Serial fiction plays an central role in narrative today. The serialized novel started in the 19th century, driven in part by the cost of books: people who could not afford to purchase an expensive novel instead bought one piecemeal, in weekly or monthly installments. Recurrent characters in short stories also proved a reliable source of readers, and then radio and television series preserved the tradition of the serial. Whether we’re talking about television episodes, webisodes, or the fact that every film and video game blockbuster seems determined to have a sequel before opening day, serialization has certainly crept into our lives in a very powerful way.
Jo Walton examines the joy of an unfinished series , arguing that an unfinished series leaves us wondering, speculating, and (in my opinion most-importantly) talking about what might come.
If you come face to face with James Clavell in the afterlife, my advice is to tell him first how much you like his books, before asking if he’s had time up there to finish Hag Struan.
Of course, many of us read hypertext narratives serially. Hypertext naturally lends itself to open-ended narrative, and the joy of an unfinished series is relevant whether we’re talking about a hypertext series or just an exceptionally long hypertext. And with the immediacy of Web publishing and hypertext’s ability to be constantly changing and expanding, there’s very little real difference between the two anymore.
Our friends at ElectricLit posted an interesting essay by David Shields on remixing . The essay itself is remix, combining original work with excerpts from Emerson, Picasso, and Godard to the pop-culture offerings of Wikipedia. It offers a musical blend of written voices (as only an expertly-remixed work can) while providing useful insight on the history and practice of remixing. The work’s successful use of the technique is enough to justify the merits of remixing.
MemoryMiner is a software application that allows for easy image sharing and publishing with a plentiful metadata and commentary. Users quickly import photos, add tags and tag-comments for faces or any area of the image, attach time and location data, and publish to Flickr or a MemoryMiner gallery that keeps much of the desktop application functionality intact. Metadata can be automatically; for example, if GPS data is embedded in the image, as on the iPhone, MemoryMiner can situate the image on a Google Map. Similarly, it can import face-recognition data from iPhoto. Photos can be located by searching for one or more people in the image, location, time, or relative time in a person’s life (e.g. John as a toddler)
The software bills itself as “Digital Storytelling” software “used to discover the threads connecting peoples’ lives across time and place.” Indeed one could certainly see it as a database of the links between people, times, and places and the natural narratives that emerge from these intersections. It could also provide a useful tool for creating visual hypertext literature that takes advantage of linking people in images, adding text, and using Google Maps for a fun added dimension of realism. A Carmen Sandiego-style mystery immediately comes to mind, however I’m sure a clever author could come up with a very interesting way of using MemoryMiner’s tools to create an immersive narrative experience.
Brian Greenspan was one of the most fun and colorful people we met at the Future of Digital Studies conference. In addition to seeming to always be at the center of the most interesting conversations, he proved to have very interesting ideas on electronic narrative. His current project, StoryTrek, looks to provide fascinating and immersive possibilities for the future of digital storytelling.
The idea behind StoryTrek is that authors could combine their digital texts with geospatial location systems to provide location-specific text. Reading the text on her phone, the reader might be traversing the text as she walks, only to read a passage about arriving at a brook as she does so in the real world. Going a bit further might reveal a passage about dipping one’s feet into the water and so forth.
Ed Blackham answers our post on Editing Hypertext with an insightful look at how software debugging relates to electronic literature and the issues therein.
Your description of the problem made it sound similar to the the problem of debugging a program. We write (or sometimes auto-generate) tests, and we have tools that try to assess the quality of our test suites by (among other things) pointing us at areas of the code that no test has yet looked at. But even those tools can't really get at the fact that a line of code that's innocuous when arrived at along one path is deadly when arrived at along a different path. […]
If indeterminacy is part of the hypertext, of course, it all gets very difficult. […] It's all very fine to say in a postmodern (or pre-Socratic) sort of way that no two readers ever read the same text (or no reader ever reads the same text twice), but what can fairly be said of a "text" whose words make this philosophical conceit literally true?
November’s National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) has been over for a couple of months. Now, many writers are returning to the novel for which they sacrificed blood, sweat, and their carpal tunnel. Many are casually editing and revising for their own sake, but others are looking to actually publish.
The NaNoBlog as posted an interview with Smashwords founder and eBook enthusiast Mark Coker on why electronic publishing may be the most viable format for many.
An ebook author doesn’t need a publisher to gain mainstream distribution into the largest online ebook stores. Amazon’s Digital Text Platform allows authors to publish their books directly into the Kindle store, and my own Smashwords recently announced ebook distribution agreements with all the major online retailers, including Barnes & Noble, Amazon and Sony. We also have distribution into the online catalogs of mobile platforms such as Stanza on the iPhone, Aldiko on Android phones, and Kobo across all mobile phone devices.
Millions of book buyers now prefer reading ebooks over print books, and this trend is likely to continue in the years ahead.
Of course, matters chiefly to those who have interested readers queued up in sufficient quantity to make publishing worth while, but cannot easily reach so many as to attract a conventional publisher. And do we know that millions of readers now prefer ebooks? Still, distribution is good to have.
After finding out today that my favorite Runner’s World weblogger will no longer be posting, I was deeply saddened and touched in a way that felt very unique to the medium. It’s funny; the retirments of many of my favorite writers, composers, and artists haven”t touched me deeply. But Web reading is a different experience; one doesn’t often go back and read (someone else’s) old archives just for fun to see how the story unfolds with knowledge of the future, despite hypertext literature’s emphasis on rereading.
So when a blogger retires, that’s it. Runner’s World may choose to take the all of the archives down in a couple of months, cutting off my access forever. With reading a book, looking at a painting, or listening to a song—even though those pleasures exist in a finite space of time like reading a weblog—the experience is repeatable in a way that reading social media updates isn’t.
Where is the line drawn? I wouldn’t read a newspaper a second time, though I would reread the anthology of an interesting columnist. And I would argue that the interesting columnist is the closest analogy to the blogger. And indeed, though I’ll never browse the archives, if the blogger’s posts were bound into a book, I would probably reread them. So why the difference? What is it about the Web that makes this distinction?
And in the age heralded as the birth of universal publishing, does the achievement really count if people won’t ever reread those works?
In revising some of the hypertexts she wrote during the 100 Days project, Susan Gibb noticed that some words were missing on one of the pages in a story. She remarks:
In straight narrative, this would tell me that nobody read the story. But in hypertext, they honestly could have read it and may have taken another path and missed this space.
It seems that, even with my own rereadings I’ve missed it too!
This post got me thinking about some questions regarding proofreading hypertext. Because the experience often depends upon the order in which different lexia are read, how difficult is it to anticipate how readers will interpret the text as they arrive through different paths? Is it more difficult to write and polish certain lexia while considering the reader’s ignorance of pertinent parts of the story?
In all forms of art there is the compulsion of the artist to want to perfect her work, which may often delay the work’s release indefinitely. This example is even more true of technology-based arts, as the technology curve can sometimes outrun the work’s progress, rendering it obsolete before it’s ever revealed.
Clive Thompson of Wired explores the reasons for Duke Nukem’s perpetual delays and ultimate abandonment. The culprit in the game’s death, he suggests, was its designer’s inability to release an imperfect game. The article focuses on the gaming industry, but its lesson applies to software developers and technical artists alike:
It’s a dilemma all artists confront, of course. When do you stop creating and send your work out to face the public? Plenty of Hollywood directors have delayed for months, dithering in the editing room. But in videogames, the problem is particularly acute, because the longer you delay, the more genuinely antiquated your product begins to look — and the more likely it is that you’ll need to rip things down and start again. All game designers know this, so they pick a point to stop improving…
Jesper Juul’s A Casual Revolution offers an excellent approach to the gaming industry’s shift toward more “casual” games like Bejeweled, Rock Band, and Wii Sports. Juul contrasts the design approach of more hardcore games with these newer casual games, revealing interesting insights about what brings so many players who detest “traditional” video games to spend hours with Farmville or The Sims.
Hypertext literature faces similar difficulties: many see it as too challenging or too time-consuming. As a hardcore gamer, I can certainly appreciate the refusal to lower one’s intellectual standards in order to make a narrative more attractive to a wider audience. But the numbers speak for themselves; companies that are embracing a casual audience are making millions of dollars, and some of the most successful games— Rock Band, Grand Theft Auto, World of Warcraft—are flexible hybrids that fit into both a casual and a hardcore mindset.
This possibility exists for hypertext too, if it decides that it wants to become more mainstream. However, if “serious” games are any indication, it might take us a long time to decide if that’s actually what we want.
While I’ve sort of been accused of using an old fashioned form of hypertext narrative–and this may be true since I’m a bit behind the times learning on my own–I’m still very much aware of the fact that folks need to be eased into the concept of hypertext story.
Text-only hypertexts may not take advantage of graphics, video, and audio, but when did having all of these things together become a requirement for literature? To ask this is to require a painter to use every color of the spectrum at once.
One of the joys of reading is being able to imagine things exactly how we want them. Images can take this away from a reader.
As for folks needing to be “eased into” hypertext, I think this is becoming less true as time goes on. Weblogs already combine text, links, and other media in ways that make sense to us. I recently showed Morpheus Biblionaut to someone who had never seen a hypertext before, and she had no problem understanding what was going on.
Hypertext pioneer Cathy Marshall has just written Reading and Writing the Electronic Book. Marshall offers a brief history of electronic books, and focuses on what facets of reading eBooks inherit from print, how they are written and read, and how they are presented, and what they do to advance the future of literature. In contrast to much of what’s appeared to date, Marshall doesn’t base her opinions of books on received wisdom, nostalgia, or press releases, and this book’s explanation of how we can study actual readers is at once rigorous and accessible. Based on extensive research and thoughtful consideration, this volume is clearly the authoritative source on new ways of reading and new reading tools.
[a] geekily hilarious modern choose-your-own-adventure novel in which you play a middle aged bitter geek who is drafted into a branching narrative in which your goal is to save reality, while negotiating many of the familiar indignities of modern geekish life, from over-exuberant role-players to nuclear apocalypse.
The map shows the overall structure of the work, revealing all of its loops, dead ends, and branches.
I often forget how linear choose-your-own adventure tends to be, perhaps because I’ve become accustomed to working with complexly structured hypertexts. As with most works in the genre, there are really only substantial choices to be made in the middle of this text; the beginning and end is strikingly linear. Also it seems that there is only one “true” end, while the other endings seem to just be deviations from the story--a game over, not a saving of the princess--and it might have been nice to see a couple of different true endings.
Just as I was getting ready to go home, dreading the two hour commute by train, bus, and foot—thank goodness it’s not really snowing yet— I saw this article on the subway as a writing environment. Many people, including me, spend hours a week on the subway reading; few write.
I do occasionally write on the train, but I prefer not to since the random passenger glancing over my shoulder is distracting. Emily St. John Mandel has a different view:
There’s a certain paradoxical privacy in working on the subway. It’s New York City, and we’ve all seen everything down here: if you start writing on the train nobody’s likely to give you a second glance, unless of course you’re writing on your laptop and they’re planning on stealing it at the next stop. Except on the rare elevated sections of track, your phone won’t ring. The odds of running into anyone you know are fairly slim. . . You’re out in the world, surrounded by other people, but there’s enough solitude in that crowd to get some writing done.
The California NanoSystems Institute at UC Santa Barabara has been researching interactive environments for research and artistic expression since 1997. Their efforts have yielded the Allosphere, a 30-foot diameter sphere built inside a three-story cube. The Allosphere was built to be anechoic, minimizes all background noise and light-interference, and contains thousands of speakers to create an immersive interactive experience.
The Allophere’s project website speculates some of the possible uses for such technology:
Scientifically, it is an instrument for gaining insight and developing bodily intuition about environments into which the body cannot venture: abstract, higher-dimensional information spaces, the worlds of the very small or very large, and the realms of the very fast or very slow, in fields ranging from nanotechnology to theoretical physics, from proteomics to cosmology, from neurophysiology to the spaces of consciousness, and from new materials to new media.
Artistically, the AlloSphere is an instrument for the creation and performance of avant-garde new works and the development of entirely new modes and genres of expression and forms of immersion-based entertainment, fusing future art, architecture, music, media, games, cinema, and more.
The project, which recalls Cave Writing project at Brown, is ongoing; designer Professor JoAnn Kuchera-Morin and her colleagues are working on the computing platform and interactive display portions of the sphere.
As the NaNoWriMo deadline approaches, here are a few more quotes to motivate you to push to the last word:
WILLIAM TREVOR
By the end, you should be inside your character, actually operating from within somebody else, and knowing him pretty well, as that person knows himself or herself. You’re sort of a predator, an invader of people.
PAUL RUDNICK
Writing is 90 percent procrastination: reading magazines, eating cereal out of the box, watching infomercials. It's a matter of doing everything you can to avoid writing, until it is about four in the morning and you reach the point where you have to write.
HALLIE BURNETT
Trollope said, “On the last day of each month recorded, every person in a work of fiction should be a month older than on the first.” We go with our characters wherever they lead us, and as time makes its mark on us, so it must on them.
KENNETH ATCHITY
It would be crazy to begin revising immediately after finishing the first draft, and counter to the way the mind likes to create. You’re exhausted. You deserve a vacation. Go away from the project for at least a week.
JUDITH APPELBAUM
With one exception, any publication opportunity you can seize is worth seizing; ever-widening ripples move out from even the smallest splash. Something more like a self-contained plop is all you’re likely to get, however, if you resort to a vanity press. Vanity publishing is not the same as either subsidy publishing or self-publishing, though the terms are often used as if they were synonymous. Subsidy publishing is best defined by its guaranteed audience; self-publishing is partly defined by its realistic efforts to find an appropriate audience; vanity publishing frequently involves no audience at all.
Would-be hypertext readers and writers sometimes create barriers to protect themselves from the unfamiliar. People believe that they “can’t understand” hypertext, that they don’t like to read on the screen, that it’s all “too complicated.”
If we didn’t appreciate complicated works, neither Joyce nor Stravinsky would be considered masters. Why, then, put up barriers to creating the next amazing piece of literature simply because you haven’t grasped the gravity or impact of your own work?
Forman asks provocative questions:
Could the difference between success and failure be as simple as a thought?
What will you choose?
What might you be capable of achieving if you never see walls?
Searching for inspiration in any medium can be a daunting task, and it can easily turn into procrastination if you’re not careful. Smashing Magazine has given us a guide to finding inspiration.
No designer should ever feel that taking time to find true inspiration is time wasted. This article explores offline sources of inspiration and discusses how they can be treated as a part of the design process. Furthermore, we’ll look into a few methods of deriving this inspiration, so it becomes an active part of creativity and be done more effectively.
Though the article focuses on digital design, its advice can really be applied to any form of art. Besides, those visual design principles are quite useful for the hypertext author.
Blind, I felt a hand clutch mine. I was tugged forward into the dark. Fingers brushed up my leg, a voice whispered and breath blustered across my neck. I was surrounded.
Finally, the blindfold was yanked down. I saw shapes, a figure caught by wires, twitching, his hands suspended. I looked to the man next to me. His face was glistening, and I brought a hand to my own damp forehead. “What have I done?” I thought. But this was no Bacchanalian orgy; this was The Trial.
Lyn Gardner in The Guardian reviewed the same production, part of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
The Trial has many flaws – it is messy, frenetic, a little in love with its own virtuosity, and the white-faced actors and physical work looks a trifle dated. But who cares, because it is also exhilarating, ambitious and manipulates sound, space and the audience with real verve.
It doesn't so much inhabit the venue as haunt it, as if what you are witnessing is a terrifying vision conjured from your own warped imagination. Even the way you are moved around the playing area makes it feel as if you are on a labyrinthine journey from which there is no escape. It doesn't all work, but there are moments of real potency. As you race for the door, you must step over the prone body of Josef K, lying in the darkness with his hand outstretched towards the light.
I loathe audience participation. The purpose, most of the time, seems to be to humiliate, not engage, the spectator.
But he found the Sleep No More compelling.
It’s been a tough year in the arts for the area. The Rose Art Museum fading, the North Shore Music Theatre closing, other organizations and troupes struggling. We needed this. Boston has never seen anything quite like Sleep No More before. Neither has any North American city, New York included. The streets of Brookline seemed alive to new possibilities; so did the world of theater.
To paraphrase Rodgers and Hart, we’re wild again, beguiled again . . . bewitched, bothered, and bewildered are we.
"Bookless Libraries" asks whether the brick-and-mortar library is dead, or simply in transition. Reading it, I asked myself, “What is a library?” And the answer was not “a place that holds books,” but “a place that celebrates books.”
I love libraries, I always have. In elementary school, going to the library meant a break from spelling and fractions to sit cross-legged with friends while a librarian read stories to us. When I was nine, I even got to meet a real life author in a library, and though I can’t remember who he was, I felt extremely privileged to have met him.
In high school, the literary journals were dangerously close to the music section, and I was sure to come across a book on the history of rock n’ roll or composition or books of sheet music. I would sit on the floor for hours and thumb through the books, pausing to occasionally return to my work.
In college, I didn’t get a single book at the library, though I spent many, many hours there. I would meet friends, study groups, and work on calculus or programming . The library wasn’t a place for books, but it was still a place for learning. Now I work right across the street from a library, and I eat lunch outside of every day. The library still has books, but I go for the atmosphere: the wonder of the kids trying to calm their excited stage-whispers; the fun, outdated decorations, the readings, and the monthly displays that advocate literacy, oppose censorship, or agitate in favor of knowledge.
Just about anything I need is now online. I don’t go to the library any less often. The library is not a place for the obsolete codex to rest from its labors; it’s a place to celebrate the knowledge that the codex brought and to facilitate a date with that knowledge. When you say, “I’m off to the library” what you’re really saying—whether you’re going to meet a study group, do research, or work on today’s assignment—is “I’m off to gain knowledge.” And as long as there is a place in the human spirit for the thirst for knowledge, the library won’t be going anywhere.
As NaNoWriMo really gets underway, count on our continuing Writers on Writing series to keep you motivated. If you’re falling behind schedule, take advice from the greats and head back to work, you slacker!
(Correspondents: send us your gems!)
MORRIS L. WEST
In a longish life as a professional writer, I have heard a thousand masterpieces talked out over bars, restaurant tables and love seats. I have never seen one of them in print. Books must be written, not talked.
GEORGE V. HIGGINS
Never tell your reader what your story is about. Reading is a participatory sport. People do it because they are intelligent and enjoy figuring things out for themselves.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI
A good style comes primarily from lack of pretentiousness, and what is pretentious changes from year to year from day to day from minute to minute. We must be ever more careful. A man does not get old because he nears death; a man gets old because he can no longer see the false from the good.
NATALIE GOLDBERG
If you read good books, when you write, good books will come out of you. Maybe it’s not quite that easy, but if you want to learn something, go to the source. Basho, the great seventeenth-century Haiku master said, “If you want to know about a tree, go to the tree.” If you want to know poetry, read it, listen to it. Let those patterns and forms be imprinted in you. Don’t step away from poetry to analyze a poem with your logical mind. Enter poetry with your whole body. Dogen, a great Zen master, said, “If you walk in the mist, you get wet.” So just listen, read, and write. Little by little, you will come closer to what you need to say and express it through your voice.
EDWARD ALBEE
If you are going to learn from other writers don’t only read the great ones, because if you do that you’ll get so filled with despair and the fear that you’ll never be able to do anywhere near as well as they did that you’ll stop writing. I recommend that you read a lot of bad stuff, too. It’s very encouraging. “Hey, I can do so much better than this.” Read the greatest stuff but read the stuff that isn’t so great, too. Great stuff is very discouraging.
DONALD M. MURRAY
Don’t market yourself. Editors and readers don’t know what they want until they see it. Scratch what itches. Write what you need to write, feed the hunger for meaning in your life. Play at the serious questions of life and death.
Narrativist role-playing games, an esoteric spin-off from Dungeons and Dragons, turn the conventions of games upside down. In games, you play to win, the rules regulate your action, and the story is a hook meant to draw you into the game. In narrativist games, you play to create a story, the rules constrain the ways the story can evolve, and winning is beside the point.
In many ways, narrativist role-playing games are collaborative writing exercises or storytelling workshops. They might also be useful laboratories for social software design.
For example, everyone talks about Twitter and the role of its 140-character limit. Is 140 characters enough? Could we manage with less? Would we be happier with more? What can’t we achieve in the face of the limit? What can we achieve that we wouldn’t be able to do with unlimited message length?
Robin D. Laws game, Og: unearthed edition, explores the extreme case. The players in the game are a band of cavemen. They face various dangers — wolves, mammoths, forest fires, hostile tribes. They work together to achieve heroic triumph, or at least to survive.
They do this with 18 words. That's all you can use amongst yourselves, though you can say anything you like to the GM. You, me, rock, water, fire, stick, hairy, bang, big, small, shiny, thing. And it gets worse: no one knows all 18 words, so you start out with a few words selected from the 18.
And one of those eighteen words is “verisimilitude".
A blogger writes:
For some reason, though, it works brilliantly. There's a real sense of satisfaction in managing to explain (comparatively) complex ideas with your tiny vocabulary. Once you get the hang of it, you can hold entire conversations in cave-speak, and string together ever more inventive forms of abuse. Essentially, you're combining elementary puzzle solving with searching through a foreign dictionary for all the curse words, with an occasional time-out to massacre bunch of cavemen from a different tribe (without any of the pesky moral considerations of whether it's OK to kill a bunch of pygmies). There's also some pride to be taken in engineering breakthroughs in caveman technology; by the end of our session we had invented both the wheel and the scarf, and possibly scrambled eggs. Every roleplay scenario should end with a communal omelette.
Og is available as a pdf download ($7.95) from Steve Jackson Games.
With NaNoWriMo starting this weekend, thousands of fingers will begin pounding furiously at the keyboard. Since the first Writers On Writing was well-received, we thought we’d share some more thoughts with you to really get you going! (Correspondents: send us your gems!)
FRANZ KAFKA
You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quite still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.
GORDON LISH
I see the notion of talent as quite irrelevant. I see instead perseverance, application, industry, assiduity, will, will, will, desire, desire, desire.
NATALIE GOLDBERG
Sometimes people say to me, “I want to write, but I have five kids, a full-time job, a wife who beats me, a tremendous debt to my parents,” and so on.
I say to them, “There is no excuse. If you want to write, write. This is your life. You are responsible for it. You will not live forever. Don’t wait. Make the time now, even if it is ten minutes once a week.”
WILLIAM FAULKNER
Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency . . . to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is worth any number of old ladies.
NORMAN MAILER
Over the years, I’ve found one rule. It is the only one I give on those occasions when I talk about writing. A simple rule. If you tell yourself you are going to be at your desk tomorrow, you are by that declaration asking your unconscious to prepare the material. You are, in effect, contracting to pick up such valuables at a given time. Count on me, you are saying to a few forces below: I will be there to write.
So if you’re not sure what to do with your Hallowe’en afternoon before the trick-or-treating and costume parties really get into full swing, lock your doors, pull the shades, and try to hold on to your sanity as you invite the Elder Gods into your Twitter account. The theme couldn’t be any more perfect for the holiday. Here’s how to join the parade of horror.
A friend sent us the a link to a site about retouching photos. It was, she said, the scariest thing she’d ever seen. In the spirit of Hallowe’en, we expected people retouched to look like zombies or ghosts; instead we found this. It appears that people are retouching photos of children to make them look “better.”
In “Editing Children Into the Uncanny Valley”, Bryan Alexander raises interesting questions about anxieties toward digital manipulation of images that are supposed to represent reality. All digital art—and indeed all art—is a departure from reality. It is not the fact that this isn’t life-like that makes it disturbing; it’s the fact that it should be. Something has been lost in the editing process that has completely taken away the essence of life and realism that the photos are supposed to capture.
So where do we draw the line between acceptable digital art and that which affects us negatively? At what point do these girls stop looking real? As Alexander also points out, there are also some interesting issues of class, a topic which has already garnered attention in the digital world.
“At Pixar, they have a word for almost human but not quite: monster.” – Alvin Ray Smith
Just in time for NaNoWriMo’s new Young Writers Program , Puffin Books has created We Make Stories, an interactive digital writing site aimed at children. The site offers different applications in which kids can create narratives, one even allows kids to record their own sounds to add to their stories. Other applications allow children to make eBooks, treasure maps, interactive pop-up books, and comics.
At Puffin we believe that storytelling is an important skill which aides in the development of a child's literacy. The tools here have been designed to promote a range of storytelling skills and give children confidence in their ability to create stories. There are currently six different storytelling tools available with the possibility of further tools being added in the future.
The site may have been created to stress literacy, but it also has the added benefit of fostering electracy and introduces kids to the creative process behind simple forms of electronic literature. The site is innovative, cute, and engaging, and best of all gets kids creating born-digital narratives.
A while ago we raised some questions about whether Twitter narrative needs to weed out the cheese sandwiches. After all, cheese sandwiches are, in fact, a part of our daily narrative. Unless you agree with David Mamet that cheese sandwiches aren’t tasty.
While these questions have not been answered entirely to our satisfaction , Susana Zaragoza has some interesting points about Twitter as a platform. Zaragoza argues that Twitter goes beyond the typical social networking site to offer proof of the emergence of Secondary Orality, the shift from the values of print literature to combine many of the values of both print and oral culture. She also seems to suggest that Twitter uses hypertext and multilinearity in a way that bridges the gap between social media and wikis, the future of which could be a complex narrative which promotes reconfiguration of the text, author, writing and literary education. The emergence of such a narrative is precisely the idea behind Mark Amerika’s suggestion of a Hypertextual Consciousness .
With the beginning of NaNoWriMo looming on the horizon, it seemed like a good time to recall the wisdom of writers who’ve been there:
ALBERTO ÁLVARO RÍOS
The worst thing a writer can do is to think. The best thing to do is to react, which includes thinking but doesn't let it act as an impediment or a censor. When you read something, you think something—write that down. That's what I'm always trying to do, –
SANDRA JENSEN
If you start to edit as you write, you are climbing into your “editor” self, the self that reads. You’ve done plenty of reading, you don’t need practice right now.
Just write.
E.B. WHITE
When you say something, make sure you have said it. The chances of your having said it are only fair.
MALCOLM COWLEY
Any fiction should be a story. In any story there are three elements: persons, a situation, and the fact that in the end something has changed. If nothing has changed, it isn’t a story.
H.G. WELLS
If you are in difficulties with a book, try the element of surprise: attack it at an hour when it isn’t expecting it.
DAVID MAMET
Don’t write stage directions. If it is not apparent what the character is trying to accomplish by saying the line, telling us how the character said it, or whether or not she moved to the couch isn’t going to aid the case. We might understand better what the character means but we aren’t particularly going to care.
JIMMY BRESLIN
Breslin’s Rule: Don’t trust a brilliant idea unless it survives the hangover.
WILLIAM SAROYAN
Do not pay any attention to the rules other people make.... They make them for their own protection, and to Hell with them.
I was recently able to attend, courtesy of the ART, and it was truly one of the most memorable theater experiences I’ve ever had. I had never been to a hyperdrama before, but I was familiar with the concept and, having a fair amount of experience with hypertext, knew that my choices on which characters I decided to follow would influence my experience.
One problem I couldn’t figure out was how the audience could watch the action without getting in the way or detracting from the experience. The solution is brilliant: each guest wears a white mask. In the dimly lit rooms, the masks make us seem like spirits gathering around a group of mortals who were only faintly aware of our existence. Though we were asked to be silent, the occasional stifled giggle or whisper between other ghosts added to the ambience. As the action moved down a hall, groups of spirits would break off their exploration of scenery to join the larger group on the move, and as more and more spirits gathered and followed, the action seemed to take on a new sense of foreboding. The experience created by the masks was incredible, like watching a scene from beyond the grave.
I was also struck by the authenticity with which the play space was transformed: smells, temperatures, textures, and sounds brought the experience to life. The choreography was impeccable, and the cast did a wonderful job of helping the audience understand exactly what to do. I may even go back to catch some of the things I missed the first time.
If you’re in the Boston area, treat yourself and go see this production! Shows run through January 3, 2010.
One of my favorite English professors once told me that being a writer means that it’s harder for you to write than it is for the average person. At the time, when “writing” meant churning out a ten-page paper on Conrad in the two hours before class and breathlessly running to class with wet ink, I had no idea what he meant. Today I don’t think I can write my phone number on a napkin without revising it .
NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) was designed for people like me. The idea is to write a 50,000-word novel (about 175 pages) in one month. According to the website,
“By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. To build without tearing down. ”
NaNoWriMo also offers a Young Writers Program , which allows kids to set their own writing goal for the month. I hope plenty of teachers will participate with their students!
The event kicks off November 1st and ends midnight, Pacific Time, November 30th.
The essay covers everything from the perpetual gloom of the book business to the psychological dependency of writers. Reviews are often arbitrary. You can’t get reviewed anyway, because there are few reputable review outlets left. You don’t have time to read all the good books that come out; You don’t even have time to find them.
Menaker thinks that books today are becoming shorter due to shorter attention spans. We’ve all heard this before, usually about kids and teenagers: the Internet is decreasing everyone’s attention span and kids don’t read anymore. If this were true, I couldn’t say that my 13-year-old sister read 12 books this summer (no, they were not assigned readings, nor was the TV broken, her cell-phone disconnected, or her laptop inaccessible). But the fact that books are getting shorter may be true even if his reason for it is not.
Which brings up an interesting point that Mark Bernstein pointed out to me: “how long should a salable unit of literature be? In the 18th century, people bought and sold pamphlets and even broadsides. What law of nature or economics prevents one from buying a novella?” Similarly, how long must a hypertext work be?
Often even the experienced concert-goer will complain that these pieces are strange, experimental, disjointed, or hard-to-understand—many of the same complaints that plague new media. What struck me about the project was the unusual critical and commercial success the group seems to be enjoying from playing these pieces. In a time when music CDs are tough to sell, and the enterprise of classical recording seems almost at an end, BMOP has launched an ambitious, award-winning (and apparently profitable) catalog of new works on CD (some downloadable from their site for $0.99), including John Harbison's ballet Ulysses and Gunther Schuller’s Journey in Jazz.
The interview discusses the digitization of writing, addressing claims that technologies like email and text-messaging are destroying children’s capacity to write and disputing the idea that computers and online learning will replace face-to-face teaching. Baron also discusses Google’s book project .
In a new post to her blog, Susan Gibb discusses revising her latest hypertext, Blueberries. She describes how slight changes to wording can alter the meaning of a particular node, allowing for possible interpretations that even the writer didn’t catch the first time.
Meanwhile, Diane Greco (who has just taken up a new post at Boston University) talks about the obstacles to starting a story — and also about how writing letters builds identity. She picks out a wonderful comment from another writer’s weblog:
How many layers of imagination are piled in this buttery biscuit of a note?
In her blog, Susan Gibb discusses the process of writing and revision for her new hypertext, Blueberries:
“So what is the impetus for selection [of which link to follow]? Does it depend upon the individual as far as style (first, second, third link in order) or experience either of reading hypertext or of knowledge of the author’s style? Is it the text itself that creates desire to go further in that direction, whether it be the single word (or phrase) that is obviously the link, or the context in which the link resides?”
Gibb is able to trace the path of her readers, finding out which link they clicked on and how far they went afterwards. She uses this information to revise the text— fascinating!
Be sure to check out the comments as well, as she brings up interesting points of discussion on the fact that a reader might be done with the piece and not have visited every link:
“As far as am I okay with a reader missing many of my most eloquently written spaces, I’m getting used to it. There are two evident solutions for the author to take: 1) ensure that the paths lead through the story in a way that would both please the reader and satisfy the writer, and 2) more importantly, make each and every writing space a piece of art.”
In a showing of true creative fortitude, Steve Ersinghaus and friends have finished the 2009 incarnation of the 100 Days project. The project invited artists of different fields to create a new work in their respective area of interest each day for 100 days. Susan Gibb, who was tasked with creating a new work of hypertext each day, explains how the project began:
The 100 Days Project started as a spinoff from last year's collaboration between Steve Ersinghaus and Carianne Mack , Steve writing a poem to match Carianne's watercolor paintings. As teachers, they both had some time during the summer to be creative and decided to produce work every day for 100 days and posted each one at Steve's Media Play Site. This project was later turned into a book .
Wanting to continue the idea this past summer, Steve decided on a short story each day, with Carianne doing watercolors and invited a number of photographers, storytellers, cooks, poets, graphic and coding artists to join in. My role was in hyperfiction. Steve has some information on the beginnings of the project on the sidebar of the Media Play page. And here is the link to the main project page where everyone's work is collected and we kept up with each other's daily creation. Basically, Steve would write his story and post it early (or early for him!) in the morning and from there, the others would sort of take inspiration and follow their own trail into a related work.
Ersinghaus is scheduled to speak on the project at Tinderbox Weekend San Francisco, November 21-22.
Brand Savant features a great article by Tom Webster on using Tinderbox to write questionnaires. Webster, who is VP for strategy and marketing at Edison Research, observes that writing effective questionnaires and surveys can be exceptionally tricky. All of us who have ploughed through endlessly dull market research surveys understand the frustration of irrelevant questions that are obviously irrelevant but that a clumsy script insists must be asked.
Though the article is limited to questionnaire design, it’s quite easy to see how the same practices could be applied to hypertext creation, or even to administering examinations where students are given a list of works and asked to discuss a selection.
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