Beyond Reading: A Guide to an Interactive and Collaborative Experience

About

Missed | Connected Inspiration is an online theatrical endeavor that invites the reader to become a participate in creating an event centering around the posting of fictional "missed connections" on both this blog and Craigslist.org. Reader-participants respond to and receive answers from the character-author of the missed connection. This highly personal interaction does not have a given end point or structure, allowing the reader-participant to influence and affect the world of the missed connection and the personality of the character-author. Your experience with Missed | Connected Inspiration will be unique and has the possibility to bloom and shape the characters at the center of the original posting.

What is a Missed Connection?

Missed Connections refer to a section of Craigslist.org's online personals in which persons create posts searching for strangers in order to rekindle or connect with a romantic missed opportunities. The idea has evolved over the years and now includes posts about unrequited love, long-lost loves, secret crushes, and confessions of longing, love, and/or lust.

 

How exactly does this work?

1. A Missed Connection is posted on this blog.
2. Reply to the post via email (missedinspiration@gmail.com) with the intention of either 1) assisting the character-author in his/her search, 2) determining if you are the subject of his/her search, 3) general commentary about his/her post or search, and 4) anything else you deem possible.
3. Receive a personalized response from the character. You may choose to continue the conversation. You may be the person he/she is searching for. The possibilities at this point are unknown and uncharted.
4. Responses and personalized conversations are posted on the blog at the discretion of the author.

Author Commentary

This began as a writing experiment and exercise a few years ago and recently reemerged in my creative radar this past summer. The idea is simple: write a fictional missed connection each day and post it on Craigslist. I discovered that it didn't matter if the people reading believed it or not, they wanted to be entertained and to root for the happy ending. Each missed connection varies in style and character, although I'm sure some characters may possibly be recurring.

The thought of a blog came while wondering how best to present my first 30 days of fictional missed connections and the wonderfully amusing, praising, and ridiculous responses. However, I did not want to solely present my own cognitive process of writing nor did I want to pedantically examine and discuss unscientific findings, parsing what type of people responded to what type of posting. This is where I stalled and brainstormed for a good while.

The interesting aspect of missed connections is that they play and tease and toy with our hopes, our fantasies, and our arrogance. We read missed connections and want to root for the person behind the computer screen, yet secretly the desire is that someone out there loves us enough to put something online that we'd see. We read and laugh at the outrageous and the crass, yet secretly we desire to stumble upon one written about us. We fantasize about that. We may even hit ctrl+F and begin to type places we have been in the past few days. So how do we play with this desire, arrogance, and empathy?

It occurred to me that this human desire could morph into an interactive online experience. What if I posted a missed connection and invited readers to answer with the promise that a personalized response would follow? What if this response had the potential to confirm the reader as the subject of the missed connection? At which point does this interaction become pivotal for the character of the missed connection and the newly formed reader character? What if I continue to post new missed connections on Craigslist and a reader of this blog discovers my posting there, beginning this theatrical internet exchange before it even hits the blog? My mind was racing with possibility.

A brief note regarding the fiction. It is not my intention to actively communicate with people who are not aware of the fictional nature of these postings; therefore, I do not respond to emails from the original craigslist posting. I will post responses on the blog if I believe them to be interesting or thought provoking, but always anonymously. If you believe you've found one of my original posts and want to reply before it hits the blog, just be sure to reference the blog somewhere in the response.

And a final note: the fiction is spontaneous and instinctive. Each one purposefully explores different character voices, styles, and writing skills. Some are melodramatic, some are badly poetic, some are gracefully poignant. That's part of the fun. Feel free to comment.