Lost and found for words

THE best 'message in a bottle' of all time has to be the Voyager 1 spacecraft.

Since setting off from Earth 37 years ago, it has travelled 12 billion miles through space on a mission to study the planets.

Voyager has now passed beyond our solar system and headed into the interstellar void. And it carries on board, inscribed on a golden disk, a message from mankind to the stars. That message includes spoken greetings in 55 languages, a selection of 115 images of life on Earth, recordings of natural sounds such as surf, wind, thunder and whales, and a selection of classical and ethnic music.

Oh, and directions on how to find us...

FoundFiction, the latest attempt to get us all writing and reading, can't quite top that. The most far-flung locations in which its distinctive 'messages in a bottle' – short pieces of writing tucked in envelopes marked with an FF – have been found so far are Poland, the United States and Australia.

But that's not bad for a project that began life right here in Yorkshire.

You may yourself have spotted a Found Fiction envelope – with its distinctive FF marking – in a park, bar or café in York.

If you opened it, you'll have found inside a short piece of writing, a short story or poem. It will have been anonymous, because the whole Found Fiction project is anonymous.

That is a deliberate attempt to help writers get over their fear of writing, admits one of the founders – let's call him 'Simon'.

"The fear of writing something and getting negative feedback can be daunting, so Found Fiction arose from the question: 'How can someone write and have their work read without worrying about being told it's no good'?" he says.

"The answer: write short stories and leave them in random places to be read anonymously. The concept of having a complete stranger stumble upon our work was quite exciting."

The Found Fiction team started out with a handful of short stories they had already written themselves.

"We printed about a dozen or so, packaged them, then distributed our first envelopes locally," says Simon.

But the idea quickly spread, through word of mouth and on social media.

That has enabled Found Fiction to link up with a network of distributors all over the world, which is why their envelopes are now turning up as far afield as Brisbane and Los Angeles.

Anyone can submit a piece of writing – as we explain later – on almost any subject.

"We’ll print it, providing it’s appropriate," Simon says. "We’re distributing this stuff in public, of course. If the language is too strong, and the material too explicit, we would ask the writer to submit an alternative piece. But we haven’t actually had to do this.

"No genre is off limits – our only guidance is just to keep it short. If someone stumbles upon a piece of fiction unexpectedly, they’re not going to want to read on for pages and pages. They’ve got places to be. We need to get in, then get out. So the shorter, the better."

And if you do stumble across a Found Fiction envelope, what should you do with it – once you've read it, of course?

"Recipients of Found Fiction can do exactly what they want with their envelopes," says Simon. "Some do redistribute them, but most people probably prefer to hang on to theirs, and that’s fine.

"The primary purpose of Found Fiction is to connect writers and readers around the world. But we would love to think we brighten up someone's day in the process. If we are going to make the world a more positive place, it will be one envelope at a time."

You can follow Found Fiction

- on twitter: #foundfiction @fictionfound

- on facebook: .facebook.com/FoundFiction

To submit a piece of your own writing, or to become a Found Fiction distributor, email: fictionfound@gmail.com

An example of a Found Fiction story: Ruth

RYAN had been missing Ruth ever since their polite kiss goodbye, which had appeared to represent some sort of ending.

In their time as friends, they’d been out for dinner and sat in cafés for hours, talking about their mutual interests and the people they knew. Ryan recalled how he became lost in Ruth’s company, not really seeking to impress her, or fill the conscious silences with random junk.

How, whenever they met at parties, which wasn’t very often, they tended to sit away from the other people, where they could communicate in their own little space. She stood a good foot shorter than he, her eyes and hair were pretty similar to a lot of girls’ her age, but she was perfect.

Their polite kiss goodbye had taken place on June 17, at about 11am, outside a greasy spoon, where Ryan had just bought a bacon sandwich. They were both hungover and running late for things, and neither had anticipated that they would run into each another that morning. It felt unusually awkward and rushed. Their polite kiss goodbye lingered on his cheek that day, and for the next five years, when she was completely absent from his life.

‘Make sure you put “just a thought”,’ advised his friend Sarah. She was a good help with these kind of things. She’d never even met Ruth. ‘You don’t want to scare the poor lass to death.’

Ryan had a lot he wanted to say in that letter. He wrote about their polite kiss goodbye, and how moving its memory was to him. He asked about her cat. He didn’t know much about her anymore. He tried to express precisely what it was he loved about her, but couldn’t find the words, so he simply wrote ‘how I feel about you is beyond words’, and said he wanted to see her again.

In a room, her room, sixty years later, Ryan opened the blinds. Ruth groaned but didn’t move. He hoped she knew he was there. Speaking softly about their granddaughters, Mary and Tabitha, who were coming after school, he stroked her thin hair, and recalled her soft, perfumed skin on their wedding day.

He couldn’t look after her anymore, he’d been told, and neither could anyone else in their family. So now she was here. When Ruth sat up in bed, she spat in his face, and called him another man’s name. He often left the building with red cheeks that she’d slapped hard, but always with the thought that the happy lives they had shared, the many years they had given to each other, and the loving memories they had made, were worth suffering for.