Round Robin

Let's tell a story in a Round Robin style. Here's how it works: I'll provide the 1st paragraph. In the comments section, the first commenter will write the 2nd paragraph (or lines of dialogue). The second commenter will read write the 3rd paragraph. We'll keep going until it gets much, much too silly to continue, or if someone comes up with a natural ending.

The rules:

1) It's a story, not a competition. Don't negate the previous storytellers' contributions with claims that "it was all a dream" or killing everyone off willy-nilly.

2) Give the next person something with which to work. Setting a character up for a line of dialogue is fair.

3) No eating all the chocolate-covered strawnberries while the current storyteller is contributing to the round robin (did I mention that we often told these stories during tea-parties in college?).

The 1st paragraph:

When Ember, the youngest daughter of Xerxes the blacksmith, became apprenticed to Oren the tailor, no one would have thought the girl would have adventures any more exciting than accidentally stepping upon straight-pins or dropping thimbles into cold cups of tea. “The quiet life of a seamstress will be more becoming to my little girl than the grueling work of the smithy,” Xerxes said. Ember knew her father suffered from guilt over dropping the anvil on her foot and making her lame for life, so she didn’t contradict him, but she would have rather stayed in the smithy than worked for Oren the tailor. Oren was a cantankerous man with haughty airs and a weak chin, but he had no children of his own, and Xerxes had eight. It was only fair that someone like Ember would leave her family to become the apprentice to someone else in the village. Nonetheless, Ember decided that the first chance she could, she would run away.


Your turn!