Round Robin with Gigi

For those writing this kind of story, one that is completely back and forth small messages, it creates more feeling, in some cases, than a straight narrative. The reader can almost see the characters, can almost hear their voices and inflection. The collaboration techniques allow the stories to almost develope on their own as it just unfolds. The shorter messages and shorter stories, while without as much detail or description, carry emotion and connect with the younger generation. That is how they communicate all day. Personally, for us, it broke down the creative process into much more manageable chunks. It was easy to know how to respond because it came naturally, and you’d follow the flow of conversation into what eventually became slightly exaggerated but within the realm of possibility of a real conversation.
How we started was with the basic premise, which came from a real text conversation one of us had been a part of earlier that week. Interestingly, we set out to establish all this background information that we could draw off of, that we simply never did. Details about the context were useful for getting into the headspace of these characters who were barely characters at all, just archetypes. There was the possibility that these details would come up, but when we actually got around to writing, it just didn’t seem necessary. Supposedly we were just jumping into a previously established relationship, so there was no need to establish much, though a few details did come up naturally.
While we were establishing how we were going to go about it, we discussed a lot of what we were both bringing into the process with our assumptions. We had different ideas that we didn’t discuss as well, adding them in as soon as we started our project in earnest. The attempt was to make it as realistic as possible, going off of what DJ Spooky said about how much information we produce everyday. A lot of that information is useless, but we were also considering that that information, however useless is what makes up our lives. The conversation we came up with could have been communicated much quicker and in simpler terms, but the characters generated what essentially became filler space in the conversation because that is how they were used to communicating. This idea of filler content that is part of the content came from a discussion we had about social media. There is all this information that is just a stream of information, but taken as a whole can be used to determine character, direction of a group, intentions of an audience, or any number of things. That was the kind of authenticity and stream of consciousness we were going for, especially in contrast to the overly constructed narratives on Hooked we both had some complaints about.