The Newcastle Writing Conference presents an opportunity for new and emerging fiction writers to explore and learn about trends in publishing, new markets for writing, as well as a chance to connect with other authors and industry experts.

The conference is presented by New Writing North and Northumbria University and will approach the publishing industry from a writer’s perspective, with a focus on how to break into writing, market trends and the state of the bookseller industry.

The Literary Platform will host a Writing Platform panel in the afternoon, introducing this new online space for writers: The Writing Platform is a free online guide for writers at all stages and of all genres, to best online practice and writing in a digital age.

The Literary Platform founder Sophie Rochester will chair the panel, with author speakers; Chris Rickaby, Lisa Gee, Ewan Morrison and Tony White.

Saturday 4 May, 9.30am-5.30pm

Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne

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Writer Kate Pullinger, Editor of The Writing Platform, is also a professor at Bath Spa University, co-sponsors of The Writing Platform. At Bath Spa, Pullinger runs a series of lunchtime talks, aimed at all the postgraduate writing students who study at the Corsham Court Campus. These talks, Digital Corsham, are given by writers, academics, publishers, and pundits, all of whom are interested in writing and publishing in the digital age. The talks are filmed for The Writing Platform.

This second short film in the Digital Corsham series features Philip Hensher, a novelist, critic and journalist. Here Philip talks about the positive and negative impacts of digital on writing.

Further viewing: Naomi Alderman and Charlotte Abbott Digital Corsham talks.

If you’re a writer interested in finding out more about immersive entertainment – discovering how your audiences can be immersed and play an active part in your story – then we have a great series of specialist immersive writing guides made available to The Writing Platform by Portal Entertainment and the Immersive Writing Lab team.

The guides, created by Mike Jones, Portal Entertainment’s Head of Story, will help writers who want to write ‘immersive entertainment’: writers who want their audiences to be immersed and play an active part in their story. This second guide explains how to create characters.

Characters – Goals, Obstacles, Communities and Points-of-View

It is somewhat stating the obvious to suggest that character is crucial to storytelling. Yet the idea of character is more complex than it might appear. And in the case of writing immersive interactive and multi-platform storyworlds, the notion of how to construct characters is extended with new considerations.

A story may be described in terms of its plot (this happens, then that happens then this happens…. etc) but it’s characters that provide us with point-of-view, empathy, metaphor, subtext and drama within that plot chain of events. More specifically, it is characters that give us a reason to care about the plot and make the plot events meaningful.

Writing a storyworld, as opposed to a singular narrative, requires some broader ideas about characters, what they represent, how they work and how they relate to each other in ongoing ways. We’ll break this down into 4 useful elements as a tool kit for thinking about the characters in your storyworld.

– Goals and Obstacles

– Role-Play

– Communities

– Points of view

Goals and Obstacles

In the previous guide we looked at the dramatic pressures of your storyworld, asking what forces in opposition pressurise and make dramatic (or comedic) your world? This is to say, what macro-level problems effect every character in your world? This is the central energy source that will both generate and motivate your characters who will not only struggle against or with these problems, but who will also be a product of them. Characters born in a particular world are a direct result of the world; their attitudes, behaviours, personality and – in particular – their goals and objectives, are a response to the problems of the world.

In the TV series Breaking Bad for example, the storyworld is one where there are two big problems; the first is a broken and dysfunctional health system that doesn’t cover peoples medical bills and the second is a huge demand for the drug crystal meth. These two big problems – health care and drugs – are the forces that beset every character in the Storyworld and which every character is responding to in some way. Characters are then made interesting, dramatic and compelling when they have specific goals and obstacles that are in opposition to the problem. Hence the storyworld of Breaking Bad naturally generates the character of an under-insured school teacher who has the goal of selling crystal meth to make enough money for his family before he dies and the obstacle of avoiding both the police and the other drug dealers. The problems of health care and drugs are so big they are unsolvable and so the dramatic pressure is sustainable over a very long-form narrative.

These same principles of a character’s goals and obstacles being a direct result of the problems of the storyworld are as applicable in an interactive multi-platform experience as they are in a TV series. The question is how do those storyworld pressures and problems manifest characters with clear goals and obstacles across different platforms and also how the audience can be compelled to respond interactively to the same goals and obstacles. What is crucial for the writing of your storyworld bible is to ensure that the very specific, personal, individual goals and obstacles of your characters are intrinsically linked to the problems of the world. In this way any character dropped into your world should be immediately pressurised and compelled to respond or act.

Role-Play

The idea of a motivated character with clear goals and defined obstacles is as applicable to interactive storytelling as it is with film, TV and books. In traditional narrative media we call such a motivated character an active protagonist with the idea that watching a character actively doing things is better than watching a passive character having things happen to them. In an interactive narrative experience the audience or user is most often asked to be the active protagonist – to play the role of a character with goals and obstacles.

Sometimes the audience will be asked to play the role of a pre-defined character, where the story tells the user who they are and the type of character they represent. In other cases the audience ‘plays themselves’, a tabula rasa onto which the audience are free to assign their own behaviours. In either case creating an active role-playing experience requires an extended idea of a character’s goals and obstacles.

The first is to clearly define the role for the audience in active terms; does an interactive narrative in your storyworld ask the user to be the fighter, finder, solver, rescuer, detective, strategist, organiser, chaser, escapee, etc…. What active roles does your storyworld naturally embody? By understanding the active verbs that describe what the user will ‘do’ in your storyworld you can define the three core things that make for a satisfying interactive experience: motivation, action and reward.

It’s a mistake to expect or assume your audience will or even want to interact. It’s your job – the job of your storyworld – to motivate them to do so. Ask yourself ‘what compels my audience to interact’? What is at stake? What is at risk? What will be lost or gained by their actions?

Once motivated the audience will then have specific actions and tasks to perform. What are those actions? Be specific not abstract. What are you asking them to do and how will they do it? These actions come directly out of the role you have asked them to play and the actions should be a direct consequence of the storyworld’s pressures. The audience’s actions should be specific to achieving a clear goal and be made dramatic by the obstacles that prevent them from achieving those goals.

The last crucial element for engaging interactive story experiences is reward. If you’re going to ask your audience to take part in your storyworld, to role play and take action, then you will need to reward them for doing so and thus motivate them to continue to interact and role play. How are your audience rewarded? is the story advanced? New knowledge unlocked? New spaces opened to explore? New mysteries revealed or questions answered? Of course reward systems can also involve traditional ‘game’ ideas of points, leveling-up, or any combination of the above.

Communities

The dominant mistake writers often make when developing and submitting their storyworld project is to focus on a single character with a single goal and subsequently a singular plot. But we’re not looking for ‘a’ story, we’re looking for a whole world of stories. In terms of character this often means shifting the emphasis away from an individual character and onto communities of characters.

Any storyworld – whether it’s real-world, intimate and contained, or other-worldly, fantastical and huge – will be home to groups of character that share common goals and obstacles; in other words communities.

Communities of characters can often be described and articulated in much the same terms we might use to describe an individual. What are the goals of that group of characters? What are the obstacles they face together? Communities will even share a personality, an attitude and a perspective. The group will collectively believe certain things and be in opposition to others.

This goes the same for antagonists as much as for protagonists in your world. Storyworld antagonists are often institutions, collective entities or forces that may comprise numerous individual characters but who all reflect a consistent set of traits. Take the much loved ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ – a project spanning TV, video games, comic books and more. The Buffy storyworld is rich and full of near countless demons, ghosts, monsters and vampires. Yet the antagonist is a singular entity – the Hell Mouth that spawns an ongoing ‘community’ of antagonistic characters for Buffy and her own ‘community’ of friends, family and comrades to face, fight and overcome. The Hell Mouth has collective goals, obstacles and perspective that is opposition the collective goals, obstacles and perspectives of the Slayers.

Within such communities of characters there are of course tensions, disputes and a mix of character archetypes. But identifying the collected traits of the different groups that exist in your storyworld is a crucial step in being able to define a world with the potential for numerous, varying and ongoing storylines and characters that can be experienced across platforms and technologies.

Points of View

The last element of points-of-view is about the different perspectives that exist for the characters and the audience in your world. Where a feature film generally offers just one point-of-view, the vibrancy of a storyworld can often be measured by the range of possible points-of-view that may be experienced. This speaks to the different platforms the world may be presented on, the different paths audiences may take through the world, the ability for the storyworld to generate multiple points of entry and audience revisitation.

Compelling points-of-view stem from compelling characters and this should prompt you to ask questions of your storyworld – What different points of view exist in your storyworld? Are they balanced and equally compelling? Does each POV effect the experience of the world and change audiences perceptions of it? Do different POV’s challenge, contradict or confound each other? Do certain points of view lend themselves more to one platform or another? Are certain points of view more conducive to being experienced interactively?

Summary

A storyworld may be full of great conceptual ideas, intrigues and fascinations, it may be visually beautiful, terrible or sublime, but it will often fail to be compelling for an audience until it is richly populated characters; characters we can care about, empathise with, cheer for or be in fear of.

Doing this of course aint easy! But the ideas here should help guide you towards the particular demands of characters in a storyworld as opposed to a character in a plot.

Goals & Obstacles

Audience Role-Play

Motivation Action and Reward

Communities

Points of View

—

For further reading please see Mike’s Immersive Writing Guides to:

#1 How To Create A Storyworld here
#3 How to Create Plot, here.
#4 Audience – User Journeys. Paths of how an audience could enter your world – highly involved and reluectant users
#5 Memories, Rituals and Emotional States – what memories will the audience take away from the storyworld and how will it make them feel?

Photo © Christopher Hauke

Ah, tools. Such a seductive word, with that tactile, workmanlike ring. And such seductive implications. Accumulating tools feels like the very opposite of time wasting. Tools promise to transform us into humble, brine-browed word-carpenters, conscientiously whittling our masterpieces in brain-workshops full of sunshine and space, while topless, and grunting. In short, tools rule.

Of course, as a writer, any tools other than your mind, your fingers or voice, and a basic recording device, are entirely superfluous. Browsing the app store, watching little download circles rotate and fiddling with complicated settings are all byways, not highways, to becoming a laser-focused sentence-whore. In fact, reading articles about good online productivity tools for writers is one of the best ways to feel productive without achieving a damn thing. Close this tab! Go! Write!

Still here? Okay, I have to admit that from deep within the towering dung-heap of procrastination-friendly digital shiny things, I have managed to uncover a few gems that consistently make me write more, and very possibly better. Enjoy, argue, pass them on, and don’t be shy about suggesting a few of your own.

Scrivener

From the first day I tried Scrivener, “the first and only word processing program designed specifically for the messy, non-linear way writers really work”, I knew I could never go back to the plodding constraints of Word or even the sensual pleasures of paper and pen. Like many who grew up with screens, I write in a highly architectural way, and Scrivener brilliantly anticipates exactly what my chaotic brain needs.

An independent piece of software developed by an aspiring writer who couldn’t find a way to order his research and his notes, Scrivener has won numerous awards for its ingenious system of folders, corkboards, notes and composing windows, which allow you to keep all your references, drafts, notes and inspirations in one place and instantly navigate between them; tag, categorise and search for super-specific elements; track character arcs or themes; and eventually, download the whole manuscript in the auto-format of your choice, from Kindle eBook to screenplay. Normally a manual hater, I strongly recommend completing the on-screen walkthrough, which will help you understand all sorts of clever shortcuts, details and customisations to get the most from the software. In practice, I spend most of my time in the simple ‘blackout’ composing screen, which focuses your text in the middle of clean, distraction-free black page. But I would be lost without the ‘snapshot’ function, which allows you to capture and store the current version of your document at any time, and the synopsis panes, which force me to summarise each chapter succinctly as I go. A no-brainer. Download it now.

Evernote

Inspiration usually strikes in places where it is difficult to whip out a notebook – on the tube, on the toilet, in a work meeting, at the gym. I always loved the idea of carrying a beautiful personalised Moleskine and fountain pen wherever I went, but in practice I would forget, or spill coffee on it, or run out of ink, and when I returned to my scribblings they were not only illegible but impossible to organize into a coherent structure.

Evernote is the best digital note-taker I’ve come across. This free, simple app allows you to capture notes on your phone via text, audio, video and photo, then synchs them across all your devices, such as your laptop and tablet. You can search by tag, keyword or even text within an image, and easily transfer notes to another application such as Scrivener. Using your online Evernote account, you can also access them from anywhere in the world, safe in the knowledge that they are always floating in the cloud, and that you need never again lose that perfect opening sentence that you scribbled on a paper napkin with eyeliner. Oh, that sentence. You still mourn for that sentence, don’t you?

Shareist 

Fresh out of beta, Shareist is the quickest and easiest tool I’ve found for capturing and organising the research and inspiration I find on the web. An evolution of the old bookmarking platforms, Shareist provides you with a button for your browser which will capture any webpage, blog, video or image; allow you to title, tag and comment on it; and then turn it into an entry in a private ‘notebook’, which you can edit, format and even export as a book or a blog post.

The key feature here for me is the privacy. Online bookmarking has traditionally been seen as a social facilitator, whereby you display, share and discuss cool stuff you’ve found. Shareist, on the other hand, is geared towards helping you create and curate your own personal treasure trove. It allows you to move more quickly through the glittering mines of the web without getting distracted by individual nuggets; just chuck ‘em in your Shareist bucket, and return to them when you have more leisure for Gollum-like fingering. The free version only allows you to create one notebook, which can be a pain if you’re working with multiple projects or themes, but it’s definitely worth a try. 

Lulu 

You’ve finally finished your first draft. First, you need a drink or twenty; then, you need some perspective. After months spent nose to laptop, it’s hard to read your story with fresh eyes, so take a week off, sign up to Lulu.com and turn your draft into a proper book. I have heard more good word of mouth about Lulu than any other self-printing platform. It is clear, easy and quick to use, offers competitive pricing and allows you to order just one copy. A 300 page black and white paperback will set you back around eight quid, and will be shipped within 3-5 days from whichever global print operation is nearest your address, so with a good wind you could have your embryonic darling on your doormat within a week.

This is not an encouragement to consider your first slew of brain diarrhoea as a finished product – nor an excuse to spend hours mocking up cover art complete with ‘Booker Shortlist 2013’ sticker (don’t pretend you haven’t); but it will help to de-familiarise your work. Your Lulu book should be approached as a single working copy to scribble all over, not a mass order to share. Read it through once without making notes to experience the overall flow and only then pick up your red pen. You won’t want to print off a full new copy after every draft, but after the marathon of the first, it really helps.

Quit

We don’t need scientific research to know that the Internet is turning us into goldfish. When I finally, properly committed to writing my novel eighteen months ago, I found myself having to entirely rewire my behaviour. At first I could only manage a few sentences before I cast around for a link to click. I was sure that I could physically feel my brain fluttering like a moth trapped in a jar. With practice, it has calmed considerably, but a ‘quick email check’ still has the ability to turn me into the writer’s equivalent of Jennifer Connelly in Labyrinth, dashing breathlessly from Pinterest oubliette to Facebook bog while the great social media Bowie-god in the sky waves a hardback in front of me with a mockingly raised eyebrow.

I’m not a big believer in online ‘nanny tools’ such as Cold Turkey or Chrome Nanny, which forcibly shut down timewasting applications or restrict your web access.  I am, however, a big fan of the rewarding sensation of self-control. So acquaint yourself with that unfortunately Americanised little menu-option called Quit. Yes, turn shit off. Close your email application. Shut down your browser. Deactivate Skype and MSN. Don’t just put your phone face down on the desk, tuck it in your bag and do up the zip. Promise yourself a ‘check-in session’ every ninety minutes. I still sometimes find this really difficult; I recommend meditation as an effective accompaniment to keep your focus muscles lean and mean.

Welcome to The Writing Platform! Our aim is to provide neutral information and informed opinion on digital transformations in writing, reading, and publishing. In the build-up to the launch of this site, we’ve been surveying writers on their digital needs; a complex, fascinating picture of writers today has emerged. For more on the results of the first phase of the survey, go here.

We writers live in interesting times. Great change is taking place throughout the interlinked industries we rely upon for our livelihoods – publishing and bookselling. Reading and writing themselves are changing; new devices and new platforms proliferate. Phones are as powerful as computers; being online means you can publish yourself freely, no matter how big or small your audience. While the ‘end of the book’ has long been predicted, pundits are now predicting the death of the e-reader as tablets come down in price. Bookshops are vanishing from the high street, libraries struggle to redefine themselves while fending off cuts in funding, and a battle worthy of Star Wars rages over our heads between the three major tech corporations whose rapid infiltration of the world of books threatens to overwhelm even the largest of publishers.

On the other hand, books sales continue to boom. We are living through a Golden Age of reading; the ‘heavy reader’, that figure so beloved of all writers (and described for us here by Kassia Kroszer), has greater access to a larger variety of books, at lower prices, than ever before. Passionate readers around the world make use of both local and online book clubs; writing and reading continue to be activities central to the way we define ourselves as people. Good books still find their way to readers.

As well as that, opportunities for writers who are interested in moving beyond the book are also proliferating. Away from the world of traditional writing and publishing, new hybrid forms of literature have been emerging over the past decade, and with them, new business models are appearing.

And writers continue to write. But whether we are well established in our careers, or at the very beginning, or somewhere in-between, we are all part of an industry that is in extreme flux, an industry that will, no doubt, continue to shift and change for the foreseeable future. And this ever-changing landscape is difficult to navigate. Established writers have a tradition of out-sourcing their knowledge of the publishing industry to their agents; the recommended trajectory for most writers remains as follows: write that book, get that agent, let the agent worry about the rest. Our survey has thrown up a number of interesting trends: when asked ‘Where do you find out about developments and new opportunities in writing and publishing?’, writers listed websites (85%), other writers (63%) and live events (36%), with less than ten percent mentioning publishers (9.8%). The rise of self-publishing has disrupted the writer-agent-publisher trajectory; the one key thing that the successful self-publisher possesses – and that the successful traditionally published writer often does not – is an insider’s knowledge of how to publish a book.

All writers need to be bettered informed. We need to have access to clear, neutral, information about digital transformation and how it affects us; we need access to informed opinion and debate. The internet is full of information, of course, and a new future-of-publishing event or conference takes place every couple of minutes somewhere in the world, or so it seems. But very little of this information is aimed directly at writers. And that’s where The Writing Platform comes in; a website for writers, created by people who are dedicated to sharing knowledge and information. Please feel free to get in touch with us with your questions, comments, and ideas. We are commissioning content: tell us what you need to know.

Serendipity is the great unsung hero of publishing. We can never be sure of the precise value arising from chance encounters in bookshops, the flash of a good jacket catching the reader’s eye, igniting the purchase instinct so that before they know it they’ve bought another book. We’ve all been there; we’ve casually browsed, and probably found many of our favourite books this way – by chance, in bookshops, passing time, scanning idly. We’ll never know what this is worth, but it is likely to be very large indeed.

How about in digital environments? Well, there has been a great attempt at not just replicating the mechanisms of the physical world but surpassing them, and a good deal of web innovation has centred around recommendation engines, affiliate networks, filtering systems, automatic suggestions and the prediction of taste.

To some this is a world where abundant culture becomes easily discoverable, where we can find what we like and structure our experience in a totally customised way; to others it is what Eli Pariser has called the “filter bubble”, an egotistical echo chamber where we are never challenged by newness or difference aside from our pre-existing predilections.

Regardless of the rights or the wrongs, one thing is clear: where chance is lost, where algorithms replace luck and the keyword search term is king, metadata is the fulcrum of discovery. Metadata, in short, decides whether your book is found, and by extension whether your book is bought.

So what is metadata and why is it important? The word is part of the problem. It sounds fairly technical and abstract, the kind of thing requiring specialist knowledge. In fact metadata is easy. Metadata is just all the information around a book that isn’t the content. That’s it. People have been using metadata for centuries; they just called it something different.

The name of the book is metadata, the cover is metadata, the word count and page count are metadata, as are the formats. The blurb, the tagline, the keywords attached to those (e.g. which words summarise the book best?) are all metadata. Price, publication date, review quotes, sales points, promotional opportunities, territorial rights, ISBNs and the author name are all metadata to.

Then there are the subject categories, known in the US as BISAC codes and in the UK as BIC codes. If you Google for your subject you will quickly find the correct codes for your books. Metadata can become quite ‘granular’ as the parlance would have it, looking at details like different author roles and different identifiers, but for the most part it sticks to the information readers would find relevant about a book.

Metadata influences search, it influences territoriality and categorisation – metadata is the advert, the sales pitch, the sell in and the advance promotion; metadata is the random book left on the table, the fervent recommendation of a friend, the arresting blurb, the good review, serving the random browser and the determined buyer alike.

Bad metadata means your book is invisible and un-purchasable. Yet compared to many industries either totally or increasingly focused on digital commerce, publishing lags in its understanding of SEO practices, metadata standards implementation, data collection and analysis and systems investment.

A few brief principles for metadata, whether self-published or working with a book publisher, will enormously help your book’s chances.

1 Accurate metadata – it all has to be correct. Wrong metadata confuses the system. This means you need to be meticulous when inputting your metadata and check everything through. One of the difficulties of metadata is that different retailers have different metadata requirements, so you or your publisher need to make sure the right metadata is going to the right retailer. This can be a painstaking and time consuming process but it’s worth it.

2 More is more – if you don’t put the metadata in, it won’t be discovered. Many people only put the bare minimum in. Metadata is boring and tricksy. However by not putting absolutely everything in you will increase the visibility on offer. So if you are uploading work yourself fill out every field on offer. If you are working with a publisher supply them with as much information as they need and monitor what the output looks like.

3 BUT go for quality not quantity. Making sure your metadata is complete is one thing, overloading is another. Book blurbs, tag lines, review quotes, puffs, different regional pricing are all great; but don’t go overboard. A well drafted piece of copy is a much better piece of metadata than a lengthy, search engine friendly piece of text that no one will want to read.

4 Lastly, familiarise yourself with the basic tenets of SEO. Yes, this is a chore and a distraction from writing. We all have to recognise the world we live in, and in that world a bit of simple knowledge can go a long way. All of the above applies. You don’t need any technical knowledge, just an awareness of what kind of thing might help. Have a look at something like this introductory guide from a well-known SEO website: http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo.

We still haven’t fully figured out how to replace the experience of shopping in a bricks and mortar store, that sense of surprise, fun, the unexpected – and we haven’t worked out how we can create and capture those impulse buys. We are going to need to, and the answer will be found in a revolution of what metadata we supply, and how we supply it.