Making We Tell Stories

I’m not sure if I’ll ever have the same delighted confusion as I did in 2009 when my company, Six to Start, won SXSW’s Experimental award for We Tell Stories. The website for Penguin Books had launched the previous year, a showcase for its authors to tell stories in unusual, online-only ways, like Charles Cumming’s Google Maps-based The 21 Steps and Nicci French’s two-handed live-writing story Your Place and Mine. We were ushered out of the main auditorium to do press interviews for just a few minutes when an official rushed over and practically pushed us back inside and onto the stage. I had no idea what was going on – we’d only entered the Experimental category. It was only after we asked what we’d won that we discovered we’d been awarded Best of Show. This is the story of how We Tell Stories was made, reconstructed from emails and messages and working documents. A lot of it has been told in pieces elsewhere, but with the twentieth anniversary approaching, I wanted to memorialise it…