September 28, 2009

Sharing a Story

A yearlong online adventure story makes its debut at the National Book Fair in Washington, D.C

By TFK Kid Reporter Rebecca Joskow

Have you ever played the game Hot Potato? Jon Scieszka and a team of 13 popular children's book authors are playing a writer's version of the game, and having a blast.

BRENDA IASEVOLI FOR TIME FOR KIDS Author Steven Kellogg and Rebecca Joskow share stories.

Here's how it works. In The Exquisite Corpse Adventure, the "hot potato" is the story, and it is passed from one author to the next. Scieszka wrote the first chapter. Then he passed the story to Bridge to Terabithia author Katherine Paterson. If Scieszka decides to introduce a roller-skating baby into the story, which he did, Paterson and the other contributing authors will have to decide what to do with the baby in later chapters.

"The story just keeps getting weirder and weirder," Scieszka told TFK. "I'm completely entertained. I think kids will feel the same."

Every two weeks a new chapter, written by a different author, will be published on the Library of Congress's read.gov site. Scieszka's first chapter was published on September 26. You can read the second chapter, written by Paterson, on October 9. The story will end a year from now.

Fun at the Fair

TFK Kid Reporter Rebecca Joskow and hundreds of other children and their parents gathered in a crowded tent on the National Mall to hear Scieszka read the first chapter of The Exquisite Corpse at the National Book Fair in Washington, D.C. Five other children's book authors who are also writing chapters of Corpse joined Scieszka at the kickoff: Megan McDonald (Judy Moody series), Kate DiCamillo (Because of Winn Dixie), Shannon Hale (Princess Academy), Nikki Grimes (Meet Danitra Brown) and Steven Kellogg (Is Your Mama a Llama?).

Scieszka, the author of The Stinky Cheese Man and other Fairly Stupid Tales, did not fail to make the crowd laugh with his incredibly silly story.

"Working on The Exquisite Corpse story was so much fun," Scieszka says. "I got to write the first chapter so I could set up all these booby traps for the other authors and make them have to write about meatballs, clowns and ninjas."

In the first chapter, 11-year-old twins Nancy and Joe have just run away from the circus. Their train is rushing toward a bridge with a ticking clock attached to a bundle of dynamite. In just 47 more ticks, the bridge is set to blow. Will Nancy and Joe survive? And what exactly will happen to the roller-skating baby, the clowns and the ninjas? Kids have to visit read.gov every two weeks to find out!

An Old Game

Other characters in The Exquisite Corpse include a talking pig and a talking butt. "It's complete insanity," admits Hale.

The story might be a tad zany, but all of the authors agreed that writing the adventure together was a whole lot of fun. "I start in the middle of [the story]," author and illustrator Steven Kellogg told TFK. "That's kind of fun because I get to read about everyone else's characters and then bring them into the chapter that I'm writing."

BRENDA IASEVOLI FOR TIME FOR KIDS TFK Kid Reporter Rebecca Joskow talks to author Nikki Grimes.

Kellogg and the other authors are playing a game that is over 100 years old. Exquisite Corpse is actually the name of an old game in which players begin a story on a sheet of paper and pass it on to the next player to continue the tale. The game ends when someone finishes the story, which is then read aloud.

Want to join the fun? Keep reading The Exquisite Corpse at read.gov and write your own chapters. Then, write your own tale and pass it along to friends to continue. As Kellogg told TFK, "Everyone's an author; everyone's a storyteller.

To read TFK's interview with Jon Scieszka, go to A Chat with Author Jon Scieszka. The author talks about the writing process.

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