Let me clarify this. A story is a literary work that encompasses several important structural components such as a theme, an idea, and some other ones, which are the reflection of a writer's outlook on life, the system of his or her values and convictions, his cultural roots as a prism through which he or she sees the world and what makes the world tick.

That's why two stories with a similar plotline could be extremely different in their writing style, the underlying idea and overall cultural impact. That relates to a short story and even to a greater degree, it relates to a novel.

In a story and even more so in a novel, the plotline is a device to expose the author's views, his esthetic, cultural, philosophical and often political position on the current issues or on the eternal issues.

The main difference of a soap opera from a novel and a story is its absence of any philosophical conclusion, of that prism that allows a reader to evaluate the writer's ideas and values. It is just one endless chain of the various plotline void of any underlying philosophical meaning.

The exercise that we do here is a fair challenge for a writer. The author of the prompt presents an amorphous (I think deliberately amorphous) writing sample with many embedded clues, allowing each participating writer to move the story in his or her unique direction. It's a springboard, an opportunity for each author to develop his or her own vision on the startup circumstances. Thus the resulting stories could be very much the creation of those authors.

However, once we have five-minute writeups by different people, it never adds up to a complete story and becomes just a writing exercise voided of any meaning. In other words, it becomes a miniature soap-opera.

That's all I wanted to say.

Cheers!