One story. Thirty characters each. The whole world holding the pen.
When the lights came back on… is a story being written by everybody, thirty characters at a time — from around New Zealand and from anywhere else that finds it. You get one line. Then it belongs to somebody else for two days, and you wait your turn like everyone else.
That waiting is the point. It asks you to read what strangers wrote before you, think about where the story is going, and add something worth the space. In an age built to be skimmed, this one takes your time on purpose — one line, one light on the map, and then the patience to see where it goes without you.
Your line
- One line, then a wait of 48 hours before your next.
- Thirty characters, counted the way you'd count them by eye — an emoji is one, not two.
- At least three, so the story doesn't fill with single letters.
- In English for now. Other languages are coming.
- Pick the country you're writing from. Your flag goes in after your words and stays there for good.
We know your line by a private, anonymous marker kept in your browser. There's no account, no email, and no way for us to work out who you are. It also means somebody determined enough can get a second line, and that's a trade we've made on purpose: the alternative is making you sign up, and that would cost the site far more than the occasional extra turn.
Come back in two days
Forty-eight hours after you write, you can write again. There's a clock on the page telling you exactly when.
The wait is the point. It's long enough that nobody can sit down and write the story themselves — even somebody who never missed a turn would manage about ninety lines in six months, among however many thousands everybody else adds. And it's short enough that the story is worth coming back to. It will have gone somewhere strange while you were away. It always does.
The same wait applies to a paid long line. One purchase, one long line, then two days before the next.
Joining it to the line before
Beside the box there are two small dropdowns: a joining word like and, then, but or because, and a punctuation mark to finish on. Neither counts towards your thirty characters — they're free, so you never have to spend your words on grammar.
No machine is involved in any of this. Nothing reads your line, rewrites it, or decides how it should fit. You choose the join, and the story is stitched together by the people writing it — which is the only way it could honestly be called theirs.
Humans only
Before your line goes in you'll be asked to tick a box saying you're a person. Behind it your browser does a few seconds' arithmetic to prove there's a real machine with a real person at it — which costs you nothing you'd notice, and costs anybody running a script an enormous amount.
No pictures of buses. No third party watching you. Nothing about you is sent anywhere, and nothing is stored. It just has to be dear enough that writing a bot to do this isn't worth the electricity.
Finding your line again
Your own turns carry a faint underline when you come back on the same device, and you're told your turn number when you post. Turn 40,112 of Volume III will still be turn 40,112 of Volume III in ten years.
Nobody knows where it goes
Thirty characters from somebody in Whangārei land against thirty from somebody in Lagos who will never meet them, and between the two of them the story turns a corner neither would have chosen on their own. Nobody is steering. Nobody can.
It's the same pleasure as a conversation that gets away from everybody in it — the moment where somebody says one unexpected thing and the whole evening goes somewhere none of you planned. This is that, running for six months, between people who will never know each other's names.
Look at the map above the story and you can see who has turned up so far. It began in Wellington and it isn't meant to stay here. Every light is a person who read what strangers had written and decided to add something to it.
So the story can go wherever it likes. Funny, tender, ridiculous, quiet, sad for a line or two and then somewhere else entirely — a story written by this many people is going to be all of those before lunch. It only has to be something a stranger can pick up and read.
It might not make sense
Some days it won't. A line arrives that ignores everything before it, or three people answer the same moment in three different directions, and the story stops making sense for a paragraph or a page.
That isn't the thing going wrong. That is the thing. Nobody has ever really tested whether a crowd can write something together thirty characters at a time — whether enough strangers will read what came before and add something that serves the story instead of themselves. This is the test, and it's running live.
It's a trust fall done with words. You close your eyes, let go of your line, and hope somebody catches it. Sometimes they do, and the story turns a corner that nobody could have written alone. Sometimes nobody catches anything and it goes sideways for a while. Both are the experiment working. The question was never whether a crowd can write neatly — it's whether a crowd can write at all, and how much care it takes from each person to make that true.
Your thirty characters are one small answer to that. Read what's there before you add to it, and you'll have caught somebody.
Six months, then it closes
A volume runs for six months. The clock at the top counts it down. When it reaches zero the volume locks forever — nobody can add to it or change it again — and a new one opens with the identical first line.
That's the interesting part. Same seven words, a different world writing them, a completely different story. Every finished volume is on the shelf.
A chapter a day
Every day the story is written on becomes a chapter of its volume. Chapter 1 is the day it opened, and a new one begins each midnight. Once a day is over its chapter is closed and can never change again.
The calendar on the days shows every chapter at a glance — the brighter a square, the busier that day was. Click one to read only that day, or find the same chapters listed under their volume on the shelf.
Each night the day's turns are also read back and noted down in a couple of sentences, so you can see where the story went while you were asleep. A note is written about the story, never into it. No summary has ever changed a word anybody contributed.
When a volume closes
At the end of the six months, when the volume is shut and can never change again, the person who runs this site intends to read the whole thing and write about what happened in it — what the story turned out to be, where it went that nobody expected, and which lines stayed with them. That gets published alongside the volume, like an afterword.
It's one reader's account of a story written by thousands, and it's written well after the fact. Nothing in it can reach back and change a word of what you wrote.
Reading it in another language
Underneath the story there's a Translate the story button. It hands what's on screen to Google Translate, in whatever language your browser is already set to. Nothing is translated here and nothing passes through this site on the way.
The map
Above the story is a map of everywhere it has been written from. A country lights up the first time somebody writes from it, and flares whenever another line arrives.
One light each, all the same size. Whether a place has sent one line or two hundred makes no difference to the map — it answers a single question, which is where this story has been, and a place either has been part of it or hasn't.
It's centred on the Pacific rather than on Greenwich. Most world maps cut that ocean down both edges, which would put New Zealand on one side of the world and Tonga on the other. This one keeps the Pacific whole and cuts the Atlantic instead, where nobody minds.
Taking it away with you
Every chapter and every volume has a Copy button. It gives you the whole thing as plain text with a line saying which chapter it came from and how many people wrote it.
Paste it wherever you like — a document, an email, or into an AI if you'd like it summarised, argued with, or turned into something else. That's yours to do. The one place a machine will never be allowed to touch it is here.
Lights on, lights off
The switch at the top of every page turns the site from night to daylight. It starts dark, because the story does. Your choice is remembered on your device, and until you make one we follow whatever your system already prefers.
Keeping it worth reading
Lines are screened before they land — for slurs, hate speech, harassment, contact details and advertising. Links and usernames don't go in. If a line is turned away you're told why in one sentence, and you can fix it and try again straight away.
It's a list of words held on the same machine that runs this site. Nothing is sent anywhere and nothing is scored. Ordinary words are not the enemy — a story about people needs words about people, and the screening is here to keep out cruelty and spam, not vocabulary. If it refuses something it shouldn't have, the form below is the fastest way to get it fixed.
Still to come
This is deliberately small while it's being passed between friends. The rest is waiting until there are enough people here to make it worth building.
Writing in your own language, with joining words and punctuation to match, and flags from everywhere.
Translation — whole volumes turned into your language and kept here, so a finished story reads as one piece rather than a page at a time.
A longer line, for a small price. Three hundred characters instead of thirty, once, marked as bought, and strictly rationed — no more than one in every hundred lines, so nobody can buy their way into steering the story. It's the one thing here that might one day pay for the rest.
If there's something else this needs, the form below is where to say so.
Found something broken?
Tell us and it goes straight to the person who can fix it. No account needed, and an email address is optional — leave it if you'd like a reply.
© Mike Cousins, New Zealand.