You might have heard of chain stories, or perhaps even participated in one. They are a common exercise in creative writing classes, in which a story is started with one word or one sentence, then gets passed from person to person until its completion. The BBC defines a chain story as “a game, devised independently by large numbers of bored students, schoolchildren, and office-workers with a lot of time on their hands, but an inability to go anywhere interesting.”
One version appears in The Morning News. Someone created a tempting beginning of a tale, and several Morning News writers made up their own individual endings. The story, which is about a young college student who finds police cars surrounding her dorm one morning, variously ends in murder, a MySpace photo op gone wrong, and Sarah and Bristol Palin, among others (the article was written on Halloween, before the election).
The European Union funds an educational project, entitled Chain Stories, to promote language intercomprehension in young learners. Students in one country write a story in their mother tongue, pass it on to a school in another country with a different language, where it is translated in order to continue the story. Considering how difficult it can be to learn another language and how tedious grammar exercises can become, the European Union is definitely onto something there.