The Ten Commands
March 14, 2022
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A Moses-like figure in a world ravaged by climate change, meets an ancient sentient device that helps him to restart civilization.
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Open Stories
by Theena Kumaragurunathan
Open Stories is a collaborative writing community, guided by the principles of other open knowledge movements.
The aim of the project is to allow writers to tackle Open Prompts (essentially writing prompts from around the web) together in an inclusive, collaborative, diverse, and welcoming space.
Writers can contribute in a variety of ways
Writers can contribute in a variety of ways
Either as Writers or as Editors – using the version control system known as Git, or making simple first pull requests. Here is an excellent video tutorial.
Every week, I will attempt a short story based on a prompt. The entire writing session will be recorded, sans voice, and made available on YouTube; the manuscript for each prompt then made available on this repo.
Writers are free to take these manuscripts, and change it as they wish. My hope is that this combination of fly-on-the-wall approach to seeing a writer at work, and then being able to access, read, edit, and take ownership of the respective manuscript, would be educational to young writers embarking on their first projects. In the long run, I hope it leads to a form of open storytelling.
Why?
Why?
There are two good reasons why this project was started:
- Pragmatic: First attempts at any type of creative work is difficult. Beginning artists have a world world of visual material available free, beginning coders have entire code libraries accessible for free on places such as GitHub. It shouldn’t be that hard to have similar starter material for writers.
- Philosophical: I truly believe the publishing industry’s approach to protecting its intellectual property will lead, in the long term, to writing being relegated as a creative expression, losing out to other creative avenues that are less restrictive. This is no place for a ramble, but I will add that this is a humble attempt at exploring alternative ways of thinking about ownership of written works.
WHO IS THIS FOR?
WHO IS THIS FOR?
At this early stage, I imagine the audience for this project belong to one of the four categories:
- Experienced writers, embarking on their first fiction writing projects
- Voracious readers who want to channel their love of words into writing
- Regular contributors to fan fiction. We know how much these words on pages, the worlds they conjure, the people that populate them, mean to you. We also see how dismissively and condescendingly you are treated by the publishers and authors who would stand to benefit the most by allowing you to take ownership of some of these stories. You may not yet be fans of any of the stories here, but you are welcome to take them and mould these narratives to your heart’s content.
- Storytellers of other sorts looking for inspiration and collaboration from fresh new writing voices
OPEN STORIES
Coming soon.
Foodie
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A young food critic is invited to a legendary chef’s last public meal at the greatest restaurant in the world, but the critic suddenly loses their sense of taste and smell.
Last Man Have Chance
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LOGLINE The worst cricketer in the world wakes up one day and realizes he might be the last living person on earth. COMING SOON. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International