eMysteries Toolkit

The European Commission's support for the production of this publication does not constitute an endorsement of the contents, which reflect the views only of the authors, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein. [Project Number: 2019-1-DE03-KA201-060127] 51 Module 4: Creative Writing of Mystery Detective Stories 4.1. Collaborative Creative Writing Collaborative writing consists of the creation of texts by several people. Writing for several people at once is a fun and creative way to work in a group. Techniques for collaborative writing There are many techniques of collaborative and creative writing. Below you find some examples. Exquisite corpse: a technique born in the avant-garde of the 20th century (around 1925) and based on a game in which participants take turns writing on a sheet of paper, folding it to cover a part of the text and passing it on to the next participant. There are four steps in this activity: 1. Each person begins to write a story on a blank sheet of paper. After a few minutes she/he passes the sheet to another student. 2. The next person decides how to continue the story and several ways are suggested: read all the above, read only what was written by the last person or read only the last sentence. 3. The teacher announces the end when everyone has participated and then there are two possibilities: the story is passed on again or the person who has started writing the story decides how to end it. 4. In the end, all the stories are exhibited. Narrative chain: it consists of a series of questions arranged on a sheet of paper and which give shape to events from which a story can be extracted. 1. Questions: who was he? Where was he? How did it all end? What did he say? What did people say? 2. To perform this technique, the class is divided into groups and each group answers one of the questions without knowing what the previous group answered. 3. At the end, the teacher reads all the answers as if it were a story.