This question occurred to me the other night and it reminded me of way back in school days (a waaay fuzzy memory) when I used to love starting a story with one sentence and then passing it to friends who would also write one sentence and pass it on.
I don’t know where I got the idea (I always find out later that it was never really my idea – I probably overheard it/them somewhere else), but I always seemed to enjoy it more than my friends. We’d sometimes have several going at once so that I didn’t have to wait more than 2 minutes to get something passed to me 😉

Anyways it’s best to do this with just a few friends because at some point someone had the bright idea to pass it to every single person in the class (whether they knew how it was supposed to work or not)…Somehow that one ended up in the teachers hands (and even worse it had morphed into a story about the teacher – haha).

One time I tried this and one guy I didn’t know basically took the 4 sentences that had been written so far and proceeded to write about 10,000 words on his own. This irritated me 🙂

Anyways so I had a brilliant idea for my novel (yes, a midget is the main character and yes in the final scene he is shot out of a cannon – to his death btw) and at the same time realized everything is crowd sourced these days (didn’t that guy from weezer do a whole album this way?)…but has anyone used google docs or something to say write a beginning, middle and end to a story (or more like plot points really), and then turned it loose onto the net with some mechanism to allow the owner to edit it, but not allow any one person to write more than a few sentences/paragraphs/pages at a time?

As usual I thought of this on my own, but I’m sure I’m not the first person to think of it…