New Yorkers would have you believe that New York is the most wild, interesting, varied, and utterly human city in the world. They may be right. I’ve never been; I’m in no position to judge.

Twenty million people tell millions of stories every day. Stories both written and performed in the same instant by real people.

Enter a project called New York Writes Itself.

It’s curated by Leo Burnett New York, but the content comes from New Yorkers.

The idea is simple: sign-up for the site and become a Scribe. Then, when you overhear or see or take part in a little scene of human drama, write it down and add it to the Script.

The Script is available on the site, and the idea is that creative folk – artists, filmmakers, writers, actors – read through it and produce scenes that appeal to them.



The project is still in the gathering phase; production of scenes hasn’t begun yet (apart from a couple of trailers), but it’ll be interesting when it does.

The scenes cover everything from funny stories to the trials of urban living to quiet moments snatched in a city of 20 million people. They’re little vignettes of life on a grand scale. And as such, there is sadness also.

People sometimes say that New York in the 80′s was “like Calcutta — such a hellhole that you’d be stepping over dead people on your way to work.”

It wasn’t, of course. People exaggerate. But there I was one morning in 1983, in the foyer of my walkup on 29th and 9th Avenue, forcing the old front door forward, banging it gently into shoulders, curled up, frozen. Pressing the door slowly outward, edging out sideways.

He had lived upstairs, an old mariner, a drunk, must have forgotten his keys.

I stepped over him.

Check it out at www.NewYorkWritesItself.com.

Quote from www.newyorkwritesitself.com/index.php/entry/?entry=stepping-over-dead-people