A Story with a Bang
It's Monday. An ordinary day with its ever-present pleasures and nuisances. Nothing unusual. Yet, the events that take place in that seemingly unexceptional day trigger a series of bizarre coincidences of escalating severity. Within a few weeks, all hell breaks loose and the world spirals towards its demise. The world as we know it comes to an end.
The goal of EndOfThisWorld is to create a surreal novel beginning with a seed event, such as the one above, that undergoes an avalanche leading to a global catastrophe. Instead of trying to emulate the randomness and unpredictability inherent in such a story (like a single author would do), our approach is to build these aspects in the writing process itself. We provide a system through which the story will be shaped interactively, chapter-by-chapter, by an online community of writers and readers using the following process:
EndOfThisWorld consists of 25 Chapters that progress by means of an election system. Creating the chapters is entirely left to the community, subject to the requirement that Chapter 25 sees the end of the world. Here, the concept “End of the World” is to be interpreted in a broad sense. For example it could mean the end of the human civilization, planet Earth, the Universe as a whole...
...or anything that writers can come up with. One thing required for sure, however, is that the world as we conventionally understand and experience it ceases to exist.
Chapters advance on a two-period cycle (lasting approximately two weeks each). During the so-called Submission Period, members can submit candidate scripts for the current chapter. Then, during the Voting Period, the community votes to select the best one, which is incorporated into the official plot. In order to avoid having members vote among an unrealistically large number of candidates, we have established a pre-selection process, which we call Rating, that is used to nominate five finalists for each Chapter's election.
Rating runs in parallel with the submission period. When a writer submits a candidate Chapter, the Chapter becomes immediately available for viewing by members of the community. Whoever reads the Chapter, then has the option (and is strongly encouraged) to assign a score ranging from 1 to 5, according to how much they liked the Chapter. We will nominate the Chapters that receive the highest scores, but reserve the right to exercise discretion in cases where more than five submissions receive high ratings, or an exceptionally good candidate was submitted late in the Submission Period. As for the duration of the periods, this is nominally two weeks for both Submission and Voting, but we'll be tweaking it according to the number of candidates and/or votes we receive. Of course, we'll be notifying the community well in advance of a period's completion.
The writing style we use in EndOfThisWorld is completely experimental. It seems, however, very nicely suited to the surreal story we want to create here. After the novel is completed we hope to make something tangible out of our effort and, apart from the option of publishing it as a book, one can think of our story being made into a graphic novel, an animation, or even a movie script. We want you to be partners in any such endeavor. Accordingly, EndOThisWorld is built around a user agreement that entitles with creative rights all authors whose chapters were selected in the voting process.
So get together your pens, keyboards, and ideas because the world as we know it is about to end!
