This Year, We’re Letting Stories Wander
For the past few years, our storytelling program has embraced fragments: short chapters, unfinished scenes, moments that begin in the middle and end before anything is fully resolved. That choice was deliberate. Life rarely wraps itself up neatly, and many of our participants—youth, first-time writers, or those exploring complex personal or community memories—connect most deeply with stories that feel open, uncertain, and alive in the in-between.
This year, we’re taking that philosophy a step further. We’re asking a new question: what happens when stories start to notice each other?
Until now, each chapter existed in isolation. Even when themes overlapped, each piece felt like a memory in a vacuum. Now, we’re exploring a more relational approach: a shared narrative space where characters, locations, and objects can reappear across stories, sometimes decades apart, sometimes in entirely new genres.
A tired detective might show up years later in a sci-fi story. A quiet lighthouse might host a romance one day and a mystery the next. Even minor characters might drift from the background of one scene into the foreground of another. Sometimes nothing dramatic happens at all—they might just pass each other on the street. One hurries somewhere important; the other is distracted, lost in thought. That brief overlap is enough to give the world a sense of life.
This year, we’re exploring how our characters can live independently, almost like NPCs in a vast, gamified world. They carry their own histories, personalities, and habits, moving through stories whether or not the plot revolves around them. Sometimes they take center stage; other times they simply drift past one another, unnoticed yet familiar. Their appearances ripple across chapters, creating quiet connections that readers can trace, follow, or discover by chance. In this way, the world itself feels alive—full of figures who exist beyond a single story, moving, drifting, and intersecting in ways that are never fully predictable.
We think of our narrative space like a sandbox game. Characters are no longer tied to a single plot—they exist independently, moving through the world like autonomous agents. They have routines, personalities, and histories that persist beyond the moment the reader encounters them. These small encounters—the brief glances, the passing on the street—matter because they build texture, much like the subtle behaviors of NPCs give life to a city in a video game.
By designing characters and locations as persistent entities, we allow emergent storytelling to occur. A reader following a character from one chapter to another may witness unexpected collisions or quiet echoes—interactions that no single plot dictated. Readers become explorers, tracing patterns, noticing repeated appearances, and discovering connections that feel both spontaneous and meaningful.
From a game theory perspective, each character is an agent with tendencies and constraints, and each interaction—cooperative or incidental—creates a branching network of possibilities. A detective might align with a baker, or pass them without acknowledgment; a lighthouse might host a romance in one chapter and a mystery in another. The choices of readers in what to follow or notice act like player strategies, influencing how the world is experienced without ever controlling it.
This shift changes how we think about reading. Instead of moving linearly from start to finish, readers are invited to wander sideways: follow a name, track a location, notice a recurring object. There is no “correct” order, no final authority on what happens when. Meaning emerges from noticing patterns, tracing intersections, and lingering in moments where characters brush past one another.
Some might worry about consistency. What if a character dies in one story and appears again in another? Our answer: maybe they did, maybe they didn’t. Maybe the second story takes place earlier, or somewhere parallel, or in a slightly altered version of the world. Ambiguity isn’t a bug—it’s a feature. Many of the communities we work with live inside overlapping histories and unresolved truths. Our stories are meant to reflect that complexity.
This year’s exploration isn’t about building longer, “better” stories or forcing a plot to resolve. It’s about creating a space where stories, like people, can exist together without needing to collide. Small moments—a glance, a passing on the street, a shared location—can ripple across chapters in unexpected ways.
In allowing stories to intersect, drift, and echo, we’re creating a living network of narratives. Contributors don’t have to finish anything for it to matter. A fleeting moment, a name dropped in passing, or a scene left unresolved can gain meaning later, in ways no one could plan. In that sense, the work mirrors how we want our communities to grow: collective, relational, and unfinished with care. This year, we’re not trying to tell a single story. We’re making a space where stories can keep happening.
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