A ring-side seat in the writer's brain
Laurence is sitting in a pub, getting drunk.
Terry is on her own, inside her head. Nowhere.
Laurence and Terry have just slept together.
I'm sitting at my computer watching their separate thoughts scroll down parallel columns online, more or less in real time.
I have gathered that they are almost certainly going to kill each other tonight - as in Friday April 11 - sometime after 6.30pm.
This unusual short story is evolving in a singularly unusual fashion because its readers are watching it appear online, sentence by sentence. The thrills here are "live".
The hugely successful thriller-writing team Nicci French (Nicci (Gerrard) and (Sean) French) are the latest writers featured on Penguin's We Tell Stories website. All week they have been telling the story of Terry and Laurence to a chatroom full of people with handles like Batgirl and Spugmeistress.
It takes a little while to settle into this live-ish, semi-spontaneous fictional experiment.
Turning writing into a spectator sport has a history of sorts, though to be honest it isn't very edifying. Monty Python's writing-as-cricket-match sketch ("Hello and welcome to Dorchester where a very good crowd has turned out to watch local boy Thomas Hardy write his new novel The Return of the Native on this very pleasant July morning...") still casts a pall over even the most ingenious experiments.
Still, I am beginning to think that Penguin and alternate-reality gamers SixtoStart are on to something. The story's fine, in a broad-brush, hyper-gendered, bloke vs bunnyboiler way, but it's the chatroom that's really making the whole thing tick.
"She's scary," says one visitor.
"RUN," types another.
It is certainly a fresh spin on "live" writing. In 1978, at a science fiction convention in Phoenix, the writer Harlan Ellison sat writing a story inside a plastic bubble in the hotel lobby. Twenty years later he was doing the same thing in a shop window in Sherman Oaks, California.
More recent, more ambitious and closer to this week's experiment is Tim Etchells and Adrian Heathfield's Long Relay - a continuous, 24-hour, online writing experiment in 2007. It set eight writers to work for three-hour shifts as they took it in turns to write a piece of original fiction, which was updated every minute.
Meanwhile, things are moving along online, with the brewing drama still under wraps.
Laurence: I've got to get fit.
Terry: I'll make him some pasta.
Those lines appeared pretty much simultaneously, but in the chatroom, csimpson turns them into an instant gag: "I think these two are perfect for each other - they sound married already."
Then somebody mentions the word "knife".
It's nothing whatsoever to do with the story. Someone just said "knife".
No-one's actually saying anything coherent any more. They're just saying the word "knife". The whole chatroom. WonderWoman and Catnip and Burgomeister - whatever their names are - "knife" and "hahaha" and "lol". And "knife". Again.
And now I get it. Writing is the business of steering a course through a treacherous archipelago of observations, jokes, criticisms, fugues, images, irrelevant chatter. The chatroom is simulating - with an unsettling degree of precision - what it's like to be inside a writing brain.
This hasn't been the most visually arresting - or, frankly, the most innovative of Penguin's experiments (and there are quite a few to choose from). Nonetheless, it is a very rare thing, a writerly performance that works.
Come along at 6.30pm tonight for the final instalment and see if you agree. I'll be there.
