When it’s “now or never”

Abstract

Abstract Individuals who share knowledge of past events may encounter different practical problems when engaging in the co-telling of those events. Drawing upon conversation analysis, this article investigates how co-tellers manage interpolated opportunities to initiate other-repair in collaborative storytelling. The analysis focuses on the placement of different repair operations on the story-in-progress and shows that co-tellers monitor the progressivity of the storytelling activity to identify proper places to initiate repair. Repairs that are initiated out of place can be oriented to as inappropriate and require more interactional work from participants. When tellers project the continuation of the story beyond a proper place, co-tellers display urgency for halting the story’s current trajectory, which shows their orientation to this moment as a last opportunity to initiate repair. This last possible point to repair the story-in-progress is what I call a “now or never” moment. Data stem from video-recorded collaboratively told stories in Spanish.