Group Story Writing Rejects

One of Enigma's regular meeting activities is something called "Group Story Writing". Everyone sits in a circle and each participant starts a story and has a set time (usually two to three minutes) to write. When the time's up, the stories get passed to the left and everyone continues writing until eventually the stories get around to the original author, who tries to write an appropriate ending. Given the time constraints, the participants rarely have time to read what was written before (let alone the variants in which the paper is folded over so that you can only see the last line or two), so the stories tend to be a bit ... erratic?

Most group stories are read aloud once to all the participants and promptly trashed. Some get saved and typed up by volunteers who don't want to see them lost. Of those the better ones (not good, merely better) are often published in Enigmata, the Enigma fanzine/newsletter. However, some group story writing efforts are so bad that even the editors of Enigmata (who generally don't reject anything) can't find the stomach to publish them. And so, like many other low quality works, they've found a home on the net. Here are the group-written stories that someone thought good enough to type into a computer, but not good enough to actually print out on paper.

Unless otherwise noted, the authors are unknown (which is probably how they want it to be). The slashes in the text indicate where one author left off and another picked up.

• Aesop's Fable
• Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction
• Lovecraftian Horror
• Teenage Dilemma Story
• Group Sonnets, July 2002