Tim Burton is writing a story. You may be familiar with some of his other works: Edward Scissor-hands, The Nightmare Before Christmas, and Corpse Bride. Only this time, he isn’t writing it by himself, he’s enlisting the brainpower of a collective mass of people he doesn’t really know via his Twitter following.

Tim Burton invited his Twitter followers to help write his next short story – one that will be published as early as December 6th.

The opportunity to co-author a story with Tim Burton is appealing to his followers, especially considering the extent of their efforts must fit into a single tweet. Burton will hand select each “winner” who’s tweet will become the next sentence in the story.

Sentence by sentence writing games have been a popular writing & forum game for quite some time on the Web, but this is the first one I’ve seen on Twitter and the first of any get this much attention. I commend Time Burton for creatively interacting with his community.

Join the Fun Tim Burton Short Story Twitter Experiment

If you’d like to participate in this new UGC experiment, here’s what you need to know:

The story begins with:

“Stainboy, using his obvious expertise, was called in to investigate mysterious glowing goo on the gallery floor”

The story currently has the first 20 parts (Tweets) locked down. You can read the full story on the Tim Burton Story site. Anyone can tweet their next line of the story by including the hastag #BurtonStory & they can tweet as often as they like. Every day a new entry will be added and the story will end on December 6th.

I think this is a neat idea. Does it remind you of anything else you’ve seen?