Stories collide. I love this. We are born out of stars and everything we do is about collision. Sometimes for good, sometimes not.

Two people collide and remain in orbit forever. Their forever at least. Others collide and bits of them break off, perhaps to collide with yet more people.

Stories do this too. You can listen to a story and, often impatiently, think to yourself that you know how it ends. And maybe you do. Maybe it’s the same ending or maybe it’s different. But you know how to continue the story and you want to. No, you’re driven to.

Other stories collide with the how of their telling. You remember it wrong or place the emphasis in a new place or somebody else interrupts and spins it into something else.

It’s the constant, shifting, elegant physics of stories. It’s the process which happens whenever a story enter into a model of collaboration.

A model which all stories, sooner or later, drift into.

3hundredand65 is like that. Each day somebody new takes the story somewhere different. Each day a reader interprets the story in a new way. Even when the last tweet is sent it will continue to collide and change.

How would the story change if I told you the illustration below was drawn on the day Dave heard his Dad was diagnosed with cancer? How would it change if you didn’t know that but knew what Dave looked like? Or if you read the tweet by Clint Boone and then found out a little about his life?

I used to think collaboration was something we had to actively include in the story making process.

But through 3hundredand65 I’m realising that it’s something we would have to actively exclude.

And the only way we can do that is to not tell stories at all.