It's a good idea, but I'm not sure if (or how) it'll work.

I've done these before with a writer's group.

It's a "round-robin." Or exquisite corpse. Or other names.

I'm in, if you want.

You don't need a plot beforehand, if you don't want.

A plot might help though, as would a basic agreement on a little continuity. Why?:

Because mainly these stories suffer when one writer wants to make a fantastic dogleg turn away from the last installment and s/he thinks it's brilliant, although the continuity kind of suffers. Or somebody gets the urge to kill a character or two. Or someone wants to do some "radical" change, like make the last chapter all a dream that one of the characters had.

Happens all the time.

Even the pros sometimes do these things in published exquisite corpse novels, although I can't think of a good example of one gone bad right now. Actually, the only pro corpses I can think of now are one that Robt E Howard did with some pulpsters in the '30s, and the contemporary Irish novel Yeats is Dead.

This sounds like my old PBEM (play by e-mail) role-playing games. You have a character, and your write your character's actions and storyline then e-mail that to the listserv. People see what you did, react to it, add their own storyline (or ignore it if they don't interact with your character). Of course, we had pretty regular meetings on IRC to keep our stories straight and to make sure no one stepped on any toes.

Here's a helpful link from Wikipedia's External links section on PBEMs.

I would be interested, but I have very little follow-through on these things (my character's main storyline took a little over a year to develop, while other people had kids, joined and left, etc. during that time).

Oh, and it's best to give someone a week to do a chapter then send it to the next person to do the next chapter.

These are VERY FUN!

THANKS, scrump!

Sounds fun. Shane makes a good point: perhaps a gentleperson's agreement to avoid such things?

Robert Lynn Asprin did this with the Sanctuary fantasy genre anthologies. Different authors writing short stories for the same world.

It actually is readable, but they were pros and/or mentally unstable and/or fond of grog.