and hang out. Spineless Fiction works as the real world. The events in the story are not decided by a, b or c choices, through pools or voting, but through reader characters interacting with the story characters in the forum. Do you think the main character is about to make a mistake? Well, buy him or her a beer in the Forum bar and tell him to shape up.

Suggested optional extra features

Wiki
A wiki can be a good way of making information about characters, places and other things available to the readers, especially new readers who want to get into the story. It’s also a nice way of giving the readers a chance to add characters and other things to the fictitious world of the story.

Chat
Why not add a chat feature where the readers can chat with each other and the story’s characters?

Werewolf games
Why not stage a classic werewolf type game in the Forum? Give the readers a problem to solve in whatever way they think fit, then include it one way or the other in the main story.

And most importantly, a Spineless Story is always FREE!
Reading the story and taking part in the interactive features are free. Readers can also download and share the text as they please as long as they always:

link back to the project’s webpage
acknowledge who’s the author of the text
don’t make money off the text

The author of a Spinless piece of fiction can accept donations or make different forms of merchandise available for purchase. A Spineless text can only be published in book form by, or with the permission of its author. Please, check the Licence page for more information.

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Spineless Manifesto

A Spineless Fiction project has to include:

Suggested optional extra features