Could you write a story in five minutes? In front of a live audience? While wearing a mask?
In the Peruvian Lucha Libro competition, masked must improvise stories in front of a live audience while mood music blares overhead. Above, we’ve embedded a video from the organizers about the writing series. PRI recently ran a piece about the literary sport:
New writers don masks, and head onto a stage where they’re given three random words, a laptop hooked up to a gigantic screen, and five minutes to write a short story. At the end of a match, the losing writer has to take off his or her mask. The winner goes on to the next round, a week later. And the grand prize? It’s a book contract.
2011, a pair of writerly Peruvian grapplers had an idea: what if they could dramatize that struggle between the literary field’s técnicos and its rudos? What if they could give Lucha Libre its most inspired turn yet, and use it to give rudo writers a chance? They dropped an e, added an o, and turned it into Lucha Libro: the Battle of the Books.
The video was featured over at Reddit’s Litvideos page, a growing community spot to share book trailers, author interviews and other literary videos.