Finding Fiction

The best stories you find are the ones that find you. 

I went to a launch of a new initiative last week. It was a great little party, hosted at the Leeds Library, with a number of delightful talks and readings. It embraced storytelling, street art, letter writing and poetry. It was a celebration of serendipity and the written word.

The idea is very simple. Drop a piece of anonymous fiction into an envelope, sign it with a hashtag (#foundfiction), and leave it in some public space, anywhere in the world. Someone will hopefully come to read the story, tag its finding on their social media, return it to its envelope and leave for someone else to find. It's been going a little while now, in a very low-key and organic way, and this event was to launch the idea more formally. I love the notion of disseminating a story like this. You offer a story to the world as a random act of creativity. You may possibly never know who comes to read it and the reaction it has. You let it go and it takes on its own life.

I like to think that people will come across the very stories that they need to find at that particular moment in their life. That's the romantic in me talking there, although this very experience has already been tweeted. 

If you'd like to get involved, from anywhere in the world, get in touch through the email: fictionfound at gmail.com. They are keen to add both writers and distributors to the project. If it ends up going massively viral, remember that you saw it here first!