Exquisite Corpse is a game thought up by a bunch of surrealists. It’s designed to help people come up with ideas. In the real world, it works like this: You divide a sheet of paper down the middle. On the left you write a list of Adjectives/Verbs, then fold it over so nobody can see what you wrote. You then pass the paper to another person. That person then fills in the other side of the paper with a list of nouns. You then swap paper with someone else again and now you have a list of complete random combinations of nouns and adjectives.
The end result looks a little like this:
I thought maybe we could play a game of it here. So here’s the plan.
- Everyone writes a completely random list of adjectives/verbs, and a list of the same number of nouns. Keep that list secret.
- You are then paired randomly with another person, with whom you will swap your list of adjectives.
- You are also paired with another person with whom to swap your list of nouns. This leaves you with a list of nouns and adjectives different from the ones you started with.
- You then pick one of those adjective-noun combinations and write a short story or drabble based on it. So for example, for the example above I might choose the combination Exquisite Corpse and have to write a short story about... well, an exquisite corpse.
- You get the idea.
Anyone up for it?
