Earlier this week, we asked you to help us tell a story—140 characters at a time—in honor of Miami Book Fair International.
We tweeted out the first line, given to us by Pulitzer-winning author Junot Díaz: “The dogs hadn’t barked all week.”
Like a new media version of Naked Came the Manatee or those Choose Your Own Adventure books, we asked you to tweet us the next line, and the next, and the next.
What we got back was a woman about to be a mother, a mother who rejects her daughter, an ominous tia, an ambivalent relationship, and a pack of howling dogs:
It was quite an experiment. And yeah, if we were to workshop this in a college English class, there would be a lot of questions. Like: What’s in the backpack? Who is Tony? How did they get to Mahlia’s mom’s house? Wait, what just happened?
But hey, it's like jazz: it's the notes you don't play.
And the story doesn’t end here. There were a whole lot of interesting tweets to #WLRNstory that didn’t make it to our final narrative. Bath salts came up once. A trip to the beach. Maybe an alien baby plotline.
Which brings us to our next request.
We want your remixes.
Take a look at the tweets that came in to #WLRNstory on Thursday night. Reorder them, make a new narrative. We’ll post the winning submission on WLRN.org next week.
The rules:
- The submission should be a reordering of tweets that came in to #WLRNstory on Thursday night.
- Don’t edit the content of the tweets.
- Include the @TwitterName at the beginning of each tweet.
- Send submissions to smack@miamiherald.com with #WLRNstory in the subject line.
- Deadline is Sunday, Nov. 18, at midnight.
We're excited to see what you come up with.
