Remix lit

I've found a few sites that experiment with remixing. They include stories with a creative commons licence so you can play all you like.

http://markcnewton.com/2010/02/17/remix-project/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2001/jan/10/fiction.film

http://www.remixmylit.com/

http://www.thecreativepenn.com/2009/09/23/remix-my-lit-literature-thats-read-and-write/

And to turn to music, the medium that has been remixing for the longest: here is DJ Shadow's Midnight in a Perfect World and a remix of Midnight in a Perfect world from Endroducing. (DJ Shadow's album Endroducing is composed of entirely appropriated remixed and reworked samples and was the first ever album to do so).

First is the original piece of music that DJ Shadow sampled from:

and here is Midnight in a Perfect World:

and a remix of Midnight in a Perfect World:

On the nature of remixes

At the latest SAC writing group meeting we discussed the nature of the story remix and thought it would make an interesting prompt and writing exercise. This is something anyone can do, and you can be as creative as you like with it.

Remixing is selecting and editing or combining and re-contextualising an already existing piece of writing. The idea is that you take a plot or concept from a book and re-write in your own style. It can be any book, and you can remix as much of it as you like: an entire plot, or a single character. What would you do differently? How would that change the tone, tension, or outcome of the book? The possibilities are endless, and the only real limitation is that you probably wouldn't be able to publish it—at least, not without getting express permission from the author or publisher of the original work—unless it's been released under a Creative Commons license (and even then it's always best to double-check).

But as a writing exercise, it can be a lot of fun and an interesting learning process for the author, inspire other people to read books they may not have otherwise tried, and invite readers to look at a text from an entirely different angle.