Writing in the 21st Century @ The Cambridge Festival of Ideas
Writing in the 21st Century @ The Cambridge Festival of Ideas
The future of writing is now. Smartphones, interactive storytelling, stories that take us right into the future…now. Writing and technology have a long backstory: from Guttenberg’s press [and beyond] to today’s digital smart phones humans have explored new ways of communicating with each other using tools of one form or another and these tools have had an impact not only on how we communicate…
She is very excited about the opportunities that digital and online storytelling opens up for writers. What she likes the most about digital forms is their iterative power. Because of the nature of the web digital authors are able to easily get feedback from readers and allow their work to be influenced. She mentioned how in the past writers would release their works in serial form and then only publish it as a novel if it was very popular, and how others would heavily revise stories for later editions because they were not happy with the original. You don't really see that happening anymore with print fiction, but digital fiction is very much open to this.
What opened her up to this idea was discovering "episode 5" of her work "Inanimate Alice", which has not in fact been finished. What she found was a blog displaying student made versions of what they think could happen after episode four. And while we do see this kind of thing with fanfiction. It opened her eyes to ways that it could be more.
Her digital fiction is already collaborative, and she is working on a project to make it even more collaborative by opening it up to readers. She is releasing a print novel, Landing Gear, based on her adult digital fiction "Flight Paths" and along with that a website for interacting with the print text in new ways, such as remixing and sharing feedback. Her idea's for this sound much like Pottermore, which I think is an exciting adventure.
After hearing her talk I feel inspired to make a digital story of my own, and her own experience allows for those interested not to be scared off if they lack digital savvy. She emphasizes doing what you do well and finding collaborators to enhance and add more to your work.
I think this can translate to the working world as well. In digital writing we compared the division of labor to integrated teams. And in this way you combine both of those ideas. Each person is specialized in a certain aspect of creating the project, but you must work in an integrative and collaborative style to make an diverse and compelling document.
So! I went to a lecture on transmedia on Monday and have promised two people that I would type up my notes and thoughts, which means that I should really stop procrastinating and type up my notes and thoughts. I am incapable of organising things properly, so my thoughts will be interspersed throughout the notes as I wave my arms and shout a lot.
(for those of you who don't know what transmedia is, it is basically 'storytelling across media,' which boils down to a story that uses two or more mediums to tell. So, Homestuck is an example of a transmedia project.)
The lecture was called Fiction in Future Environments, and was delivered by Kate Pullinger. She's a writer who has written both traditional novels and a couple of transmedia projects; please make note of this as you read because I will be talking about it.
What is digital fiction?
Kate started off by talking about what she did and giving it the name of 'digital fiction,' which she then defined as collaborative, iterative, and as something that makes full use of its platform.
The collaborative point was fairly obvious: transmedia projects, even small ones, require a lot of talent. There's art (or photos, or footage, and the editing thereof), sound design, writing, editing, and programming, and even if someone could do all this themselves, there's a reason one-person studios aren't the norm. You are never going to be the best at everything, and turning to someone who knows what they're doing is generally going to a) result in a better work and b) stop you from ripping your hair out.
(Kate also mentioned that she has a project called The Writing Platform, dedicated to hooking up people interesting in creating transmedia projects, which you had better believe I am all over.)
The iterative point is interesting to me. The thing is, you can't really iterate books, past editions. And even then you can't really make permanent changes, because the past editions of books will always be hanging around somewhere. The digital realm is a lot more permeable though - editing is literally just changing things in a text file, instead of reprinting everything. And this is good, and bad - the primary example I can think of is Homestuck's aracial retconning, along with the Caucasian/peachy joke - which is in the collective consciousness of the fandom now, but will it be in ten years time? Twenty? The Wayback Machine is gone and so is Google Cache, so scholars looking back at Homestuck will only have second-hand evidence of the change, which is a really interesting thing to think about. Our knowledge of ancient cultures is already based on imperfectly copied manuscripts and shards of knowledge, so what happens when our editing doesn't leave a trace?
(I keep thinking: some poor scholar will come across the Homestuck anime posts created during the hiatus and have to determine whether or not it was real. Which would be a relatively simple thing, but still. The internet is strange and confusing.)
The platform of digital media is interesting, too, but I found it less so. I'll talk about it a bit more when I come to the distribution platforms section.
Traditional Publishing -> eBooks -> ???
Kate then argued that eBooks are a transition technology to fully-immersed digital media, which I'm not sure I agree with. There are already a number of narratives taking advantage of everything a digital platform has to offer, and they are a completely different experience to reading a novel, which is much the same no matter how you're reading it.
(Ssssh, paper vs screen purists. Ssssh. It's text.)
We do agree, however, on the point that the advent of the eBook did unlock some torrential floodgate in the realm of digital publishing. An ISBN number is a book's registration code; libraries, bookstores, and Amazon use them in order to sell books, whether e- or otherwise. In ten years, ISBN registrations have exploded from ~900 000 to ~32 million. Thirty-two million. And that's because of self-publishing, which really took off when eBooks did. Digital publishing requires getting past no gatekeeper like traditional publishing does; as a result, a lot more people are taking advantage of it. And yet, the lack of gatekeeper is a problem. Again, more on that in the distribution platforms section.
She then asked the question: Will traditional publishers ever be interested in digital media? Not to spoil things, but her answer was, 'No.'
Flight Paths
She then introduced one of her projects, Flight Paths. It was backed by Penguin, who are a pretty big deal in the publishing business, and its goal was to see if a community could write a novel. Again, the answer was no, but the results were interesting nonetheless.
The main hub of creation was a wiki, and I am sure you all know how much fun can be had over a wiki. There were 1500 writers/editors and around 80 000 viewers total. The contention was so high that the project was initially not a success at all; it was only when the collaborative group was reduced to 100 people or so that a coherent story was built, with people submitting text articles and pictures and music.
Go click the link to Flight Paths up in that initial paragraph, take a look at one of the episodes, then come back. I'll wait.
Remind you of anything? It reminded me of Knite, by Yuumei, as well as all of her other comics. And this is something that... not upsets me exactly, but worries me, because webcomics have been the driver of digital media since it existed and nobody seems to want to acknowledge this.
Let me just take a small diversion here: I love webcomics. More than that, I'm passionate about them. They are and always have been something new and amazing, of unlimited potential. I have written a webcomic, I read many, many webcomics, I want to study webcomics and what they mean, I would be happy forever if I could create a webcomic for a living. This is my bias.
So let me talk about webcomics. Argon Zark! first appeared in 1995. Readers, I was three in 1995. It was the first comic ever to use some hilariously low-tech GIFs as animations within it. I don't think I can express how revolutionary this is. Think infinite canvas. (The infinite canvas is the concept that on a digital platform, comics have an infinite amount of space - as opposed to on paper, where they would generally be the size of the paper. Shocking, right? Well, it was, in 1995.)
So. Argon Zark! First transmedia project, perhaps ever. Knite, a story you interact with, with pictures and text and buttons. Homestuck, the most ambitious transmedia project I know of, and I have made a(n amateurish, admittedly) study of these. None of these were brushed upon in the lecture. The topic of webcomics wasn't even mentioned, which disappointed me. No nods to Scott McCloud and his groundbreaking studies of how being digital affects a medium.
This is something that I feel strongly about, as you might have noticed. Comics have a history of being dismissed as a juvenile medium, which is plain short-sighted if you know anything about comics at all. Webcomics, too, are often overlooked, but they're some of the most progressive stories out there. Yu+Me taught me about different sexual orientations, while Khaos got me started on gender issues. Knite is a gorgeous, heartbreaking look at pollution and the burden on Millennials, and Ava's Demon makes me think very grimly of the burden of mental illnesses. They're much more progressive than traditional comics, something that e-publishing shares.
It could just be that academia has trouble keeping up with the internet. It could be that Ms. Pullinger is of a different generation and thus interacts with the internet and digital platforms a lot differently. It could be that she just didn't mention webcomics, for whatever reason. It still saddens me, that they're not acknowledged as the forerunners that they are.
I suppose where they differ from Ms. Pullinger's area of expertise is that webcomics, with the notable exception of Homestuck, are usually a one- or two-person job. Ms. Pullinger's creations are excepetionally collaborative; her latest one, if:book, takes snippets of memories gathered from hundreds of people and consolidates them into a narrative. I'm not convinced, though.
Spreadable Media
Kate then used the idea of spreadable media, first introduced by Henry Jenkins, to look at how digital fiction succeeds. In that it succeeds because it is spreadable: adopted, adapted, remixed. The best example I can think of is actually a softer world, which I would not be surprised if everyone knew through a parody. Creative Commons is obviously a way to facilitate this idea of media; I would argue that it is the definition made action.
And here we come to the distribution channels section! I know you are all excited. Kate argues that spreadable media is a new form of distribution, and with this I both agree and disagree. I think it can be more of a byproduct of a distribution method. There are ways to lock images and text down; only the very determined are going to pull apart a Flash file for assets, but the more successful projects tend to be the ones that are distributed and built upon, and for this I turn to the Homestuck fandom. Some of the most amazing projects have been made with sprite recolours (Red Dead Virgo, Be The Sea Dweller Lowblood), others still have aped the style of panel-and-chatlog (Promstuck), not to mention all of the music and animations and games and stories that have come out of the original being open to being adapted and adopted. Fandom makes something its own, and it grows tenfold.
That said, there is the question of how do you make a living, and there are two methods, which are: sell something alongside the thing, or sell the thing. Selling the thing is the interesting part of my distribution channel rant, because if you want to sell the thing then you have to figure out how to sell it. Webcomics are, again, a leader in this field; it's rare that a popular webcomic won't have print copies to pick up. An interesting emerging option is the app-ifying of things, reformatting your thing to work on a mobile device and selling it for $2.99. The opportunity for interaction is something that I hope gets used a lot in future.
Kate pointed out that selling the thing is becoming more diversified with the use of micropayments and paywalls. Subscriptions are nothing new, but they're adapting to digital media in strange and exciting new ways.
(Kickstarter was not mentioned at all; another sadface. Kickstarter and IndieGoGo and the like are amazingly interesting because they give you a chance to be a patron, to say that you had a hand in making something a reality. It's powerful, and something that a lot of creative people are taking advantage of, something very 18th C in the 21st. I like it. I hope it encourages diversity in creation by removing gatekeepers.)
(Speaking of, gatekeepers and curation are something inherently necessary to the current method of selling a thing to make a living; you will note Penguin was behind Ms. Pullinger when she created Flight Paths, which means that it presumably faced scrutiny in order to get cash. The problem with our current gatekeepers is that they are largely white baby boomers, which means what gets published is what white baby boomers like. I am not surprised that the internet, to a certain extent, does away with gatekeepers and relies on its networks to inform it as to what it may like. This is grassroots curation and voting with your time and money, and is incredibly fucking interesting when you look at societal tendencies over generations as well - Do you trust authorities? Okay, does your mother trust authorities?)
The last distribution channel is selling a thing alongside your thing, which I can easily categorise as merch, because once again, webcomics are my bias. That said, there are other ways of doing this as well, like selling a game based on your thing. Like, uh, Homestuck. I'm sorry, it's just a really good example. Hussie made $2.5 million off selling the Homestuck world in a different format, and presumably some of that goes to him eating and the roof over his head. You'll find with internet ventures that people tend to do their best to diversify their income streams; usually advertising and merch are big ones, as well as copies of their thing in whatever format their readers most demand.
I have run out of notes! This is convenient, because the text editor is starting to lag the hell out. I hope someone has found this as interesting as I do!
This summer saw the publication of No Rest For The Dead, a crime novel with an unusual twist: Authorship was shared by 26 different writers. Around the same time it was released, we were in the midst of planning our own Summer Fiction issue, so when the book came across our desk we decided to ask some of Canada’s literary luminaries to team up for a similar experiment, albeit on a much smaller scale — a short story. The only thing we provided was a sentence (“He’d/She’d always hated the summer”), which was promptly ignored, though it does in fact appear in a slightly altered form. The story began with Steven Heighton, who passed it on to the next writer, and so on, until all 11 writers had contributed a section. We hope you enjoy The Fine Art of Basking (the title was suggested by Kate Pullinger) as much as we do.
