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TalkTalk, the broadband and home phone company, has received over 3,800 submissions in just over a month for its online collaborative creative writing experiment, The Forever Story (www.theforeverstory.com). The Forever Story is open to contributions from everyone and TalkTalk hopes in time it will become the worlds longest ever collaborative story.
The story, which raises awareness for autism education charity TreeHouse, was started by author Nick Hornby, begins: For the first nineteen years of his life, Johnny Razor wasnt Johnny Razor at all. He was Malcolm Weatherly, and he was born in Mile End Underground station on the night of 17th September 1940. It has since received contributions from famous writers including Tom Stoppard, Richard Curtis and Robert Harris.
Anyone who wishes to contribute a paragraph or more to the story can do so via The Forever Story website. An audio playback facility allows them to can hear their paragraph once it is added. A regular podcast is also available for download to enable people to catch up on the story so far.
TalkTalk launched The Forever Story to raise money for TreeHouse, the national charity for autism education. For every contribution made to the story, TalkTalk will donate £1 to TreeHouse to support its work with children with autism.
Dominic Stinton, Marketing Director at TalkTalk, said: The amount of interest in the story so far has been fantastic and weve seen submissions from people of all ages and all around the world. Literacy remains a problem for many people in the UK so we hope that The Forever Story project encourages more people to give writing a go and improve their confidence with words, whilst supporting a very good cause.
According to the National Literacy Trust, 16% of adults in England (5.2m people) have literacy skills at a pre-GCSE level; in Wales, it is 25% (0.4m); and in Scotland, 23% have low skills.
