The “Exquisite Corpse” game began as a parlor trick in the nineteenth century and became extremely popular within the Surrealist art movement in the early 1900s. Each artist would fold a piece of paper into thirds (or fourths, fifths, or sixths, depending on how many were playing) and sketch a body part of a corpse on one folded section. After a set amount of time, each would pass his work to another artist, who would continue drawing without knowing what the other artists had drawn before or after them. Once the sketch was complete, the artists would unfold their papers to reveal an exquisite corpse.
We will do the same thing in fictional form.
Directions:
1. Each of you will generate a different story starter by going to http://thestorystarter.com/
2. Take the sentence you’ve been given, altering it as you see fit, and paste it into a word document.
3. Save your word doc to your desktop, using the following naming convention: yourlastname-exquisite-corpse.
4. Beginning with your sentence, continue to write for 7 minutes.
5. At the end of seven minutes switch computers with one of your classmates.***
6. Begin writing from where your classmate left off.
7. Write for 7 minutes.
8. At the end of seven minutes switch computers with one of your classmates.
9. We will repeat this insanity until we are out of time.
10. Save your document and email it to me and/or save it to our dropbox folder.
***Note that in some cases you will also send/receive your document to/from another student, as instructed.
