Experimental writing at Brighton Digital festival

RICHARD HEARN of Paragraph Planet is back to explain about Geo-Writing at the Digital Festival and how everyone can get involved.

Geo-writing is an experimental project in which writers can pick up prompts according to their writing location, and then work on them at leisure. There are over 60 prompts spread throughout Brighton, so I’ve been busy inputting longitude and latitude of various road crossings and landmarks. The prompts include crazed seagulls, mysterious boxes, lost photographs and oddly-behaving children. I’m loving the idea of several authors tackling the same prompts from different viewpoints.

I’ve no idea what I’m going to receive in my inbox, but I’m hoping for a mad mixture of Brighton-based events which don’t quite join up. We shall see. Get involved

Thanks Richard. Lots more information on the website: your contribution can be up to 300 words long and it’s up to you how you use the prompt you’ve been given. You could write a self-contained story, but Richard imagines that many will be a moment captured – the prompt might be the central moment of a segment or it might be glimpsed in the background. Back to Richard for how you can tackle the challenge:

…say your prompt on Western Road is ‘grandfather with a pushchair containing twins’. You might be describing his thoughts as he walks, things that are going on in his life, or perhaps your 300 words describe someone about to get down on one knee to propose in the middle of the street, and the grandfather is simply one bypasser who is described. My hope is that I’ll receive both those moments, from different authors, and geo-writing will become a hallucinatory jigsaw of half-matching pieces.

I’m not going to give everything away, but right now I’m working on a prompt geographically located in Southover Street that involves white paint. You may be wondering if you have to be in Brighton to take part.

Richard again:

If you live in New York, the code will probably say that your nearest prompt is on the west side of Brighton, perhaps a small side road in Portslade, and anyone in Belgium might pick up a prompt from Hollingbury. Who am I to say you can’t sneak some piece of writing in there? Or you could definitely help by spreading the word about the project, retweeting, sharing on Facebook, and Geo-writing may well be coming to a town, or country near you in the future. There is also the possibility that post-September, further writing will be invited.

60 prompts across the city + hundreds of writers doing their own thing = anything could happen