An idea and a request.

Apr 09, 2011 12:33

So I was putting my filing cabinet back together this afternoon (after tearing it apart in search of my Japanese W2 forms earlier this week), and I came across a handful of letters that have been sent to me over the years.

A little while later I went downstairs to get my mail, and as I was flipping through the endless pile of junk I thought about the little packet of envelops tucked safely away now in a drawer. I miss getting real mail. E-mail is all well and fine, but my inbox is constantly crammed full of spam and junk from CUA (about one out of every ten e-mails I get from the college is in any way relevant to me. Also, Travelocity apparently thinks its funny to taunt me with cheap airfare deals. Constantly.) And since the advent of Facebook and Twitter, everyone just virtually stalks one another anyway; I almost never get e-mails from 'real' people unless something's wrong or they need a specific favor.

Granted, I'm a terrible penpal. Someone sends me a wonderfully long letter about their interesting life, and I sit down to write a response and ... realize I have nothing interesting to say about mine. So I put it off indefinitely, and somehow never get around to responding at all. And the chain breaks down. Alternatively, someone sends me a nice, personal e-mail, and then somehow - within less than a day - the letter's buried among spam and administrate nonsense that always seems to take precedent. (And when my inbox is at its most unwieldy, I have a very cowardly habit of just avoiding Gmail altogether.)

But among that packet of letters were a few my childhood friend Danielle and I used to send back and forth over the summers between elementary school years. We lived in the same town, and saw each other almost daily when we took our dogs for walks -- so at first glance, she's an unlikely correspondent. But what we were doing was writing letters back and forth using made-up personae; people with more interesting lives than we had. People who were traveling, or off fighting wars, separated from one another for long spans of time before the advent of the telephone. It fueled her flair for the dramatic (at that point in her life, she wanted to be an actress) and my love of writing and storytelling. My strength was creating the backstory; hers was dialogue. And we made a pact never to discuss the letters when we saw each other in person. No pre-plotting allowed; that was a different world, and it existed only inside of envelopes.

We kept this up for a few years, and had a tremendous amount of fun doing it. To my sorrow, I only kept a few of the letters; they would have made an interesting story, if put into context with one another.

Now, we only ever wrote things on lined pieces of paper -- it wasn't an elaborate production. But think about what a resourceful, creative person could do with something like this? You could write on anything - napkins with logos from restaurants, the back of cryptic-looking receipts (everything's cryptic when taken out of context these days, isn't it?) You could put three-line captions on photographs. Postcards, drawings, magazine articles. The possibilities are literally endless.

I've been trying for months to figure out how to incorporate that type of storytelling into an actual written narrative -- my 'scrapbook story' idea -- and I've been woefully unsuccessful so far. I haven't given up yet; but as a consequence, it's constantly lurking in the back of my mind as a half-formed idea. And today, I got to thinking about how much fun it would be to craft a non-traditional story that way with someone else, using letters. You could do anything; period pieces, spy-type thrillers with clues and puzzles ... anything.

I rarely have luck when I ask people to jump onboard with my bizarre writing schemes, but I'm asking in earnest here: would anyone like to do something like this with me? Exchange letters, but in the form of storytelling rather than personal, real-life correspondence? I'm thinking we'd agree on a time period for the story and the sketchiest of plot outlines (because these things almost have to be organic in order to work; the idea is to surprise your correspondent with what you do next), and beyond that, there are no rules. It would mean sending me your mailing address, and obviously paying for postage, but that's it as far as commitments go. (I live in Maryland, on the east coast of the USA if anyone's trying to calculate postage costs in their head, and I'm happily willing to correspond with anyone from anywhere.)

Any takers? :3 Shoot me an e-mail (o2doko [at] gmail [dot] com) or PM me here on LJ if you're interested.

I miss having a chance to be creative in a physical, non-internet forum. I miss writing things that have nothing to do with school. And I really, really miss getting real mail. I'm just going out on a limb, here, and guessing some of you might feel the same. ♥

request, letters

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