Variation on the Surrealist Playbook…

Krater

Guest Post by Jeb Dickerson

(Jeb Dickerson is the force behind wikiDstory.com, a collaborative writing site.  You can follow him on Twitter @wikidstory )

wikiDstory.com is about production. Not a production or the production…just production. As opposed to consumption. We’ve come a long way we humans…yes, very advanced indeed. But along the way, we’ve lost something inherent to our species and necessary for fulfillment. We’ve forgotten how to produce.

We pay someone to wash our car. We pay someone to clean our house. We pay someone to train our dog and cut our lawn and make us dinner. We consume all day long (and this says nothing of the more subtle forms of consumption we engage in while watching TV, playing video games, etc) and never once stop to consider the real cost of this consumption. Not the financial cost, but the cost to our happiness, to our fulfillment, to our sense of worth and to our ability to contribute to the people around us. And worse, we don’t even mourn the loss.

The wikiDstory movement, then, is a new beginning. We are here to create a community of producers. People who are committed to being ‘doers of things’ every day, small or large, no matter. And as we develop the wikiDstory community of writers, we will simultaneously be developing a community of people who take this commitment to production into every area of their lives. And who begin to recognize exactly what they’re capable of. Through this recognition, we believe the world will change. 

So please join us. Visit wikiDstory.com and join in our collaborative storytelling community. And when you’re ready, jump into a story. Say whatever comes to mind, just get writing. Because as you likely know, there is power in action. Even if you haven’t a single idea where to take a story, click the ‘edit’ button and start typing. I can assure you the river will soon flow. Then, start your own story. If you have one in mind, great, start with that. If not, come up with the craziest start you can imagine and see where it goes. You may just be surprised. The point is simply to write…take 15 minutes to start the production process and see what happens.

Then, come back often and watch your story starts, or other contributions, grow and change and develop into truly amazing and organic creations. What you see at wikiDstory today will most certainly be different than what you find the next time, and the time after that. As a truly community effort, there’s no telling what we’ll produce together, as we take creative writing (and productive living) to an entirely new level.

(note from CCSeed: to explore how collaborative production has operated in art history, read.