the same story seven ways

Not that it has to be seven, but the idea is that seven friends write the story of a specific event and then compile the stories intact.

I've wanted to do this for a little while but can't pick a specific enough event involving seven people whom I know would write the story. I was thinking that a singular event might be interesting, but that probably an event that altered the course of the day or week would be preferable.

I used to have dreams where I was multiple people at the same time, doing some relatively mundane thing. Talking on a swingset. Going to the grocery store. Playing a game. There was this one time that I was like six x-men fighting eachother, which was awesome, but mostly it was mundane stuff. I've wanted to write a story that would recreate this sense of being multiple people, but I don't reasonably know how to do it. I think this same story seven ways is probably the closest approximation. It would be interesting if they could be spliced into eachother without the wording being significantly altered. Maybe seven is too many.

As I'm writing this I realize that this kind of plot device is used commonly to spice up a plot or interconnect characters with no natural feeling in all manner of Hollywood film. I want to clarify that I mean, boring story, not like, raining frogs. As in, I'm suggesting seven friends write a relatively ordinary day. The kind of ordinary day with some event that isn't entirely significant that isn't going to have much entertainment value at all for anyone who wasn't there. This idea involves characters with natural feeling for eachother in order for it to work. Don't imagine reading the story of seven people. Imagine writing a story and reading the intersecting stories of six of your friends. And then imagine rereading it in like, eight years.

If I was teaching a writing course, I would just take the class out to coffee and then have them write the story of going out to coffee. In an ideal version of this, the class could read their stories aloud in turns, finding the place in the story where the last writer had just left off, and picking up there in their own words.

I think it would be interesting for a writing class because if told plainly enough, it would be very plot oriented, and would provide perspective on the other characters in class. And it might discourage new writers who compulsively tell huge big stories about death and apocalyptic despair (usually poorly) to write a simple story in a straight-forward way (well).