Mathematics itself is a living and creative act (Boaler, 2008), and mathematicians themselves often collaborate in their work (Burton, 2004). What, then, is holding school mathematics back? Are educators so conditioned to expect the act of mathematizing in school to proceed in a certain abstract, formalized way that they are neglecting other means by which mathematical learning may emerge? What if educators shifted their conception of what students do in school mathematics to be an act of storytelling, where they take the time to admire how students tell their stories, take pride in how they keep their audience engaged, or, on a deeper level, the themes and greater truths they touch on in the telling? In this article Alayne Armstrong argues that framing doing mathematics as storytelling would help to privilege the process of doing mathematics over the product that results from it (the answer), something that might make school mathematics more satisfying, more human, for students. Herein, he discusses how storylines that result from mathematics tasks can be compared to published works with similar plots where each author has made the story his/her own by varying the storyline. He demonstrates this point through a collective problem posing study he conducted with small groups of students at a middle school in British Columbia.