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.

Collecting and analysing the data we generate every day—whether it’s how much we exercise, changes in our heart rate, even how much we use our devices—have become indispensable tools to improve health and wellbeing. Can a similar approach to other data we generate—say when we write—bring benefits to our creative lives? Prolifiko has just launched a study to find out.

In 1994, psychologist Roger Buehler asked a group of research students writing theses how long they thought it would take them to finish their papers. On average, the students predicted that their theses would take 33.9 days to finish. How long did it actually take? 55.5 five days –  a 64 percent over estimation.

What Buehler was investigating was something called the planning fallacy – the tendency we all have to overestimate our abilities and underestimate how long projects will take or how complicated things are.

It’s a phenomenon first coined by psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in 1979 and it can be applied to anything: commercial mega-projects, travelling places, completing tax forms and of course, writing projects (and especially long ones).  

The best way to avoid falling into the planning fallacy trap according to Prof. Yael Grushka-Cockayne (Darden School of Business) who studies decision-making, is to base any estimates on how complicated, or otherwise a task might be on past experience and past performance.

And the best way to do that is to track and monitor your behavioural patterns and learn as you go.

Talking to the Freakonomics podcast, she says: “If you’re planning project X, the best approach is to ignore project X. Instead, look back at all the projects you’ve done that are similar to this new project X and look historically at how well those projects performed in terms of their plan versus their actual. See how your plan compares to your actual and use that shift or uplift to adjust the new project you are about to start.”

At our startup Prolifiko – a digital coach for writing – we’ve teamed up with academics and professional survey designers to launch a study into academic writing practice. It builds on some work into writing systems and habits that we wrote about here.

The first part of the study involves a large-scale survey into academic writing process – this survey is still open and you can take it here. Whilst the second part is a more in-depth study which involves 80 academics ‘tracking’ their writing process over 30 days.

Our aim is to better understand the role of ‘tracking’ and self-reflection on the writing practice and to see what these writers might learn about their behaviour along the way.

The question we’re trying to answer is twofold: whether tracking can help people avoid the planning fallacy and become better prepared for tackling future writing projects and whether the act of self-reflection helps these writers improve, adjust and optimise their practice.

We’re using our digital coach for writing Prolifiko as the data collection platform for the study and we’ll be using the tools and startup techniques we typically reserve for digital marketing, email automation and user cohort analysis to manage the study and analyse the results.   

Every time a writer completes a writing session, they’ll ‘track’ their progress using Prolifiko and create a simple, personal record of how each session has gone for them. They’ll be asked, how did it go? What could you improve next time? Tracking each session takes around two minutes – so taking part won’t unduly interrupt a writer from their work.

The objective isn’t to understand whether academics become more productive over 30 days but rather, to see whether tracking in this way helps these people spot any patterns in their writing process.

And if they do spot patterns whether they go on to apply these to their practice – whether they adjust or calibrate their behaviour in the future – we’d like to run the study for longer than 30 days later in the year.

We want to add to learning in the field of scholarly writing with this study but more than that, hope that by taking part, participants will start to understand more about their own practice.

We’d love to see academics gain some practical benefit from the study and it will be fascinating to see whether individual writing patterns and systems emerge.

If you’d like to take part in the wider survey into academic writing practice please complete the survey here – it will take you around seven minutes to complete.  

I have set myself a challenge: I am giving myself precisely three-quarters-of-an-hour to write this piece, after which I will post it. I will not ‘sit on it’, or ‘sleep on it’ and – save for major factual error or (unintended) offense – I will not ‘tweak’ it after it has gone up, which is what I would typically do.

As part of the Making Day we programmed for Bath Spa University’s MIX 2013 conference, I had the pleasure of attending Leila Johnston’s workshop Making Things Fast: How to Stay Creative and Motivated. In three hours four of us – who had never met – devised, wrote and a performed a show for her.  We made a comic, wrote a song, made props out of card and pipe-cleaners and used Vine to make videos. Leila’s gentle encouragement to ditch the end goal, and to stick two fingers up to perfection, opting instead to give into the journey and enjoy the process of making, was incredibly invigorating.

Boat prop from the Making Things Fast Workshop

By the end of it I felt like weeping at all the three hours I’ve lost procrastinating, tweaking, or being held back by some imagined fear of criticism or judgement. So, in the spirit of that workshop, and without further todo, here are some of the key themes that emerged from two very enjoyable days at MIX 2013:

Motivation and success

In the writers’ survey we carried out prior to launching The Writing Platform, ‘finding readers for their work’ trumped ‘making money from their work’ as the key motivation for writers. In her keynote my colleague, Sophie Rochester, explored definitions of success. Using Dostoyevsky’s tumultuous writing and publishing career – an endless cycle of critical and financial ups and downs – as her starting point, she argued that whilst repetition and scalability in projects might be a suitable goal for publishers, they might not be suitable ones for writers, especially those who thrive on creating anew each time.

From binary thinking to pluralism

As humans we seem to struggle with non-binary concepts. We find it easier to get a handle on works – and the people who create them – if they fit into boxes: this-or-that rather than this-and-that. In her talk and reading on Tuesday evening Naomi Alderman shared her experience of creating such diverse works as the bestselling running app Zombies! Run and novel The Liars Gospel, drawing an interesting parallel between the frame-of-mind and environment she is in when gets an idea for a story, with the frame-of-mind and environment the audience will be in when they eventually experience the finished project.

This plurality was also something we noticed in the applications for our The Writing Platform Bursary. Our categories of ‘Writer’ and ‘Creative Technologist’, whilst helpful for administrative purposes, did not cover the rich and diverse skillsets of many of the individuals who applied. Which brings me onto …

The inadequacy of our language 

Who is the writer? who is the audience?

Our language hasn’t caught up when it comes to describing the new types of work or the new types of people creating them. This is a topic that came up at the Futurebook Innovation workshop earlier this year: if you can’t define something adequately, how can you connect it, or sell it, to an audience? Indeed the word ‘audience’ itself is no longer adequate for many types of storytelling. Naomi shared an anecdote receiving a ticking off for referring to ‘audience’ in a participatory story-telling project she worked on.

Responding to Naomi’s anecdote someone in the MIX 2013 audience (?) suggested the word ‘authience’ – whilst that particular word might not take off, as word-lovers, there is plenty of fun to be had!

You can get a full digest of Making Day at MIX 2013 at Epilogger and we’ll be posting further thoughts and work created on Making Day on the site soon.

A day of experimentation, collaboration and play for writers looking to learn new skills and develop their creative practice.

The Making Day consists of showcases and hands on experimentation for writers, artists and academics interested in learning new skills to help them extend their creative practice. The key themes of the day are: tackling the creative process, collaborating with other creators and writing for new platforms and audiences.

Workshops are designed and led by writers, technologists and other practitioners whose work blends storytelling, creativity and digital technologies. By the end of the day participants will have created something new and be inspired to explore new creative opportunities.

Making Day is brought to you by Bath Spa University and The Writing Platform as part of the MIX Conference 15-17 July, 2013.

Book now or find our details about the venue.

Programme:

10:00am Welcome from Kate Pullinger, Writer and Professor of Creative Writing and Digital Media, Bath Spa University.

10:15am Keynote and group exercise with Naomi Alderman, Writer and Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University. Naomi will lead a group exercise to create a massively multi-authored story with all the Making Day participants.

11:00am An introduction to The Writing Platform and TWP bursary project showcases, hosted by Joanna Ellis, Associate Director, The Literary Platform.

The Fabler App: Bursary recipients, James Wheale and Ben Gwalchmai, showcase a prototype of their app which reveals story through movement.

Creating with strangers: Bursary recipients, Caden Lovelace and Laura Grace, discuss their approach to working together.

11:45am Break

12:00pm Workshop

13:00pm Lunch

14:00pm Workshop continued

16:30pm Quick fire feedback from workshop groups

Workshops

Making Day attendees are invited to take part in one of the seven workshops on offer. There is a maximum of 15 places on each workshop and places will be allocated on the day on a first come first serve basis. Please come along early to avoid disappointment.

Workshop 1: Improv Writing with David Varela, writer

Writing an interactive story means anticipating what your audience is going to do next – and being able to quickly ad lib when they do the unexpected. This workshop will help you exercise those improvisational muscles, making sure your interactive work is truly responsive.

David Varela is a writer and producer with experience in a huge range of media. He has written for film, theatre, radio and games, working on some of the world’s most exciting transmedia projects along the way. These include Perplex City (for Mind Candy), Lewis Hamilton: Secret Life (for Reebok) and Xi (for Sony PlayStation). He was also script consultant on the apocalyptic fitness game Zombies, Run!

His most recent production was The Seed, a transmedia adventure combining four plays, a treasure hunt and an online story, as part of the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad. With Naomi Alderman, he teaches Arvon’s residential ‘Writing for Games’ course.

http://davidvarela.wordpress.com/

Workshop 2: The Object of the Story with Lucy and Barney Heywood, Stand and Stare Collective. 

Objects often spark stories or memories, from the jewelry we wear to the ornaments in our homes. If you are a writer and would like to explore how digital technology is offering new platforms for telling stories, join us for this fascinating workshop. Led by artists, Lucy and Barney Heywood from Stand + Stare Collective, you will write, record and edit a short story. Using RFID technology (found in libraries and Oyster cards), you will attach your story to an object to create a unique audio experience by the end of the day.

Lucy and Barney will draw on their broad experience of writing and producing audio and video experiences. As Co-artistic Directors of Stand + Stare, their current clients and collaborators include the Royal Shakespeare Company, MOSI (Museum of Science and Industry) in Manchester, and Birmingham REP to name a few.

http://www.standandstare.com/

Workshop 3: Making Things Fast: How to Stay Motivated and Creative with Leila Johnston

This workshop will cover how to practice *making* regularly, deliberately doing things out of strong personal interests and enthusiasms rather than a commercial brief, as a sort of creative rehersal. Using limited resources the group will create mini-projects that correspond to things they don’t feel they know how to do, but to which they can bring their personal skills and passions to.

Leila Johnston is Managing Editor of The Literary Platform’s magazine site. She is a writer, maker and broadcaster based in Sheffield. She is the co-creator of popular geek comedy podcast Shift Run Stop, was a columnist for the BBC Comedy website, and regularly writes for WIRED UK and other publications. She is the creator of the newspaper ‘Hackers!’ for ‘makers, players and explorers’ and the author of two humour books including an interactive gamebook. Leila now speaks and writes regularly on everything from the culture of technology to creativity and science fiction.

Her choose-your-own-adventure book and iPhone app Enemy of Chaos was featured in WIRED UK in 2009, and her humour book How to Worry Friends and Inconvenience People was adapted for interactive animations by BBC Comedy in 2010.

http://finalbullet.com/

Work shop 4: Transmedia Activism with Donna Hancox, Leverhulme Visiting Fellow, Bath Spa University

The conventions of transmedia storytelling are predominantly deployed in the area of film and television; and particularly big budget and mainstream projects. However, there is increasing interest by community and activist organisations in how they can exploit the apparent strengths of stories told across multiple media platforms to raise awareness or challenge dominant perspectives about social issues. This workshop will introduce participants to the features of this dynamic and emerging field of storytelling, and provide some innovative examples of transmedia storytelling projects. During the workshop we will guide participants as they create a plan for a project of their own and share those ideas with the group for feedback. This is a great opportunity for anyone interested in exploring new ways of telling stories and engaging audiences.

Dr Donna Hancox is a lecturer in Creative Writing and Literary Studies from Queensland University of Technology, and is currently at Bath Spa University as a Leverhulme Visiting Fellow. She has been involved in researching community storytelling practices and leading storytelling projects since 2009, and has more recently been researching transmedia activism. She has presented workshops on this subject in India and Australia.

Workshop 5: Exploring branching narrative using inklewriter with Jon Ingold

As we move to consuming fiction on devices, readers have new opportunities to invest in the narratives they encounter. In this workshop, learn how to use inklewriter to make stories that readers explore and shape, but that still surprise and delight.

inkle are the creative software company behind Dave Morris’ Frankenstein app that recreated Mary Shelley’s classic as a dialogue with the reader, and the interactive fantasy adventure story, Sorcery!

www.inklestudios.com/inklewriter

Workshop 6: Telling Stories to Our Computers

However much we like to think of computers as being fiendishly clever, the truth is that they’re actually pretty thick. Life as a computer can be quite dull – all you can see is an endless stream of bits, bytes and text go past, which the humans seem delighted by. No wonder, therefore, that we get frustrated with our machines from time to time – something which appears basic to us, they just don’t understand. In this workshop, we’ll explore a method for bringing the joys of storytelling to computers – helping the machines to understand the delights and drama of the narratives we construct.

This workshop will explore how the structures and narrative devices we’re familiar with might translate into the world of the Web, and how this can support new ways of crafting and experiencing stories for ourselves. As well as a closer look at some of the theory, participants will have a chance to try their hand at translating stories for machines using RDF and SPARQL.

Paul Rissen is a Senior Information Architect in BBC Future Media, having served his apprenticeship working on BBC iPlayer in the year up to launch. Since then, he’s worked on the BBC’s /programmes platform, across BBC Knowledge & Learning, and News, and, from 2008 onwards, has been investigating the interplay between Linked Data, the Semantic Web, and storytelling. Paul is a keen advocate of Domain Driven Design, having taught the process to design trainees and MSc students at City University and has written about it for several publications. He was a co-producer on the R&D Mythology Engine and Storybox prototypes.

http://www.r4isstatic.com/about

Workshop 7: Ekphrastic E-Poetry Exercises with Sarah Tremlett and guest

Bath Spa University has an exciting art collection on display at Corsham Court. Following a quick tour you will select one artwork to provide a brief and instinctive written response (which can also include photographing or using drawings to capture the subject). These will be used to create experimental e-poetry sketches, interpreting the original artworks in new ways, and using edited sound and visuals to produce short, response-based, playful e-poetry exercises. The aim is to facilitate a liberated approach which attendees can then bring to their own practice.

Sarah Tremlett is a screen-based poet, arts theorist and doctoral researcher at Chelsea College of Art and Design. In conjunction with performance poet Lucy English she cofounded MIX 2012 and is currently organising Liberated Words film poetry event at Bristol Poetry Festival as part of National Poetry Day, October 3.

Book now!