Instructions on The Wandering Story say: Add to a story or start your own. It only takes a sentence.

The Description says: A collective effort. Add a sentence and pass it along. Let’s see where this story goes.

The Note: Make sure you share this page on your profile after you add to the story so that it gets passed along to your friends.

There’s no indication who is the originator of this collaborative storymaking page on Facebook. So far one sentence has evoked 42 following sentences.

It is the “exquisite corpse” of the digital age.  According to wikipedia, exquisite corpse is defined as “a method by which a collection of words or images is collectively assembled. Each collaborator adds to a composition in sequence, either by following a rule . . . or by being allowed to see the end of what the previous person contributed.”  The term was coined and the technique was utilized by the Surrealists in the early 1920s as an exploration of odd  juxtapositions that was characteristic of their works.

At www.poets.org, they have rules for doing the same with poetry. They say, “participants should agree on a sentence structure beforehand. For example, each sentence in the poem could be structured ‘Adjective, Noun, Verb, Adjective, Noun’.”

When I was a kid we did the same thing with drawing (instructions here.)  You would fold a piece of paper into thirds and draw feet and legs on the bottom, fold it so all the next person saw was the “connecting” lines so they knew where to begin their torso and pass it.  The torso person would pass it on to the head and neck person, and then we would have the great unveiling. A clown’s head on a stocky body with ballerina legs.  Always good for a good laugh.

I found some great examples of drawings by the original Surrealists at the Exquisite Corpse website.  But, anyone can play this game. You don’t have to be an artist to make these drawings, you just need to jump in and draw.

Using this model for drawing and for telling stories is a lot of fun to do with children of all ages, including your grown up friends.

(Drawing from Ryan at Let’s Share: The Berkeley Blog.)