The creation, presentation and publication of new creative work has been a core element of undergraduate teaching programs at Queensland University of Technology for over four decades now. What started as the writing and performance of works for the stage by drama and dance students, has been transformed via a tsunami of consumer-led technologies and pedagogical incarnations to embrace work designed for stage, screen, new media, animation and numerous digital delivery platforms. And in recent years the practice of creative writing (in all its forms) has evolved from a traditionally individual process to that of a vibrant team-based practice with writers working in vertically integrated, interdisciplinary production enterprises. 

The School of Creative Practice in the Creative Industries Faculty at QUT is comprised of six discipline areas; Music, Dance, Drama, Creative Writing, Visual Art and Film/Screen & Media. The Bachelor of Fine Arts degrees that span these six programs incorporate discipline specific practice units, shared academic and critical studies units and in the final year, a suite of interdisciplinary creative practice units. These capstone interdisciplinary practice units were conceived in response to industry consultation, and the reflective and lived experience of creative practitioners in the teaching faculty, as critical to preparing emerging creative artists for the team-based creative environments they would engage with.

On July 2, 2020 Queensland University of Technology Art Museum launched an exhibition of William Robinson’s artworks titled By the Book at the William Robinson Gallery in Old Government House. The exhibition was partnered with the publication of a non-fiction novella of the life and works of William Robinson by award-winning Australian writer, Nick Earls. The exhibition curator proposed a format where an audiobook read by the author would guide visitors through artworks, photographs and artefacts referred to in the text.

Nick Earls reading during a recording session (Photo: Michael Whelan)

As a music academic at QUT, my role in the exhibition was to produce the recording of the author reading the book and to coordinate the subsequent editing and assembly of the sixty individual audio cues that accompany the in-person and virtual tour of the sixty works on display in the exhibition. During the editing and post-production process of the voice recordings, and in conversation with the curator and the author, the brief began to expand to include additional audio resources to enrich the audience experience in the gallery and online. A sound artist named Lawrence English had captured and made available nature soundscape recordings from selected field locations that featured in many of Robinson’s landscapes. William Robinson is also an accomplished pianist and a recording of Bill playing Brahms Intermezzo in A Major was offered to accompany the field sound recordings as additional media and context to complement the reading.

Nick Earls reading during a recording session (Photo: Michael Whelan)

With the production brief now expanded to include location sound and occasional musical cues, I proposed the inclusion of small musical motifs to conclude each cue to signal the end of the cue for listeners (You know it’s time to turn the page when Tinkerbell rings her little bell). Using Bill’s recorded performance of Brahms Intermezzo in A Major as a point of departure, I recorded a series of fifteen separate five-second improvised variations on the main theme to place randomly at the end of each cue as our Tinkerbell signal to virtual and in-person viewers that the audio for that particular piece had concluded. The final format for the audiobook descriptions was finalised and the sixty cues were completed with author voice recording, location sound, background music and cue-end markers.

Final year Creative Writing students in the School of Creative Practice participate in a range of these interdisciplinary creative projects; some connecting with various aspects of the publishing industry (zine, blog and online formats etc..), some leading community writing initiatives and some collaborating with visual artists on illustrated poetry and prose publications.

The By the Book project with its combination of written text, recorded spoken word, sound design, music creation, neutral and character performance, audio recording combined with the design, production and publication of streamed programs and podcasts provide an exciting format for creative writers to participate in a wide range of team-based interdisciplinary practices. Within this model, writers are the creative and conceptual nucleus of projects that may include acting students, for whom training and experience in recorded voice-over and character performance will be extremely valuable. Audio and technical production students have the potential to collaborate, design and produce audio environments that capture core themes, locations and psychological landscapes. Music producers and composers interested in music and sound for film, television, multimedia and games can find a variety of challenges supporting and foregrounding key themes in the text through leitmotif and underscore. And Film, Screen and Media students may collaborate with the QUT student record label, Vermillion Records to realise these audio programs for distribution online.

The rise of the enhanced audio podcast has been hyperbolic in recent years on the back of genres such as audio books, serialised true crime, news and current affairs commentary, short stories, comedy, in-conversation and, wellness and mindfulness programs. According to US marketing firm Brandtastic, podcast listeners consume an average of seven different shows per week and podcast review sites speculate that there are currently between than 700,000 and 1,000,000 active podcast programs available for download. Apple podcasts alone feature more than 500,000 programs in over 100 languages. With blockchain tracking so simple with this digital delivery format, there are abundant analytics outlining the production growth and market penetration of podcasts as the entertainment format with at-home and in-transit the most popular.

 Content has always been king, and undergraduate creative practice at QUT will increasingly embrace creative writers as core contributors, project leaders and collaborative artists in a diverse range of interdisciplinary production projects. Enhanced audio podcasting with its booming market consumption and dynamic combination of media, creative stakeholders and production practices seems certain to generate a curriculum and project-based learning wave to surf into this fertile future of storytelling. The By the Book project at QUT has provided an exciting stimulus for academics and students in creative practice disciplines to reimagine writers and writing. 

The ‘digital turn’ brings opportunities and challenges for creative writers. One of the few things we can be sure of is ongoing change. This article is about how to navigate that change.

New technologies and corresponding new genres emerge apace, social media platforms and conventions morph and mutate. We can get caught out. We can’t anticipate what the next set of transformations will be. Take book publishing.

Previously, the publishing model was stable. From the eighteenth century to the start of the twenty-first century, it remained basically the same: authors submitted manuscripts to literary agents or publishers, then the publisher did pretty much all the work of producing, marketing and distributing the books. Today, authors can by-pass publishers completely. They can self-publish cheaply and quickly and promote their work easily using social media, potentially reaching readers across the globe at the click of a button. Yet, seismic though these changes are, they may not be the most significant changes that writers face now.

The cliché of what it is to be ‘a writer’ generally involves two things: solitude and a favourite writing tool. Works including Virginia Woolf’s 1929 essay A Room of One’s Own helped perpetuate the idea of ‘a writer’ as someone who struggles alone, most likely in a garret (in poverty), with a carefully sharpened quill pen or a battered typewriter. The cliché has held strong because periods of quiet focus and attachments to particular writing tools remain important for writers.  

However, today, even if a writer chooses to use only a particular pen or typewriter to produce a manuscript, once that manuscript goes into production, digital processes will be involved. Whether a writer is self-published or signed to a mainstream publisher, there is an expectation that authors will post messages directly to readers via blogs, Twitter, Facebook and so forth, perhaps several times daily. Software updates can feel relentless, so too the need to upgrade phones, tablets, laptops. Thus the chance of a writer being able to work alone using a favourite writing tool over substantial periods of time possibly spanning several years to develop a creative project is fundamentally challenged. 

One year, I wasn’t quick enough with a computer upgrade. I lost all my work. The man in the computer repair shop told me that there was no way of saving it. At the counter, we stared at my boxy, off-white computer. It had looked so space-age when I bought it the previous year.  Perhaps to make me feel better, he said he thought I might be able to sell it for a tenner to a local artisan who was converting that particular line into fishbowls. Ever since the moment I saw a computer with all my work on it become less use to me than a fishbowl, I have been looking at the role of creative flexibility in how we tackle a digital world that can feel exciting and unnerving in equal measure.  

What are the constants? Can a toolkit of skills be identified that will apply across technologies, platforms and genres; is there a single model of creativity that can help writers negotiate our increasingly fast-paced 21st century writing and publishing landscape? That is what my book, The Multimodal Writer, is about.  

With change as a constant, transitions gain particular significance. Any transitions – between technologies, between types of writing – have to happen more quickly and efficiently, because, with social media and regular technological change in the equation, such transitions occur more often. Perhaps the shift is between writing a novel and posting a tweet, or, perhaps it’s between a handwritten poem and a script for a game on an Excel sheet. To research The Multimodal Writer, I looked back at my own experience of writing and publishing novels, creative non-fiction and radio and print journalism. I also interviewed eight writers who each had long-standing experience of moving between different types of writing.  Kate Pullinger shared her experience of shifting between writing traditionally published long form fiction and short stories for smartphones, for example. Rhianna Pratchett talked to me about shifts between writing games and screenplays, Simon Armitage about shifts between writing poetry and libretti. I also worked extensively with my Creative Writing students in order to help identify what skills help writers survive and thrive in our digital age and how to teach those skills.

Perhaps the book’s most important research finding is that we each have a significant proportion of the answers already. We can re-use (or, ‘remediate’) our own experience and apply it in current and future contexts. All technology is new at some point. The pencil was once new; the typewriter was once radically different technology. A writer can, by paying close attention to the details of his or her own creative practice, draw on his or her own resources. How has the problem of approaching something new been tackled in the past? What previous experience can be drawn on for the task of identifying a solution? 

Maybe something as simple as a brisk walk or stiff cup of coffee will help you clear your head so you can think ‘outside the box’, as the saying goes. Maybe an earlier stint writing promotional strap lines means you already have the experience of writing snappy dialogue that you need to write the short lines of background dialogue, or, ‘barks’ for a video game.  

The nature of ‘digital literacy’ is hard to pin down. ‘Digital literacy’ can be viewed as a set of functional skills (the ability to turn on a computer and ‘surf’ the Web, for example).  Alternatively, cognitive skills such as critical thinking can be considered key. Indeed, there is debate regarding whether it is possible to provide a single definition of ‘digital literacy’ at all. Many now consider it more accurate to talk of ‘digital literacies’. The paperclip icon that denotes an email attachment might be baffling to one person, while for another, working out how to use Excel to draw a bar graph might be the issue that’s causing a headache. There are a large number of variables, such as what technological skills we have already and how we want or need to apply our digital skills (to what ends, in what contexts). ‘Digital literacy’ means different things to different people at different times.  

In recent months , at talks about The Multimodal Writer (in London, York and Estonia; via video calls during COVID-19 lockdown), I invited attendees to give their personal definitions of ‘digital literacy’. A wide range of people were at the talks (Creative Writing students who were just starting out and established novelists, administrators and managers, composers and film-makers). The definitions of ‘digital literacy’ were correspondingly diverse. One person defined ‘digital literacy’ as ‘Using technology to read and write and speak and listen’, another as ‘Facility with hypermedia as a mode of cultural and literary consumption’; one said ‘Keeping up, keeping up, but it’s tiring’, and yet another said simply ‘To be frank no idea’. However, there was one word that recurred: ‘navigate’. The digital arenas described were very different from person to person, but through all the events, the ability to ‘navigate’ effectively was considered key.  

We ‘navigate’ stormy waters. We have to have some knowledge, of course, and practical skills too. And we have to be quick off the mark and ready to deal with difficulties. Certainly, dealing with difficulties can be hard. The experience can be tiring and undermining. Navigating stormy waters requires stamina and agility. Adrenalin starts pumping. When a particularly tough patch has been navigated successfully, we can feel satisfaction or even excitement.  Storytelling is not merely about selecting a set of words. Writing has always involved challenges, and sparks of joy. To be fully immersed in the task of telling a story – finding the right metaphor, the right piece of dialogue, the right narrative arc – is to forget everything around us. Storytelling is a complex, exhilarating experience. If we can each identify a set of internal resources that will give us the necessary stamina and agility, we can navigate digital waters in ways that leave space for those invaluable sparks of joy.

There was nowhere to park. As if it wasn’t daunting enough to throw myself into the alien world of tech-heads and program-people, now I was late. I found the Loft – a boutique entertainment venue on Plymouth Sutton Harbour – and launched myself up the stairs, down a deserted corridor and towards the sound of confidence and mingling.    

Members of Digital Plymouth meet every quarter – three meet-ups and one conference per year – and they are, according to their website, a “diverse and talented community of digital businesses and organisations, sharing knowledge and celebrating achievements throughout the South West digital industry.” Each meet-up has three speakers, and once I’d traversed the deserted corridor and heaved open the creaking door, I faced a frowning crowd listening to the talk that had already started, a crowd clearly following what, to me, sounded like a recipe for cerebral soup; equally impressive and baffling, like how grandparents are with smart TVs. I found the nearest corner to hide in and counted around a hundred guests. And then there was me, the only humanist at the party; sweaty and breathless and creeping in late.

So what was a humanist – a creative writer, associate lecturer and practice-led researcher, to be precise – doing at a tech-industry networking event?

Believe it or not, I wasn’t there by mistake. I was on a mission: to explore the vanguard of digital excellence and seek out the digital in Digital Humanities (DH). According to U.S. English Professor & Digital Humanist, Gerald R. Lucas, “DH stands at the intersection of art and science; it makes technology explicit in our understanding and interpretation of culture. DH makes clear that the humanities and technology are inseparable.” An instrumental concept then, and one that, until recently, had been totally absent in my world.

Turns out I’m not alone in this digital blindness. Considering our tendency to elevate scholarly endeavours over industry outputs – a trend that is explored by Zoe Bulaitis in her excellent 2017 article – it is surprising that so many humanists, myself included, are oblivious to Digital Humanities; the term, the area, the field. Are we ‘doing’ Digital Humanities, or DH, without actually realising it? Or is this a product of systematic technophobia? How had I navigated my entire doctorate without discovering or being introduced to this world? Just like Minecraft and Furbies, how had I missed yet another hot trend?

And it’s everywhere if you know where to look.

People are doing it in libraries. People are doing it in labs. They’re doing it in colleges and airports, cafés and pubs, museums and science parks, hotels… bedrooms. Anywhere there are people, actually, or even just web access. And only some of these folks are humanists, the rest aren’t even academics. Instead, we’re talking technologists, creative industries and start-up companies, volunteers at local heritage centres, or 3D design students combining physical and digital mediums.

And I only came across it by accident. Upon completing my PhD in December, life went from nursing an all-consuming word-baby, to chasing down indistinct whiffs of potential collaboration. A few months later, I came across the term Digital Humanities. It was mentioned in a job spec: This module will contain a particular focus on collaborative work, presentation skills and the Digital Humanities.

Upon learning of my deficit I reacted just like any other decent academic. I spent hours (and hours) stumbling through an electronic maze of links, videos and reports, I impulse-bought books, signed-up for vaguely relevant events, and I made an online survey. Mercifully – as any fresh-faced and contract-less PhD graduate would attest – such impassioned efforts have blossomed into PROJECTS.

As such, this article preempts a series that will examine the hopes and ambitions, fears and barriers, successes and shortcomings of everything DH. Although I maintain a primary focus on Creative Writing and the South-west UK, the survey – Hands Up for Digital Humanities – is open to input from any country, discipline or background, and so in taking the survey as the catalyst for all this, my research questions aim to be both extensive and comprehensive:

1.Do discrepancies exist between the current provision for DH at universities, in terms of space, equipment and expertise, and the interests / activities of students being expressed / conducted on-the-ground?

• What are the needs / interests of students? Is there a need that isn’t being met?
• Who is actually engaging with facilities when they are actually provided?
• How much of the student body feels their work would be/have been enhanced by increased digital focus?

2.What best practice guidelines can be set out by carrying out a review of DH provision in UK and international Higher Education environments?

• What are the top 3 UK universities for DH provision and engagement?
• How can we judge this?
• What are the first things individuals and institutions should implement to improve DH?

3.Where else is DH being ‘done’?

• What enterprises exist outside universities?
• How can activities be streamlined? What lessons can be shared?
• How can industry professionals and academics work together to strengthen DH practice?

4.What types of projects are DH departments working on and what percentage of these is related to English or Creative Writing?

• Who is involved in these projects?
• Is DH better suited to undergraduate or postgraduate study? Why?

5.How appropriate are DH resources for Creative Writing educators and practitioners?

• Is it a case of inaccessibility, or unsuitability?
• Are creative writers engaging with digital resources and if so, what are they producing?

6.What does the future look like for Digital Creative Writing?

• How does existing DH practice fit in with Creative Writing theory and pedagogy?
• How can better understanding of DH enhance scholarly opportunities for digital publishing?
• If engagement with DH is embedded as a fundamental element of English and Creative Writing research projects, in line with methodologies or outputs, could it ensure a more coherent career trajectory?

So far, the survey has had some fascinating responses from individuals across academia, industry and tourism, including views throughout the education and career spectrums. From undergrads and apprentices, to professors with experience of twenty-plus years, to even those ditching the desk in favour of code, circuits and science. In the forthcoming articles, I will outline some of the more surprising responses, and highlight some common issues already surfacing at this early stage. We will delve deeper into these issues as I conduct interviews, visit DH centres and labs, and hold workshops with Chatbots. What is emerging at the frontier of creative writing, interdisciplinary research and pioneering digital technologies? How can humanists and technologists combine digital interests and work better together to benefit others? Ultimately, the purpose of this investigation asks whether DH can positively impact wider society by improving quality of life, and if so, I intend to showcase realistic pathways for making this happen.

As for my first foray with Digital Plymouth, it was more successful and productive than I could have imagined. I met founder Garry Hunt, a WordPress specialist and freelance digital designer who works with TEDxPlymouthUniversity and Women In STEM Plymouth. I cornered Tony Edwards, an exuberant educator with Software Cornwall who was one of the speakers at the meet-up.

Digital Plymouth – Group selfie with Tony

Tony managed to make voice-recognition software accessible even to me. How did he do this? By performing rap, of course. And, as it happened, I wasn’t the only humanist at the party. There was a Plymouth University English undergrad with an incredible story. Lana Dalby has co-founded an app, especially for women. According to the website, Babble is a “safe-space where you can ask questions, be inspired, share knowledge and exchange experiences. Most importantly, it’s a platform where we women can support each other.”

Lana Dalby

Babble Smartphone app

So far, I have only had a subsequent meeting with Tony, catching-up with him the very next day – well, I did say ‘cornered’ – and hearing about his exciting collaborative work with Harvey’s Foundry Trust in Hayle, Cornwall. But we’ll learn more about that next time when I hope to feature all three Digital Plymouth members, showcasing their ground-breaking work at the borders of Industry and Academia; the exact site from which DH is seemingly emerging.

Academics have a reputational reluctance to engage with creative industries, an issue explored in-depth in that same 2017 article where Bulaitis highlights how academics’ defence of innate value placed on arts and humanities is met with “accusations of snobbery”. Despite this, I made relevant connections at Digital Plymouth with overwhelming speed. Is this testament to the output efficiency that creative industries are well-known for? Is it down to my individual talent for networking, my charm, my candid approach? Or should we be thanking these industry professionals who seem to be so welcoming and enthusiastic, so open to collaboration?

I don’t know. I’m a humanist. Surely that’s enough for now. Perhaps I’d better go lie down for a while and think about it.

Lauren Hayhurst

Take my survey: Are you connected to the Humanities? I need your help! I am researching the awareness and provision of Digital Humanities throughout Higher and Further Education settings. Please take my 10-minute survey – Hands Up for Digital Humanities! Your responses will help to highlight knowledge gaps and improve partnerships between academia and industry. Thank you so much.

If you are interested in receiving updates on this research, please email me at lahayhurst.writer@gmail.com or follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrSmartlolly

You can find out more about me and my research at: http://eprofile.exeter.ac.uk/laurenhayhurst/

‘Breakdancing Jesus’ mural by artist Cosmo Sarson, Hamilton House, Bristol, UK.

The great Festival is in two days. The weary pilgrim, teasing her larchwood beads through her fingers and fearing that she will never see the Temple hung lousy with banners, or smell the grilling of sacred cat-meat, wonders whether to take the lonely and ill-kept track through the deep-cut hills, or instead continue along the ceremonial avenue that runs, sanctioned and leisurely, across the floodplain.

The waiter, not remembering precisely what the racist senator had ordered, stands with the bottle of bleach in his hand, hovering above both the abalone pâté and the asparagus soup.

The motorist sees the crippled, squeaking gull semaphoring from the roadside in her brake lights; in her boot is a heavy carjack that she has never used, and perhaps still won’t.

As he mutely waits for the kettle to boil, his knuckles held hard as calcium against his sides,  James knows that forgiving her would be the easier choice.

There persists a tendency amongst many people, particularly those who are not authors themselves (though authors are not immune) to see stories as impregnable and rather forbidding objects. They can feel like something revealed, rather than something constructed: a conclusive piece of excavation that an author has performed, discovering a pure, foregone seam of one thing after another. However, it is in moments such as those above – the fleeting, pregnant pauses of a character’s indecision before things plunge on in the customary steeplechase – that a fundamental fact about fiction comes clear. Storytelling is not the mining of a strip of monolithic truth. In those spaces where a choice has to be made we can see that, instead, a story hides an intricate machinery behind it: a fictive, thrumming world of pressures, influences, places, peoples, coincidences, syzygies, causes and effects that have their own logic, and their own obscured authoring.

This machinery, the construction of which is probably the vast majority of any author’s work, is like a Rubin’s Vase only perceptible in the negative: as readers, we have to look for it in those places where it is most obvious. When the dusty pilgrim decides to turn left, the corresponding possibilities of turning right spark into life; and even if, as readers, we only get to study one particular readout of the machine – one particular passage of events and decisions – it doesn’t mean that the machinery stops its rustling operations. The world it represents, no matter how small, goes on turning, and could certainly turn differently next time. That’s the thing about machines, and worlds: you don’t always know what is going to happen when you turn them on.

At different times in history, but particularly in recent decades, this sort of truth – that the work of an author is less a feat of writing and more a feat of engineering, or even programming, of a fictive space – has made some literary scholars very queasy. A specific, and historically blind, the definition of technology still holds sway over the popular imagination, despite the fact that a book has more moving parts than most smartwatches, and the Latin alphabet, like any writing system, is as digital as the Python programming language, and much, much harder to compile. If the Guardian videogames editor Keith Stuart is a technology journalist, then the Telegraph’s literary critic Tom Payne has to join him at that particular, overcrowded desk: their beat is essentially the same. Both are interested in the diagnostics of fictional worlds, and the calibration of their workings. Even words like ‘diagnostic’ and ‘calibrate’ set a gunmetal panic in most writer’s guts; barren, rod-backed words that have no place in the eely shamanism of their work.

The still-uncomfortable confluence of these ideas can be plumbed back to 1945, when the American engineer Vannevar Bush wrote a piece for the Atlantic Monthly, entitled As We May Think; which served as a peephole into a world, and its attendant machineries, where a union between modern science and art might become possible, and even desirable. In particular, he invited his readers to consider a machine that, as yet, he could not build. He called his machine the Memex and described how he thought it might operate: storing and linking all human information and allowing its operators to move between works, individual texts, without any authorial prescription. This core concept – what came to be called the hypertext in the 1960s – was not a revolutionary one. The marginalia of medieval psalmbooks leading you to other works in the monastic library, are as effective as any link on a webpage. However, it was the medium that became, wholly, the computer – consistently shrinking, cheapening, civilising and naturalising throughout the twentieth century into something approaching the printed word in terms of cultural invisibility – which superseded Bush’s original fancy and provided us with a bedrock on which not only to display our existing written culture, but upon which to create new artforms which exploited the machinery of the computer to mirror the machinery of the worlds that lie beneath the surfaces of every story.

In 1976 Will Crowther, an engineer for a US military contractor, built such a functional fictional world, which he called Colossal Cave Adventure, while time-sharing on his employer’s mainframe computer. Based on his weekend spelunking in the Mammoth Cave National Park of nearby Kentucky, it is considered the first example of interactive fiction and has come, unavoidably, to triangulate the very contours of the form. While undoubtedly a written text, Adventure was also, quite literally, a functioning contraption: a set of instructions for the computer to calculate its bounded world as happily as it calculated the physics of nuclear brinkmanship. Performing from the 700-line script which Crowther had written, the mainframe presented the reader with a text whose machinery was, at least partly, accessible. Readers could type instructions and the computer would, in return, narrate the opening of locked doors, the avoidance (or not) of bottomless pits, and the acquiring of unruly MacGuffins. Their choices of what to type, thanks to the procedural attention of the computer itself, reverberated through the corridors of Crowther’s imaginary grotto, reforming it as they went.  In exploring Crowther’s world, and in fiddling with its mechanisms, those pregnant pauses became longer and wider: vulnerable to cave-ins, collapses, redirections and opened shafts.

Interactive fiction has since accreted a rich literary culture of its own, along with all the accompanying furniture. It has its own polemics, schisms, discourses and honours. It has its own well-trod norms and weird, deep-cut deviations. At its best, it is a culture, and most importantly a technology, which has allowed me, as a reader, to experience many striking, complex and thoughtful worlds, and the stories implicit within them. In Stuart Moulthrop’s Victory Garden, I rifled through the cabinets of one family’s discordant, hoarded memories of the first Gulf War. In Emily Short’s Galatea, I attended a gallery opening for Pygmalion’s famous living statue, questioning the work on its own artistic merit as I became drunker and more unpleasantly flirtatious: boorishly and unwittingly activating the trauma that Short had encoded into Galatea’s every gesture and word. In howling dogs, I cycled between the same three, featureless cells for simulated day after day like dank air; each night contenting myself with falling asleep in the visored chair of the Activity Room and tinkering with the settings of my dreams.

howling dogs, created by the writer and digital artist Porpentine, is both distant and near to Crowther’s efforts over forty years ago. Though it shares some of its heritage, it has little of the infamous inaccessibility of even later interactive fiction works. For Porpentine to build it did not require a proprietary level of programming knowledge prohibitive to writers who, like myself, had never received any formal schooling in the subject beyond Excel macros and unlocking the secret pinball game in Microsoft Word. It was not the project of a senior software engineer,  working close to the tinplate of some of the most complex machinery on the planet. Instead, it was the product of a single artist working, like all artists, with a technology. In Porpentine’s case, this technology was called Twine: a tool which has done a huge amount to narrow the gap between the work of worldbuilders, in whichever department they might sit. Based entirely online,

Twine lubricates the interactions between the machine and the author almost to invisibility. The creation of a passage-bound world like Crowther’s, full of glimpsed opportunities, is as simple as writing Passages of text and linking them together, like web pages, by [[putting double brackets around a word or a phrase]]. Clicking on these links represent a conscious choice: do I take the [[left fork]], or the [[right]]? Twine even generates a map of the author’s growing mental topology, represented as a blueprint cartography of boxes of text and the routes between them. It is a map equally suited to physical space, such as that of Adventure, or more allegorical landscapes, as in Zoe Quinn’s seminal Depression Quest. Publishing one’s work is as simple as uploading a single file, a few kilobytes in size, to Dropbox or any of the several free Twine hosting services.

Every interactive fiction writer has their own gateway into the form, usually outside of any institution. Twine happened to be my own and constituted its own curriculum: a curriculum I both wish that I had encountered at school and am glad that I did not. It remapped my own conception of storytelling, not by any great thunderclap, but instead with a furtive, creeping realisation. As I pottered about with the tool, I uncovered more and more advanced techniques, orbiting the most fundamental concepts of computer science. Soon enough, I was not just building networks of static paragraphs for my readers to explore, but using the tenets of formal logic, the bread-and-butter grammar of the digital computer, to observe whether my reader chose to take the hill road or the busy highway; whether they had poisoned the soup or the pâté; whether

they unclenched James’ knuckles or tried to compress them tighter; whether they had had the fleeting, momentary courage, or cruelty, to put the gull out of its misery. After many years of writing, and both supervised and self-led schooling, I had discovered an actual vocation: the jalopying of engines of consequence, a grease monkey in my own imagination. Though my mum would never have wanted me to be a gearhead, I couldn’t have been prouder of myself.

I have seen similar, ratcheting ascents of realisation in many others attending the Twine workshops I teach; in the faces of both 7-year-old schoolchildren and 70-year-old academics. From initial scepticism, they pass to clumsy experimentation and then a burst of pure, combinatorial joy as they start to extend the horizons of what these techniques might accomplish.

For those who have not played at building worlds since they were very small, this process can be more tentative, and freighted with all sorts of prejudices about the fripperies of play, about the disappearances of the author, and about the fragilities of one’s own creation. Happily, this most often gives way to a positive impatience: a busy urge to begin eroding out passages, and sounding depths.

Twine won’t single-handedly combat the queasiness and snobberies that artificially segregate the work of computer programmers and writers. I still regularly hear the protestations. What happens to the author when a reader has the agency to change the path of their narrative? If all choices are equally valid, are any of them truly significant? How can a machine that performs brittle, unyielding logic have a place in the creation of art? What if – like Victorian idealists in the age of steam – comparing fictive worlds to computer simulations is just a case of historical relativism? How can I talk about a Tolkienesque gewgaw, written by a bored computer programmer to distract his daughters when they visited him every other weekend, in the same breath as works of ‘true’ literature? Writing a single, static perspective on this issue here does luckily afford me the luxury of not answering these questions. I can pretend, as we all do, that the narrative is already written, and the conclusion is foregone. If I stood by my own evangelism I should have written this essay as a Twine story, made its workings vulnerable, and let you make up your own minds. In lieu of this, I can only counsel some direction; some passages to follow. Go and read the work of Keith Oatley, and Marie-Laure Ryan. Read Merritt Kopas and Anna Anthropy and Emily Short. Come to the Interactive Fiction Summer School that I am curating at the British Library this July. More than anything, go to http://twinery.org and furtively, creepingly, tinkeringly, convince yourself.

There were a lot of things to like about the Episodic conference that took place in London in October. Run by the Storythings team, it featured a range of interesting speakers working in podcasts, games, comics, and TV, an engaging host in Anna Higgs, and a lovely, friendly audience. I hope they do another one.

Here are five things I learned:

1. Sarcasm is over: For those of us who came of age in the time of Gawker and associated online snark, the message was clear: sarcasm is dead and sincerity rules supreme. That goes for both connecting with audiences and with interviewees. Naomi Alderman and Adrian Hon talked about their game Zombies Run, designed for people like themselves, who might not enjoy running, aren’t competitive or aren’t expecting to improve, and who shouldn’t be patronised when doing something good for their health. Sincerity is working well for them, as shown by the millions of people who regularly use the app. Starlee Kine’s taped interview with someone working at a Ticketmaster call centre, shifting from practical questions to winding conversations about what matters in life, was a delightful example of how this approach can also result in unexpected and interesting stories. And it also illustrated her argument that you should “record everything, because you don’t know what you’re going to get.”
2. There’s a difference between what you do for love and what you do for money. Making a living from episodic storytelling means you need to look after both your emotions and practicalities.Having different levels of emotional investment in the work you do for love, and the work you do for money helps with that. Or, as Jamie McKelvie suggested, use an “emotional contraceptive” for the work ones. And make sure you have clear agreements about things like intellectual property rights and expectations, especially if you’re going to try and get advertisers to pay for it, as Imriel Morgan explained.
3. Structure your content to fit the medium. As Starlee Kine says: don’t just arbitrarily create a cliffhanger because you feel like you’ve decided on the right length of an episode. It needs to feel right and make sense. That said, I enjoyed how honestly Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie spoke about structuring the storylines of their comics to fit into their publishing sequences. If you’re publishing both every month, and then also combining six of those into a half-year compendium, have a good think about where you put the cliff hangers. In this day in age, do we even really need cliffhangers to get readers/listeners/viewers to come back? Probably not.
4. Be ethical in how you tell stories. Ask people permission beforehand, because nobody wants to be caught out. Let them have a say in how they’re presented, even, for example, giving them the tools to do some of the original recording themselves, as Jane Merkin showed in her powerful documentary “Exodus” about refugees coming to Europe. Don’t toy with your readers’ emotions and have horrific things happen to your fictional characters (especially ones that are different to you) as a cheap way of building suspense. And be ethical in how you work with people. Part of that? Don’t ask people to work for free.
5. Understand what your chosen medium does well. Podcasts are intimate, direct to someone’s ear. As Naomi Alderman pointed out, telling stories using only voice depends on having a reliable narrator about place: “If they say it, it’s real”. Comics can be online, but then they become something else, so chasing new technology doesn’t necessarily make your work better. Have matrices for success if you’re looking to make a living from it and sell it to advertisers, but know that competition is fierce for podcasts, for example, and that making good ones takes a lot of time and money. This pretty much summed up one of the main themes of the day for me: make sincere work, that’s as good as possible. Not a revolutionary concept, perhaps, but one worth following.

Many writers have explored the use of new forms of software to supplement their writing practice, such as the use of a preferred interface to increase focus, or an application that boosts productivity. Equally notable are the advancements and innovations taking place in emergent technology such as: VR, AI, facial recognition, algorithms, and creative code, that have had a transformative effect on all forms of creative thinking, extending to the literature world.

Emergent technology encompasses the increased accessibility for people to explore technologically-focused ideas, as well the ability to transform novel approaches to computing, such as a text editor, into interactive and engaging systems that emphasise creative experiences for the user. My project, the Forgetful Typewriter, is situated within the remit of emergent technology projects, such as Ambient Literature. The projects of which are currently questioning and opening avenues of discussion about what these innovations mean for literature, from reading and writing to publishing.

The Forgetful Typewriter, is a project that was initially developed at Goldsmiths, University of London. It is a text editor programmed in such a way for words to fall, fade and reappear, reflecting the very process of writing process. These elements, in the text editor, occur both randomly (or serendipitously),  and simultaneously make use of data and parsing tools.

Emergent Technology and the Future of Literature

The connections between experimental literature and technology are deep rooted. A project that I recently became aware of is David Bowie’s verbasizer software, which explores techniques of cut up poetry in a digital context. The software helped enhance Bowie’s exploration of randomness that influenced much of his work and is a thought-provoking example of how artists from all kinds of backgrounds could consider a software component to their ideas. Writer and researcher, Oscar Schwartz, also has a fascination for computer-generated poetry. His research focuses on using algorithms that generate poetry with results that are sophisticated enough to provoke questions of what it means to be human. Moreover, the AHRC funded project, Ambient Literature investigates the interactive potential of digital text with a focus on location.

Another significant development in emergent technology is how these software ideas are becoming more accessible due to the maker movement. This encompasses components like Open Sourcing software, with online communities who have the ability to access and contribute to projects remotely from anywhere in the world. However the maker movement is equally considerable offline, when makerspaces and projects such DiDIY project (‘digital do it yourself’) provide platforms for collaboration and opportunities for members of the community, of all levels of technical ability, to come together and work on technology project, typically with an emphasis on creativity and contributing to improving society.

Creative Code & User Feedback (interaction with software)

I was introduced to code whilst completing my final major project in design at Goldsmiths, University of London. I was inspired by ideas of everyday technology’s use of impacting forgetfulness, such as memory outsourcing; which I also experimented with through prototyping forms of writing software that dynamically remove words from the typed text.

Discovering the processing environment, I developed these ideas as software sketches. The subject of the project has moved from themes of memory outsourcing, into rich discoveries and textures of results that occur from working in and with creative code.

Designing instructions and exercises, geared towards creative writing, I have continued to conduct research, involving writers from traditional and experimental backgrounds to participate in testing the software. These participants have included author Daniel Bürgin, and musician and lyricist Harry Burgess. Based on the feedback, there are two main themes for how the software could be beneficial and interesting for writers to use. The added sense of pressure comes from the unexpected results of the texts destruction as well as the word fragments and constellations these interactions create.

The process of words falling away as the text is being written, was described by Bürgin (2016) as being ‘competitive’:  “One competes with the words falling away and ripping apart the text… almost as if running out of time” . The software also heightens the immersive experience of writing. As a traditional writer of books and essays, Bürgin sees potential in adopting the software as one of the rituals that help overcome writer’s block.

Burgess who writes lyrics and shorter texts, has a completely different style in which ideas move around and are refined from intense writing sessions that push exciting, edgy language. He describes the process of lines fading as “racing against the interaction” , the result of which increases the expression. There is evidence that the constraint of not being able to revisit or re-edit the text is creatively conducive.  

Other features of use of the software are the resulting fragments and constellations of words, some of which Bürgin found to be creatively interesting: “I thought it got more interesting the more words that were lost. I thought that space was helping creativity more because fragmentation brings it down to the bare bones”. The fragmented version of the text that is returned by some of the interactions rearranges and condenses the writing can aid rethinking work and progress into new ideas.

Future aims for the project and Conclusion

The programme is not only useful for creative writing but can also support other areas too: linguistics or education. For example, other interactions, such as using tools to parse the text and apply the same kind of feedback based on a word type, could have exciting applications in the field of linguistics. Therapeutic writing is another subject that has been strongly recommended for further exploration through workshops.

It would also be fascinating to pursue ideas for how writers could play a part in programming their own experiences. For example, what if the project was approached in a similar way to the developments happening 3D printing and open sourcing, available for dismantling, taking apart and sharing the results? This could also function as an alternative introduction for non technical people to get to grips with the fundamentals of code/programming.

With the developments and progress of the maker movement  (emergent technology and open source communities) there is a compelling level of evidence that writers should be empowered to explore a creative and software-based component to their ideas, this is the main of objective of the Forgetful Typewriter.

This article first appeared in Write: The Magazine of The Writers’ Union of Canada, and is reproduced here with kind permission of the author.

How do you create strong disabled characters?

The question goads me. Where disability’s concerned, there’s so much banal, shitty writing out there. Countless authors have resorted to clichés and stereotypes when creating disabled characters, and as a disabled person myself — I have a hearing impairment in both ears — such writing frustrates and even angers me. Whenever I come across a Tiny Tim- or Quasimodo-type character — that is, a pitiful or depressingly tragic figure — I tend to throw the book across the room. There are too many books out there for me to waste my time on lazy writing.

So, to prevent any more of these clichéd characters from coming to life, I’ve come up with five rules for creating disabled characters (Elmore Leonard, eat your heart out). These rules grew out of both my reading and my desire to explore disability as a narrative subject. Writers looking to diversify their characters will find these rules useful.

1. Choose different disabilities, not old standards.
I can name several stories off the top of my head that feature characters with Alzheimer’s. There are other ways people lose their memories! Choose something different and interesting, not what’s convenient.

2. Use your research well.
It’s not enough to research disability; you have to find an effective way to incorporate the information into your narrative. When I was reading about Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease for my novel ‘Mantis Dreams‘, I saw pictures of CMT patients’ feet. They looked a little like claws because of dramatically raised arches. That image of claw-like feet informed the way I constructed Dexter Ripley’s character and led to the novel’s most prominent motif.

3. Explore what could be positive about your character’s disability.
Many people assume that having a disability is a tragedy … probably because writers keep depicting it that way. It’s not a tragedy. Read Frances Itani’s ‘Deafening‘ or Guy Vanderhaeghe’s ‘The Englishman’s Boy‘. They show just how dynamic disability can be.

4. Don’t give a character a disability simply because it’s convenient for the plot.
Rohinton Mistry is a particularly consistent sinner in this regard in my opinion. His fiction’s stuffed with characters whose disabilities serve only to underscore their tragic circumstances. The narrative must fit the disability, not the other way around.

5. Make your character more than a disability.
This is probably the most important rule because it brings together the first four. Disabled people are often thought of as objects rather than human beings, and writers tend to perpetuate such thinking. Never forget that disabled people have desires and ambitions and frustrations and loves and joys the way any other person does.

One last thing: vibrant and engaging depictions of disability separate good writers from shitty writers. That’s because good writers extend their empathy and imagination to all corners of humanity, not just the people who are like them. Many of our best writers, from Timothy Findley to Ann-Marie MacDonald, have provided us with nuanced portrayals of disability. They do their homework. They recognize that disabled people are just as beautifully fucked up as the rest of us. They’re the ones worth reading.

My recent experience of playing Bamboo on the Storyjacker site was my first involvement with any kind of digital writing game.  As such, I was very intrigued, and somewhat apprehensive, about what might happen – a state of mind that I think is, or should be, integral to the experience of writing.  In a certain way, the not knowing what will happen, and the creative vulnerability of setting your imagination loose on something that you know other people might read, is part of the act of creating fiction.  One of the enjoyable things about Storyjacker is that these familiar and important states are bound up in the game playing, but in ways that feel, to me at least, entirely new.

Actually, it is not, strictly speaking, true that I have had no involvement whatsoever with digital writing games before.  I did play a Storyjacker game over a year ago, when the concept was in its infancy.  So it was very interesting to play a more developed version of the game now, because the experience was a fresh one.  For one thing, the enhanced design of the site – the visual engagement with the screen – makes a big difference.  Which surprised me.  I am not somebody who generally warms easily to technological advancement and slick design (I don’t have a smart phone, for instance), but in spite of myself I did find that the slick, smart look of the site and the visual impact of the game itself was greatly appealing.  It makes it more clear and comprehensible, for one thing.  And gives the game more status, a sense for the player of it being important, sophisticated, proper.

One aspect of the game that attracts me is the very fact that it feels like a game – with rules; an etiquette.  It didn’t take me long to realise that I was enjoying the form of it in large part because I was playing during breaks from my own writing project, the form and stylistic rules of which are entirely of my own creation – and so the pressure of form is taken off the writer’s shoulders.  The pressures are unfamiliar, and so exciting.  As each player begins his or her new segment of writing there is a prompt to follow – ‘write in dialogue only’, for example, or ‘ramp up the drama’ – and it presents a real and unusual challenge.  The pressure of competing against others is also novel when compared to the individual writing of prose fiction.  And I did find that enjoyable, although, personally, the desire to win the game was not as fundamentally important to me as the pleasure of waiting to see what would be written next, or reading how somebody else would pick up the thread of what I had just written.

Although my main occupation is as a writer, for which I come up with and develop my own ideas, I do also work regularly as a teacher, or, more accurately, a writing tutor.  In so doing, I do instigate various types of collaborative writing for my students, particularly schoolchildren, to have a go at.  The essential idea of Storyjacker – of writing a story in collaboration – is one that comes up quite often.  And it is the prescribing of, often specific, rules that usually makes it fun.  For instance, coming up with a certain number of individual and difficult words that a partner has to use within a certain number of sentences to create a miniature story.  Or getting students into small groups and giving them a prompt for a piece of writing that they have to complete in collaboration – so have to figure out between themselves what will be their process.  I am sure that, for my school pupils in particular, Storyjacker would be a very worthwhile experience, one that they will respond to enthusiastically.  I believe this because I see just how much they enjoy the surprise and reward of writing together, therefore to do so digitally, in a way that heightens these particular pleasures, is something that I will be looking to do with students in the future.

I had wondered, given that I was playing the game in the same time period as writing a novel, whether it would distract me from my own writing.  In fact, it did not at all.  The experience is simply too different.  It was quite useful, if anything, because the game makes you write quickly, and instinctively, which is something that can be difficult to generate onto the blank page, and I did occasionally find myself carrying that momentum away from the game.  My own process of writing a story or a novel often feels, for want of a better word, painstaking.  I work always in the same way: I create a longhand complete first draft, then begin again on a blank sheet of paper, rewriting the piece using the material and knowledge – of style, point of view, characters, tense etc – that I have gleaned from the first draft.  When this second draft is completed, I will return to it, sweeping through with two to three edits.  All of this before any other person sees anything of the work.  So I judge the finished product in a very different way to the finished Storyjacker piece.  The game story is flexible, unpredictable, and out of your own control – all things that are directly opposite to the individual process.

I found it intriguing that the game led me to value the text in a different way too.  Because you come to your new segment on the back of somebody else’s segment, it makes you value plot with more weight than you might otherwise.  This plays into your choice, I discovered, of which segment you choose to follow.  It is also very interesting how much the segments that get discarded do temper the piece.  They may have been side-lined, but the placing of them, muted, alongside the main text means that an awareness of them does feed into the thought process of the writer creating a new segment.  In a way, I began to think of them like the backstory sketches and discarded passages that do not find their way into a short story or novel, but which give the writer a deeper knowledge of character and place to enhance the finished draft.

Overall, I found the experience of playing Storyjacker very enjoyable, social, challenging, fun, and it is something that I intend to do again myself and to use as a teaching tool.

Read Neighbourhood Watch, a story written through Bamboo, here.

There is a statue in Paddington Station: A trench soldier, with a scarf around his neck and a letter torn open in his hands. His lips curve in a smile or a grimace. I have seen him in the early hours of the morning with face bright in the flush of dawn, and I have seen him in the hour before midnight when his face is only a shadow.

He is made of bronze, but when I look at him now I see letters.

From 28 June to 4 August, I read the letters for him in my role as editorial moderator for Letter to an Unknown Soldier, a project with 14-18NOW to commemorate World War One by creating a digital memorial. We asked the public to send us their version of the letter the soldier holds in his hand. The letters came from across religions, across demographics, and across the world. They were read by my fellow moderators and me before we posted them to the website, where they will wait till the centenary of the war’s end (2018) before they will be archived with the British Library.

As an editorial moderator, I worked with a team of eight promoting the project, reading the submissions, and uploading hardcopies. I liked to touch these hardcopy letters—some with pressed or paper flowers in them, some stamped from foreign countries. Some of them were written in sloping kids’ handwriting, some in fancy cursive. Somehow holding these letters in my hands made it more real.

We kept the atmosphere in the office pretty casual—it had to be, when so many of the letters were about war and death. Occasionally as we worked, one of us would murmur, “Oh!” Everyone else would snap to attention like meerkats. Sometimes red-eyed, sometimes hoarse, we would read the letters to each other.

My favorite letters typically had a few things in common: Letters that capture a place or voice (like this one from the Isle of Lewis, which does both), letters with unusual true stories (like this one about India), or letters that use details to make the war real (like this one from a mother to her dead son).

Coming into the job, I did not realize (perhaps foolishly) just how heavy it would land on me. Despite the enormous volume of letters, I wanted to stay tender—I didn’t want to stop feeling the impact of the war. The letters reached into me and challenged my concept of war. They challenged the way I look at news and conflicts, books and movies.

As an American, I grew up in a country where war was on my land only one day in my entire life. That’s an incredibly privileged thing to say, and I think much of my life will be spent learning the cost of things I can’t see.

I visited the tomb of the British Warrior in Westminster recently. As I stared down at it, I heard the letters whispering. The letters about the underage boys shot for cowardice. The letters about the assistant librarian who used to smoke a cigarette and dream of being back in the library. The letters about the mother who had to sit when she saw this tomb, because she knew the body inside could be her uncle. The letters turned the grave of a soldier who isn’t even my countryman into my brother, my friend, my uncle.

Sometimes, deep into the letters, I would begin to form a callus to them. But I would stumble across a letter that would make it all come back into focus. These letters made the war real again and again, and they whisper to me even now. They are letters that challenge my prejudices and break my heart. They are words that have become mine.

I did not expect the community that’s developed around the letters. Toward the end of the submission period, we editorial moderators began receiving a lot of attention. We eight read all 21439 letters between us. It was humbling how much knowing their letters were being read meant to some of the people who submitted. We even received a few letters ourselves, thanking us for our hard work. After the submissions window closed, I did a master feature list on my personal blog. In the following day or two, the authors of the letters I featured reached out to me. Leila Bradley, a 60-year-old woman from Halifax, emailed me to thank me personally. I was so honored and humbled. I feel like I know these people, like they are my friends, because they have helped me continue to be vulnerable.

On the evening of 4 August, I went out to the fields near my house. Even though my backpack was weighed down with kids’ letters, and I lingered for a long while staring at the grass in the sunset. It was vividly beautiful in a way I find difficult to put into words. I wondered if this green land is what my unknown soldier fought for. I thought about the wars still happening, wars that take countries and try to choke the green out.

War is a thing that sharpens life, and living in these letters for a month sharpened me.

Are creative writing courses a “waste of time” as author Hanif Kureishi stated earlier this year? Or are they a good way for writers to develop and hone their craft?

In this podcast Arifa Akbar, Literary Editor of the Independent, is joined by novelists and creative writing tutors Naomi Wood and Gerard Woodward, for a discussion about whether creative writing can be taught, and the benefits good courses offer to emerging writers.

Have you taken a creative writing course? What was your experience? Let us know in the comments section below, or tweet us @thewritplatform