Back in the late 1990s, I started trying to write a biography of William Hayley (1745-1820), man of letters, amateur doctor and champion of women’s writing, and someone whose private life was, shall we say, interesting. I tried to write his biography, but although there was a fascinating tale (many fascinating tales) to draw out, no matter how I tried to organise the material, the structure always felt arbitrary. There were too many stories, ideas and people to explore. Too many paths to digress down in ways that would simultaneously enrich and undermine the narrative.

The project was relegated to the back-burner part of my brain where it bubbled away quietly along with several other semi-formed ideas.

A few years later, inspired by Tim Wright’s In Search of Oldton (2004), I started thinking about making the biography as a digital thing, telling Hayley’s story in jigsaw, rather than linear form. The codex is a fantastic storytelling technology, but it’s not omni-appropriate, and I felt that a new form – one that allowed for a more flexibly-structured and variable reading experience – might better suit Hayley’s life. And not only Hayley’s life. There was, I thought, something about the structural and ordering affordances of digital technologies that could enable auto/biographers and memoirists to make life writing more congruent with the felt experiences of living and remembering.

Years of occasional discussions with bright and imaginative people followed. Some loved the idea, others dismissed it. In the meantime, I was lucky enough to be offered opportunities to write and speak about developments in digital literature in a variety of contexts. All these, together with rapid developments in technologies and their adoption, and a failed Unbound project, were vital in growing my initial seed-of-an-idea to a point where it was, potentially, realisable.

But I couldn’t have created it myself. I can’t code, and knew I wouldn’t have the time to develop sufficient skills. Luckily, I met developer and entrepreneur Michael Kowalski. Twice, with an eighteen-month gap between meetings. At our first encounter, he expressed interest in the project. At our second, in an astonishing act of generosity, he offered to build it for me.

We started work early in 2013. Almost a decade after I’d first wondered if…

By this point, and with the benefit of several other people’s wisdom (especially Sue Thomas, Chris Meade and John Mitchinson), I knew I wanted the Hayley biography to enable readers to get to know him in a way that mimicked encountering him in real life. This meant

1. Hayley and his words – rather than me and mine – would need be at its centre
2. HayleyWorld couldn’t just be a website through which readers navigated entirely at their own volition. Hayley would need to demonstrate agency.

HayleyWorld front “cover”

William Hayley wrote his Memoirs in the third person. I decided to base HayleyWorld around a series of extracts drawn from the book’s 700+ pages. It soon dawned on me that, if I wanted to simulate a relationship between readers and Hayley – which, in effect is what it means for the reader to get to know him in a way that mimics encountering him in real life –  I’d need to edit these extracts into the first person. Meanwhile, I planned to confine my biographical contributions (literally) to the margins. To give you a sense of scale, HayleyWorld includes some 420 extracts from Hayley’s Memoirs and other autobiographical works, about three hundred of which feature my commentaries – short encyclopaedia-style pieces putting Hayley’s words into context.

These decisions forced me to recognise that the biography would include elements of fictionalisation.

Did that mean it wasn’t a biography?

If not, what was it? A novel?

I didn’t want to write a novel.

There are, writes Sergei Averintsev in Mapping Lives: The Uses of Biography (edited by Peter France and William St Clair), two words in Greek meaning life: bios and zoe. “The latter denotes vital energy …  the quality of being alive”. Meanwhile, bios means “mode of life, manner of living, often what we name ‘conduct’ or ‘behaviour’.” HayleyWorld, I decided, was a zoeography. It would have the vital energy of Hayley’s life, all the information it delivered would be factually accurate, but the method of delivering that information – William Hayley addressing/interacting with his readers directly – would include elements of fictionalisation. Given that he’s been dead for nearly two hundred years, the location of the fact/fiction divide would be obvious.

Soon after Michael and I started work, I realised HayleyWorld needed an academic underpinning. I was basing it on the assumption that people read biographies to get to know the people they’re written about. Was that true? I couldn’t find any empirical research investigating why people read life writing and what they get out of it. And I also realised that I didn’t know how people get to know each other. Luckily, an opportunity arose to do a PhD in Digital Writing by Practice at Bath Spa University. Which – as well as being a wonderful life-enhancing experience – proved indispensable in ensuring that the thing got built.

So, what were the biggest challenges I faced when it came to actually structuring, writing and editing HayleyWorld?

1. Time (challenge: met)

While working on the project, I was also getting divorced, earning a living and being mum to a teenager. Meanwhile, Michael was running a company, then selling it and embarking on a new venture. I was unable to devote as much attention as I would have liked to HayleyWorld, and Michael’s time was at a premium. Whilst sometimes frustrating, this – combined with working on the project over a part-time PhD timescale – also turned out to have advantages. It meant HayleyWorld could develop slowly and organically. Ideas that were initially fuzzy and difficult to pin down sharpened into focus, almost of their own accord. It felt like my brain was getting on with the work by itself while the rest of me was dealing with other things. Bizarrely, this making HayleyWorld feel like much less effort than I suspect it would have done had I been able to work on it full time.

2. The reader journey (challenge: met – with room for improvement)

This elongated timeframe was particularly helpful when it came to mapping out the reader journey.

I always knew that this would be the most mind-bendingly challenging aspect of HayleyWorld.

Editing the extracts from Hayley’s Memoirs into the first person and writing the accompanying commentaries was demanding and extensive work, but the “how” of doing it – the process – was straightforward. Designing the reader journey was anything but. How should the extracts be grouped into different topics? What should those topics be? What should we do with extracts that fitted into more than one topic? How should I deal with repetitions and holes in any narrative introduced by my choices or Hayley’s? And what did narrative mean in what would become, if not a non-linear telling, at least a multi-strand, multi-linear one?

On top of all this, to create and sustain the illusion of a relationship developing between Hayley and his readers, his readers would need to be asked for information about themselves. To maintain the illusion of Hayley having some agency in the relationship, he would have to both ask them for that information, and to respond to it.

I spent a lot of time developing the algorithm for the reader journey. The first version looked like this:

By the time I got to the point of making, it looked like the second illustration. And this isn’t the final version. I never drew that. It turned out to be less complex for two reasons. The first is that I didn’t end up including the video content I refer to in the diagram. And secondly, using intertitles removed the need for Hayley to ask readers if they want to read more on a particular topic. At the bottom of each intertitle page, he simply suggests that…

The mapping process was, inevitably, time-consuming, but a lot of that time was spent lying down in a darkened room muttering expletives.

The final version of HayleyWorld is divided into twelve topics. Hayley asks the reader six sets of questions and, in return provides them with four personalised responses, the last of which has 1,800 possible permutations. And I don’t feel that this aspect of the work is, as yet, complete. When/if the work finds a publisher, I will persuade Hayley to ask more questions, and respond in his typically sympathetic way to his readers’ answers.   

This video provides a short introduction to how the reader journey works at present:

3. Escaping the paradigm of the book (challenge: failed)

Ultimately, to provide what Nicholas Lovell, in his forthcoming book The Pyramid of Game Design calls “the session-length promise” (this “refers to the player’s expectation of how long it will take from tapping or clicking on the game icon to have a meaningful experience in the game”), I divided the 12 topics into chapters. On my PhD supervisor, Ian Gadd’s, suggestion, each chapter is introduced through an illustrated intertitle page.

It was only when I was finishing the thesis part of my PhD (submitted to accompany HayleyWorld) that I realised I was so firmly embedded in the paradigm of the book that I’d missed an alternative way of organising my material that would have been more congruent with my intentions in making the work. If I wasn’t so book-bound, I could have abandoned the idea of topics, and, worked from an extended version of the questions Hayley asks readers about themselves, delivering and personalising all the content on the basis of their answers.

On the upside, it’s likely that many of HayleyWorld’s potential readers may be trapped in this bookworld with me. And, hopefully, my failure to escape this paradigm will mean HayleyWorld feels familiar and accessible to them.

Ten years ago I had an idea.

It happened – as these things often do – when one area of my work rubbed up against another. In this case, the question of how to shoehorn the diverse and tangential life of a forgotten eighteenth-century writer (William Hayley 1745-1820) into a book-shaped structure met the PR work I was doing for Tim Wright’s NESTA-funded In Search of Oldton for the trAce Online Writing Centre…

 The combination sparked the following thoughts…

a) digital technologies and a non-linear narrative might suit the story I wanted to tell more effectively than a traditional book-biography could

b) most people read biographies to get to know the person they’re about

c) reading a book-form biography is not remotely like getting to know someone in real life

d) it might be possible to create a digital biography that simulated the messy, blobby, incomplete process of getting to know someone IRL

and

e) that might be interesting. And fun.

I started telling people about it. Most suddenly remembered an urgent appointment they were already late for. Others (including Tim Wright, Sue Thomas and Chris Meade), at home in the digital writing world, were supportive and helped me to sharpen my much-less-than 20/20 vision.

And that was more or less it for five years until, in 2008, Chris Meade posted on Facebook about an if:book UK William Blake project – Songs of Imagination and Digitisation. There was a strong connection between William Hayley and William Blake, so I asked Chris if I could contribute a piece. He said yes, and the resulting combination of money (£800), validation and, importantly, a deadline, allowed me to think my idea into an online, dramatised (and marginally fictionalised) retelling of the relationship between the two Williams: www.rolledbythewind.net.

The following year, I sat down with Chris and we punted a speculative application for funding the 3D Life, as we called it, into Channel 4’s IP fund. They weren’t interested. So we left it at that.

Another two years passed, then, in Spring 2011 I learned, via Twitter, about plans for a book hack day. I contacted the organisers, Paul Squires and Nico McDonald to ask if I could do a short presentation about my biography project. They said yes. After I’d spoken, developer Michael Kowalski, then in the process of founding Contentment – a creative technology startup solving problems to do with digital content production and publishing – expressed interest in the idea, but said he didn’t yet have the technology needed to make it.

Later that year I wrote a feature for the Independent on Sunday about digital literature and – because I felt it needed one – made (unpaid) a short accompanying video for the website. Two weeks work for £300, I thought. Idiot, I thought. But then… that piece led to an invitation (via Twitter) to speak about the future of the book for Tomax Talks (fee: £50).

John Mitchinson, co-founder of Unbound, was one of the speakers that evening. During my spiel, I mentioned my desire to write the biography of a crap poet no-one had ever heard of, who’d been dead for 200 years but that, for some inexplicable reason, no publisher was interested. Afterwards John said it sounded like a perfect Unbound project and did I want to do it with them?

Of course I did.

HayleyWorld became an Unbound project. After approximately 18 months on the website, it’s 19% funded. At the current rate it’ll take over six years to hit target (please pledge generously). Call me naïve, but I still believe that one way or another, we’ll get there. But I might have to get creative.

Meanwhile, Sophie Rochester invited me to speak about having a project with Unbound at the November 2012 Writing Platform event at Rich Mix. I said yes. Michael Kowalski was again in the audience. Eighteen months on from Book Hackday he told me that he had the technology and would be happy to work with me.

Gemma Seltzer – writer and Arts Council, England Literature Officer – spoke about funding: Grants for the Arts: Time to Write and Nesta’s Digital R&D fund for the Arts. I chatted with her afterwards and, although the Arts Council rarely funds non-fiction writing, she offered to help me pull together an application. That, by the way, isn’t because of anything special about me. It’s her job.

We met, and then, to cut approximately two weeks of limb-chewingly agonising form-filling, flecked with bile-bitter pessimism (WHY AM I WASTING MY TIME? THEY DON’T FUND NON-FICTION) followed by a six-week wait increasingly darkened by my recognition of the sheer hopelessness of my situation short, thanks in a large part to Gemma’s support and guidance, I was awarded a grant of £9,295.

“You really weren’t expecting that, were you?” she said, when she phoned to tell me the news.

I wasn’t.

Meanwhile, Michael and I decided to try for the Nesta fund. That has to be led by an arts organisation – in this case, Unbound – with a technology partner (Contentment) and also a research partner – a UK higher education institution. I found computer scientist and AI researcher Dr Sandy Louchart of Heriot-Watt University in the British Library. He was speaking at an event with Chris Meade that I attended. One brief natter on the spot and a skype chat later, he was in. We were good to go.

I won’t bore you with the ins-and-outs of what exactly we were good to go for/through. Suffice to say the Grants for the Arts application experience was, in comparison, like skipping through sunshiney meadows with the one you love (unless you suffer from hay fever, in which case it was like that only without pollen) and by the end of it my brain had knitted itself into a ‘70s macramé wall-hanging. It’s probably less painful if you have a budgeting fetish (I don’t), or if someone else does the whole thing for you (they didn’t). Having said that, one of the many upsides of applying for funding together with partner organisations rather than solo was that everyone contributed and critiqued content and – most importantly – checked and corrected my adding up.

While ploughing through the Nesta application, I realised there were several unanswered questions troubling me about my project. Questions like “do people really read biographies to get to know the people they’re about? Shouldn’t I find that out rather than making an assumption?” and “What are the processes through which people get to know each other? Don’t I need to understand what those are in order to be able to simulate the experience in a biography?” I was pondering these and wondering whether I needed to go back into academia when Kate Pullinger mentioned on Facebook that Bath Spa University had a small number of practice-based, digital writing fee waiver PhD studentships on offer. I applied (that form was much easier).

As I write Unbound (including me as one of their authors), Contentment and Heriot-Watt University are through the Nesta initial expression of interest stage and waiting to hear the results of our final application. If (and, naturally, it’s a big if) we get through that, there’s a panel interview to negotiate. Meanwhile, I’ve morphed into a full time PhD student at Bath Spa University (although, to fund my living expenses and support my daughter etc I’m still doing other work).

All of which means it’s now time to make something concrete of this idea I’ve been talking about for a decade.

Wish me luck.

Lisa Gee

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Image © epSos.de