In introducing my new novel, author Ryan O’Neill puts it most succinctly:

This is an introduction to a novel you will never read.

He adds hastily that he is referring not to the book in your hands, the one he hopes you’re about to begin, but the novel that inspired his words, the novel he read.

The novel in question is Ex Libris and regardless of which copy you read it contains twelve chapters that can be shuffled into any order. The number of variations possible with such a structure is a little over 479 million. It has been published in both standard paperback and ebook editions, each copy a newly shuffled order of chapters unique to that copy alone. The manuscript that Ryan read in order to create his introduction is different to the finished copy now in his possession, which is in turn different from every other copy ever made.

I have written about Ex Libris previously where I noted that this kind of storytelling has its precedents, the most significant of which all hail from the 1960s. Nanni Balestrini’s Tristano was conceived and written using early computer programming to randomise its content between copies, though it wasn’t published as intended until print technology had caught up in 2007. Other similar books were housed in a box, either as loose leaves (Composition No. 1 by Marc Saporta) or as chapter booklets (The Unfortunates by B. S. Johnson). Of these, Johnson’s novel provided the most direct influence on the structure of Ex Libris: the fluid pieces of the story are defined not arbitrarily by the size of the page, but by the narrative itself. The story is broken into discrete, meaningful components that combine to form a larger picture.

What Ryan alludes to in his opening statement is that any work structured in this way presents a challenge to critical reading. How can readers universalise their experience if the texts they read are never consistent? You may disagree with someone else’s reading of a text, but you do so on the fundamental understanding that both of you have at least read the same words in the same order. John Bryant’s scholarship on textual fluidity through editions, translations, and adaptations demonstrates that texts are never as concrete as we might assume. But variation between editions is a long way from a narrative that changes by design between individual copies. Although it is possible to arrange Ex Libris in approximate chronological order (some events in the story clearly happen before others), each of the novel’s fluid chapters is a vignette, dependent on the others for context, but not for prior knowledge. I have used the analogy of a jigsaw puzzle to explain this to readers: smaller narratives link together to form a larger picture. The order in which the pieces are placed changes the individual’s progress but doesn’t change the ultimate picture.

The coding to compile finished print-ready files is done in Automator, the computer equivalent of a Rube Goldberg machine.

It can be difficult to get past the structure itself and the mathematics behind it as many contemporary and more recent reviews of recombinant works demonstrate. Umberto Eco in his introduction to Tristano, focuses almost exclusively on the novel’s number of permutations with only a cursory nod to the story. This might be understandable for a novel that, though beautiful, has a deliberately tenuous grip on character, plot, and setting. But the same approach is repeated in reviews of Saporta, Johnson, and other similar works. It is as though the flashy acrobatics of the novel’s physical construction obscure what the writers are doing within. And the critics’ resulting performative bewilderment or pithy dismissal of a wacky experiment seem to me like missed opportunities.

When the assumed shared experience of an audience is modified or removed altogether, how does their engagement with a narrative change? Some clues may be found in my own experience on both sides of the reader/writer divide. How I initially read and thought about a fluid novel like The Unfortunates, for example, is very different to how I have come to think about Ex Libris and that change in point of view has been illuminating.

My experience with The Unfortunates suggests that a first reading looms large in one’s perception of story. While reading, I had to keep reminding myself that the clever positioning of two adjacent scenes was attributable not only to the author’s craft but also to sheer happenstance. We’re trained to read stories as linear and it’s a hard habit to break. When I return to The Unfortunates today, no matter how many times I reshuffle its contents, the story is always coloured by that first reading and how the chapters initially unfolded. That first reading has become my definitive version of the novel from which all others deviate.

Readers of Ex Libris may have a similar experience, perhaps moreso given their copy cannot be physically reconstructed. Information that colours the perception of the characters and their actions may come earlier or later and its impact will undoubtedly shift. Readers who see more of a particular character earlier, for example, may centre the story around them in a way others won’t. Several of the fluid chapters also contain crucial pieces of information that change a character’s image or motivation and cast events elsewhere in the story in a different light. Reviewing the chapter order for each copy, I frequently pay attention to where these chapters fall, wondering how their precise location changes the tenor of the story.

I say I wonder because, primarily, I must rely on guesswork. My perception of the novel is not of a puzzle but of narrative pieces in constant motion, a true fluid state. As I worked on it, Ex Libris formed a kind of web, a set of interlocking shorter narratives that fed into a larger complex. For me there can never be a definitive version of the story, only discrete narrative chunks that cross-reference, echo, or contrast, but never line up precisely.

Unlike The Unfortunates which can be endlessly reshuffled, Ex Libris is presented to the reader as a single, fixed manifestation of the narrative. But it’s also a window, a viewport through which you might catch a glimpse of what I see. Without the capacity to physically manipulate pages, the reader must instead imagine that fluid state and the differences in emphasis that come with changes in how the story unfolds. With Ex Libris, like with all fluid texts, a critical reading should regard not only the text as it’s presented, but also with the text in every conceivable other version. The success or otherwise of any one version of the narrative is merely a subset of nearly half a billion possible narratives in the aggregate. Though difficult to fully conceive, this is something I suspect many readers instinctively know. A common reaction from those who have finished the novel is to seek out other readers to compare notes.

But what readers who squint to catch glimpses of the author’s view may not realise is that they have experienced the story in a way I cannot. I can cast an eye over any number of versions of my story, but I can never see the flow of a linear narrative, only a single path running through that fluid web of chapters. For better or for worse I can never have the experience I had reading The Unfortunates.

I suspect that’s why the story that emerged turned out far more self-reflexive than I had originally intended. Maybe it was inevitable that a narrative featuring a band of literary misfits reconstructing a library from fragments in a dystopian world would eventually turn in on itself, a comment on how fiction can become a vehicle for revealing how we construct our own truths. In the same way the story’s characters can never truly reach the author, so too a reader’s and writer’s experiences always remain tantalisingly out of reach for each other.

Ex Libris is out now.

Reference

Bryant, J., 2005. The Fluid Text. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Matt Finch writes and helps communities, companies, and institutions around the world to do useful and surprising new things. His latest digital work is the interactive narrative, The Library of Last Resort.

You have a varied background including a Ph.D. in Modern Intellectual History. How did you arrive at this nexus of strategy, storytelling and technology?

I wrote a Ph.D. about people who fled the rise of fascism in 1930s Europe and how they adjusted to live in their host countries, including the stories they told about their pasts. At the same time I did work with asylum-seeking children and then a stint as a kindergarten teacher in England. I also wrote travel guides, magazine articles, and worked in local government and the tech sector. Increasingly, people asked me to work with them on high-level strategy, or getting a wider community involved in conversations they were having. 

I suppose all of those jobs were to do with relationships, and questions, and the stories we tell ourselves about our lives: where we’ve come from, who we are now, where we’re going next. 

For potential clients you describe your work as “scenario planning and foresight, policy consultation and strategic direction, plus facilitation and professional development”. How would you describe it for a broader audience, or for people who might take part in one of your sessions?

I help people, communities, and organisations to make better decisions about what they want to do in the future. Sometimes that involves imagining the futures which might await, in order to expand our understanding of what’s going on in the present. That’s what people call foresight, as opposed to forecasting, which is the traditional notion of trying to correctly predict the one future which will definitely occur.

Most recently, I’ve worked with Energy Consumers Australia to imagine the energy sector of 2050 and with the University of Oslo exploring the future of digital technology in schools. I’m currently advising a project called IMAJINE on the future of regional inequality across the European Union. It’s fun and rewarding to help people explore their strategic blindspots.

What are the creative works that have most inspired you?

I could and probably should reel off a whole bunch of writers and artists who have stayed with me and who I want to be associated with, but really I think that everything you take in inspires you. Right now I’m absorbing a bunch of Gail Simone’s glorious comics; José Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia, about queer identity and the future; and the catalogue from an exhibition of works by the surrealist Dora Maar. All of those are massively feeding my head.

The story of inspiration I most want to tell comes from my kindy teaching days. One afternoon, out of the blue, this kid Josh said, “I love melon. My mum says if I eat too much melon, I might turn into one. I could become a superhero…Melon Boy!”

He started laughing, absolutely killing himself with laughter, crying, doubled up, the whole thing. I think it was the first time he had ever made himself laugh in his whole life; he was almost surprised at the reaction he’d triggered in himself.

It was so cool. We stopped what we were doing and ended up making a Melon Boy comic together as a class, piecing together the story one image at a time. (A malevolent witch tricked Melon Boy into losing his powers by feeding him so much cake he became Cake Boy). Everyone had so much fun and was so into it; and it all came from this first moment of Josh surprising himself. I find those moments, those sparks, inspiring.

You work a lot with libraries, notably as creative in residence at the State Library of Queensland and Creative/Researcher at British Library Labs. What is it about libraries that has made them particularly receptive to your work?

In the information age, it’s fascinating to see libraries change with the times. Libraries are about discovery, not instruction; it’s a different power dynamic to other knowledge institutions, more open-ended and exploratory. There are also some significant tensions as our notions of the public and private shift. But even in the shelfiest old library of the past, the user went in, chose a book for themselves, opened it, made meaning for themselves as they read. That’s what I hope we can take with us into the future from the library tradition.

A library should be a place where communities connect with knowledge, information, and culture on their own terms, and that could even mean a place where the professional gatekeepers abdicate their power or are radicalized, letting themselves be surprised and led by the community they serve. There are things to learn from Ludi Price’s work on fanfiction archives, Audrey Huggett’s immersive play experiences in libraries, and grassroots “fugitive libraries”.

From your observations around the world, do you see trends or outliers today that may point the way for libraries to thrive into the future?

The world is changing so much and so fast, it’s difficult to make predictions. I also don’t think that you can necessarily copy-and-paste what works in one context to somewhere else. Good strategy is about making a diagnosis specific to your circumstances and then taking a smart bet on what you ought to do next. I think that great libraries now and in the future will be deeply attentive to the current and emerging needs of the communities they serve and which fund them.

How are libraries adapting to an environment where staying at home and social distancing are essential for the public good? Do you see these adaptations remaining in place beyond the pandemic?

Martin Kristoffer Bråthen, a Norwegian librarian, has written and spoken about this, asking, in an age of lockdown, “What is the library’s value if they focus on being the middleman between digital content and an online consumer?” 

I suspect that the changes libraries are making to adapt to the pandemic will be like those being made in wider society; some of them will stick because they are more desirable or more efficient. When there was a strike on the London Underground a few years back, researchers tracked the journeys made by commuters when their usual journey to work became impossible. A significant number of travellers stuck with their alternate routes after the strike ended; the crisis had actually shown them a more efficient way to get from their home to work and back each day.

In the long run, while some changes will stay, others could revert, and yet others will shift into even more novel and unfamiliar configurations. It’s nice to imagine life “beyond the pandemic” but I suspect we have a sustained season of turbulence ahead of us, not just COVID-19 but all the other social, economic, environmental changes which might now shake up our way of life.

Your most recent creative work is an old-school branching narrative, set—of course—in a library. Why did you choose a branching narrative design for this particular story?

I think a lot about the balance of power between author and audience. We talk about interactivity, but mostly it’s just inviting people to make choices from a set that has already been devised for them. Library of Last Resort was an experiment in finding the limits of that framework, and then trying to jump beyond those limits to a place where the person who starts as the reader can do something which the author couldn’t see coming, enlisting them as a creator and someone who can surprise others, forcing them to confront the blank page.

I’d previously written a “choose-your-own book review” in a similar vein for an Aussie arts journal, and through them I met the excellent and assiduous editor Adalya Nash Hussein, who worked with me on the Library of Last Resort. Her insights improved the text and structure, making the Library a better, richer place to visit.

The Library of Last Resort occupies that very blurred space between “game” and “narrative”. Do you lean towards one or the other label when framing the piece? Are such labels even helpful?

I like a good blur! 

If you approached it as a story, it’s probably quite frustrating because there’s a lot of wandering around and extraneous material in there – I wanted people to have the sense of getting lost in a collection, overstuffed with reading, before they made their escape. I think that happened to you when you first entered the Library, Simon – you had to ask me if there was a point to it all, or the point was just to get lost!

If you approach it as a game it’s probably equally frustrating because there’s only a token sense of mission or victory! I’m not really into keeping score. There is a hidden ending where you can escape from the Library in a hot air balloon; one of my playtesters found it on his first playthrough, just by making the choices that he would make if he was really in the Library. Some people’s brains are just wired that way, I guess.

Maybe the Library of Last Resort is an experiment in frustration and release…I think one of the hard things about trying something new is figuring out how to work with people’s expectations. When you click that link, do you want to be told a good story? Do you want to be given a good puzzle, with the satisfaction of finding the “right” solution? How much effort should you be expected to put in? How much uncertainty should you experience?

You present The Library of Last Resort as a form of escapism, but the story contemplates fundamental ideas around the nature of play and narrative, as well as truth and objective reality. How important is it for you to strike a balance between having fun and addressing some of the deeper complications of contemporary life?

When you’re a kid, the world is so new to you that you’re constantly exploring surfaces and probing the depths, asking the big questions, where do we come from, why does this happen. It’s also an emotional journey: losing your teddy bear can feel like cosmic despair, but jokes about eating too much melon can conjure sheer delight. All of that – the deep stuff, the superficial, and the make-believe – mixes with the everyday and apparently trivial. That’s a cool place to be.

I’m not pretending the Library of Last Resort gets anywhere near what Josh achieved with “Melon Boy”, but it’s nice to have something to aim for.

Find out more about Matt at mechanicaldolphin.com.

When writers discuss plot and pacing in narrative craft, especially in creative writing classes, we often talk about the curve of stories, the rise and fall in tension that characterises the most common story structures. Now usually, at least in my experience, that curve is not something a writer actively thinks about while composing a work. It’s more instinctive. Manipulating pace is one of the writer’s primary tricks in taking a simple sequence of events and turning them into narrative. But what in retrospect looks deliberate and disciplined, is in the act of writing more like manipulating the feel of the story as you go.

When it came to my current publishing project, all that instinct counted for nothing. An experiment in recombinant narrative structure requires careful consideration and active manipulation of the curve.

Ex Libris is a novel containing twelve chapters that can be shuffled in any order, yet always presents as a cohesive narrative arc. It is being published in a print run that randomises the chapters between each copy. With close to half a billion possible combinations, each copy will contain a unique version of the text, yet all will tell the same story.

The title for ‘Ex Libris’ comes from the nineteenth century fad for bookplates.

The two books that, more than any others, inspired the structure of Ex Libris are The Unfortunates by B. S. Johnson and Tristano by Nanni Balestrini. Curiously, both were written in the 1960s, though Tristano wouldn’t find its true form until 2007.

The Unfortunates is a beautiful but restless story about grief and the intrusion of memories that overlay the banality of daily life. The novel was structured with a fixed opening and closing and with freely fluid chapters between. The first edition and its more recent reproduction was published as chapter-length booklets contained in a box, which the reader was free to arrange in whatever order they desired.

Balestrini envisaged Tristano as a standard bound work with content that was randomised between copies. Sound familiar? The author was unable to realise the work as intended until forty years after its initial publication and with the advent of digital-based print technology. As the title suggests, Tristano builds its text using Tristan and Isolde as scaffold, which frees Balestrini to desiccate the narrative into the smallest of fragments, hints of meaning that only ever briefly come into focus.

Both works experiment boldly, not just with structure, but also with the language itself. The result is intoxicating: as a reader you feel like you’re having fun, even as you stumble around the text, constantly trying to find your footing. Tristano is one of the best examples of what I call ‘narrative drift’, the sense that, as a reader, you must let go of any sense of structure or meaning and allow the pages to take you wherever they lead. The Unfortunates is more focused, a narrative that initially drifts, but tightens as more of its pieces fall into place.

When I began writing what would become Ex Libris, I didn’t have a particular structure or publishing method in mind. What I wanted to do was write a work with fluid text without sacrificing a reader’s sense of plot or narrative arc.

I started with much more complicated mechanics and elaborate concoctions of fixed and fluid chapters. I ground my way through three drafts of the story, never completely satisfied, trying to find some magic key that would unlock how the story should work.

Eventually, I abandoned these versions of the story altogether. After a break from the manuscript, I returned and found myself back at first principles. Finally, I contemplated the curve.

I created a storyboard of sorts in Scriviner—movable lists in dot points—obstinately refusing to write anything resembling finished prose until a supporting structure had been mapped in sufficient detail. Slowly, a new structure began to take shape. The story begins in media res, at the beginning of the climax. Then it backtracks. It fills in details and circumstances that led directly to the opening scene. Then it jumps to the rest of the climax and conclusion. This means Ex Libris, like Johnson’s The Unfortunates, opens and closes with fixed chapters that frame the narrative. I had hoped not to invite such direct comparisons with Johnson, since clearly I would come off a distant second best. But the structure he pioneered, with its parallels to classic storytelling technique, is compelling in its simplicity.

Beyond the framing device, the fluid or recombinant chapters in Ex Libris primarily concern themselves with exploring character and world. These chapters exist in a weird state of semi-independence. A fluid chapter is episodic, with its own miniature arc. It cannot rely on prior knowledge. That doesn’t make it a short story. Although it shares traits with the short story form, a fluid chapter’s raison d’etre is to contribute to a greater whole. Detached from their surroundings and the framing of the novel, these little stories might struggle to pass a ‘so what?’ test.

Story and the structure developed in tandem. Part dystopia, part satire, with doses of paranoia and farce, and a self-reflexive bent, the novel is set in a hyper-networked surveillance state that has abandoned and almost forgotten the book. It focuses on a small band of subversives who collect the fragments and scraps of stories left behind. Calling themselves the ‘free readers’, they are attempting to rebuild a grand library they know must have once existed. A fragmented book about fragmented books, Ex Libris both feeds off and contributes to its own structure, a virtuous cycle of knowing winks.

I was very conscious of the reader’s experience.

I was very conscious of the reader’s experience, signposting and orienting the text at every opportunity to counter and minimise the sense of narrative drift. I maintained strict upper and lower word limits for each chapter. Too long indicated waffle that needed to be broken up. Too short pointed to a lack of substance. Often throughout the long planning stage of the project, I would stare at a dot-point breakdown for a chapter and think ‘but where’s the story?’.

I also avoided working on chapters in any particular order. Instead, I jumped around. From its initial use as a storyboard, Scrivener became a kind of reference tool as I wrote, a way to maintain a wide-angle view of the story, while moving the chapters around. The texts themselves were composed in separate documents, organised by character name and working title. Early printouts were separated into chapters, each one held together with a bulldog clip, so that I could shuffle and reshuffle while reading.

When I finally created the first complete manuscript, I used a random number generator and manually combined the chapters into a single file. I’ve never considered putting together a preferred or canonical order. The thought of it seems a bit…wrong to me. The chronology of the story can be reconstructed in part—some events clearly happen before others—but a grand overarching chronology would be impossible to determine. That’s not how this story works.

At the end of an exhaustive process, I wasn’t sure if I’d succeeded. It wasn’t until the first feedback from beta readers (each of them with their own unique random shuffle) that I suspected maybe this was working as intended. A good indication was that some of these early readers did their own reshuffling to see if I had cheated.

The coding to compile finished print-ready files is done in Automator, the computer equivalent of a Rube Goldberg machine.

The long process of conceiving, planning, and writing Ex Libris has led me to a different way of thinking about raising tension in a narrative arc. The behaviour of the characters introduced in the opening sequences is gradually becomes clearer as their background is revealed. It doesn’t matter in what order those revelations happen.

The best analogy I’ve found is that it’s like a jigsaw puzzle. The order in which you place the pieces doesn’t change the final picture, but it does change how you experience the journey towards it. Adjacent chapters might flow or they might juxtapose. A character might disappear from the story for a while. A particular piece of key knowledge might be revealed earlier or later. The story has a different rhythm between copies. If the traditional narrative arc is the linear curve, this is more two-dimensional.

So does it work? That remains my burning question as I finalise editing and prepare to publish. It’s impossible to speak for every possible combination. There are 479,001,600 of them so I can’t check. It’s something every individual reader will have to determine on their own based on the version of the text they receive. I’ve always hoped that the story might be good enough to transcend its construction. I imagine a reader happening across a copy of Ex Libris, with no prior knowledge of its creation, who will read from cover to cover and enjoy it.

Is that even possible? I guess we’ll see.

The crowdfunding campaign to publish Ex Libris is live until 25 November 2019.

As a researcher, my focus is on critically examining digital literature—texts and writing practices where digital media is rendered integral to the experience of literary or poetic forms. In recent years, I have been working so that my research manifests not just at the level of written critique, but also through creative practice, placing my scholarship into a concrete dialogue with the very technologies and techniques under scrutiny. The resulting artworks represent not simply expressions of creative intent, but are vehicles for my investigations into digital literature more broadly.

To illustrate, one such project is Waveform (2017-ongoing), in which an airborne camera drone is deployed as an apparatus for generating poetry. This project represents a practice-led enquiry into what forms might be taken by digital writing in response to modern ecological concerns (see Carter 2017).

Another project, which will be the focus of discussion here, is an ongoing series of works entitled Solid State Poetry. In working on this project since 2014, I have been meditating on how digital inscription is perceived and interpreted by both human and machinic observers, employing a mode of speculative visualisation in which poetic text is rendered into kaleidoscopic patterns. In the earliest works, this process was conducted entirely by hand, but currently both the source poems and the final images are produced using a custom software routine, developed using the open-source Processing toolkit.

Described succinctly, the encoding practices behind Solid State Poetry involve generating a new poem algorithmically using simple cut-up techniques on a source vocabulary, before analysing its verbal structures (such as meter, line, and word-count), and then inscribing these values as a series of transformations on a matrix of Truchet tiles. The final image, therefore, does not encode the source poem word-for-word, and neither is it revealed subsequently in a separate statement. The viewer is thus left free to meditate on what the visual pattern might express with regards to the poetic inscription that generated it—to effectively envision their own poetic source.

Some typical outputs from this process are illustrated below.

Source: Carter 2018.

A key point to reiterate is that the source poems operate as a signal generator for the patterns that follow out from them, and it is the conversion process itself that constitutes the conceptual nexus of Solid State Poetry. This ‘black box’ approach is reflected in the name of the series, with the poems treated as a matrix of potentiality—a representation of poetic expression more broadly—as opposed to a stream of discrete outputs. The reasoning behind this choice will become clearer shortly, but so as to preserve the viewing relations described above, little else will be said regarding the actual poetic content of the series.

To begin unpacking the conceptual premise of Solid State Poetry, it can be noted that the specific choice of poetry as a subject was made in-light of comparing its density of expression with the encoding of digital information. Poetry, as one of the most sophisticated modes of writing available to human actors, radiant with potential readings, appears to have little connection with schemas designed to encode electrical signals for transmission across noisy channels. Both certainly follow very different imperatives, with one seeking to reduce the potential for novelty, for error, whereas the other is seeking to generate new modalities of thought and expression. Nevertheless, both represent a specific means of compressing and reworking the normative vectors of written language, albeit for very different audiences, human and machinic. Thus, while the operations of electronic signal processing manifest far below the thresholds of the human sensorium (hinted only transiently in the form of glitches and errors), it might be speculated how, if it could be rendered observable, it might be treatable as another, nonhuman mode of poetic performance—one whose abstract qualities would allude towards the mechanisms through which information is captured and conveyed within digital systems, and so inspire a rethinking about what they represent as expressive agents.

To rephrase the above in more compact terms: by remediating its poetic source into a structured matrix of abstract shapes, Solid State Poetry acts as a speculative visualisation of the modes by which digital systems prehend the messages of their human users—depicting these systems not simply as utilitarian conveyers of information, but as specific actors with their own expressive vectors.

To help illustrate what we might make of this notion of treating digital systems as having their own stake in interpreting and performing written text, I have found it instructive to reflect on the abstract patterns yielded by Solid State Poetry in light of those found in the work of Anni Albers, the foremost Western textile artist of the 20th Century.

Albers’s beautiful and highly sophisticated art is characterised by its meditation on the emergent relations between text as code and textiles as both a progenitor and realisation of this code. Troy (1999: 28) recounts how, over the course of a prolific career, Albers demonstrated ‘thread as a carrier of meaning, not simply as a utilitarian product’ (emphasis original), and describes her varied engagements with material mark-making:

[Albers] embedded her work with poetic content by exploring in thread the notion of the pictograph (a sign or mark that refers to an external subject), the calligraph (a beautiful mark that stands for a letter or word), and the ideograph (a sign that indicates an idea, not necessarily through pictorial representation).

An illustration of this approach can be found in her piece Ancient Writing (1936). Inspired profoundly by the work of ancient Peruvian weavers, Albers enacted a style that ‘evoked the idea of visual language by grouping together differently textured and patterned squares like words or glyphs, locking this “text” into an underlying grid. The “text,” which is set within margins, appears to jump forward to be “read” like words on a page’ (Troy 31).

Even more significant than these visual effects, however, were the actual means through which they emerged. Troy (28) recounts how Albers’s systematic approach to textile production can be characterised as the application of modular rules, a code, but one that was only apparent in the actual practice of making the textile itself—a flowing, experimental composition that marked a distinctive break from the European tradition of realising a pre-existing design. Troy (30) observes subsequently how the patterns resulting were primarily self-referential, though suggestive also of ‘the image and the idea of text’, leaving the viewer to scan ‘the images for clues to a code, and by doing so [becoming] engaged in a perceptual activity not unlike that of reading’.

What is manifest in Albers’s art, then, is its intrinsic performativity, in that it is the emergent outcome of a set of modular rules, and with symbolic or ‘text-like’ attributes that can be ‘read’ subsequently as tracing the narrative thread of the weaving process. In short, we are encouraged to engage her pieces not as representing a set of underlying codes, but as an expression of the concrete processes they set into motion, and which constitute their chief conceptual charge.

At this point, it is interesting to contrast Albers’s practice with preceding innovations in mechanical handweaving in the early 19th century. In 1804, Joseph Marie Jacquard developed a control system for mechanical handlooms, the Jacquard head, which became one of the first, widespread applications of programmable mechanism. Representing a refinement of earlier systems by various inventors, including Basile Bouchon and Jacques de Vaucanson, the Jacquard head enabled the automatic weaving of almost any visual representation imaginable, so long as it could be encoded into a series of punched cards.

Source: Author, via the London Science Museum.

Arriving well over a century before the advent of electronic storage, the punched cards of the Jacquard head were a precursor to similar systems used in early computers for the task of storing and executing instructions. Effectively, the abstract groupings of punched holes became its own mode of writing, but one that was chiefly readable by a machine.

At one level, Jacquard’s invention was a merging of the European weaving tradition with the technologies and mindset that would later underpin the Industrial Revolution—of a world reducible to symbolic, rationally ordered forms that could provide an idealised template for practice. This approach contrasts with Albers’s use of codes not as representations to be followed, but as catalysts for the performance of weaving itself

Nevertheless, it remains worthwhile to emphasise how Albers’s modular rules and Jacquard’s punched cards were both a means of parsing codes into practice, via the expressive capacities of the mechanical loom. While these codes, taken as a whole, may still be viewable as expressing an abstract concept or a predefined image, at the level of the loom itself they manifest only as specific prompts for action, and thus even Jacquard’s cards subordinate the representational for the performative—of control rods sliding into punched spacings, altering the flow of thread.

When it comes to digital technologies, we can observe a similar collapsing of the representational within the domain of digital inscription, whereby the written message is parsed into a set of executable instructions that animate the circuitry of which they are part, becoming thereafter their chief mode of significance. These instructions do not exist nor operate in isolation, but are components of myriad, interlocking, and continually actioned matrices of code. The viewable digital text cannot be posited therefore as a discrete, isolated element, but as an assemblage that is enacted anew with every processing cycle. As variables, inputs, and conditions change, this assemblage reconfigures itself to accept these changes. Therefore, while a broad continuity may still be evident at the level of the final user output, the underlying operational behaviour can be described in near-emergent terms, for the myriad configurations adopted cannot be accounted for specifically, only accommodated contingently by the system. Hayles (2006: 181-2) summarises this situation neatly, as it relates to digital poetry:

In digital media, the poem has a distributed existence spread among data files and commands, software that executes the commands, and hardware on which the software runs. These digital characteristics imply that the poem ceases to exist as a self-contained object and instead becomes a process, an event brought into existence when the program runs on the appropriate software loaded onto the right hardware. The poem is “eventilized,” made more an event and less a discrete, self-contained object with clear boundaries in space and time.

Hayles (2008:45) has written subsequently on how all acts of digital writing are but an aspect of this greater performance of enacted codes that we call digital computing, and observes this spanning across the thresholds ostensibly separating the biological, the cultural, and the technological, what she terms ‘intermediation’. Nevertheless, to focus on the particular agency of the latter, as a nonhuman actor in the world, emphasises especially its emergent, performative qualities at every stage of recording, parsing, and displaying the messages of its human users, and doing so in ways that are often treated as unremarkable as they are unobservable—being ‘black boxed’ behind smoothly obedient, ‘intuitive’ interfaces, and, in their actual operation, exceeding the scale and duration of human sensory prehension.

Writing practices that integrate digital multimedia can help draw our attention to these underlying processes, bringing to the surface a sense of the condition of digital text as both human readable and as executable code—as components of a machinic performance. In the case of Solid State Poetry, this aim is sought by visualising the parsing of written messages into the structured numerical patterns of digital logic, with their actual semantic content being neither perceived nor acted upon. While the mathematical breakdown of written messages may still be interpretable in conceptual terms, such schemas are, nevertheless, intrinsic not to the human scale of reading, but to the prehension of digital systems, where they operate as catalysts for the execution of algorithms. Therefore, while the patterns generated by Solid State Poetry are indeed so abstract as to convey very little of their source, they give subsequent cause for reflecting on the broader performances by which machinic actors read and articulate the contemporary environment—a hinting of the machinic umwelt.

Extant media coverage of smart devices, bots, and artificial intelligence would suggest readily that the condition of living amongst machinic agents is a recent development, but paying closer attention to the functioning of all digital systems, and their cultural and historical antecedents, reveals a far more complex and longstanding picture. Art and literature, digital or otherwise, represent important vehicles for bringing this richer narrative to light. While it remains a modest gesture, my hope is that as Solid State Poetry grows and develops, alongside my own critical investigations, it will continue to provide a catalyst for further such enquiry and reflection.

Interested readers can follow the development of Solid State Poetry at the writer’s website. A printed collection of selected outputs is soon to be made available.

References:

Carter, R. (2017) ‘Waveform’. The Writing Platform. Available at: http://thewritingplatform.com/2017/09/drone-poetry-deploying-sensory-technologies-tools-writing/ [Accessed 28 August 2018].

Carter, R. (2018) ‘Solid State Poetry’. Available at: http://richardacarter.com/solid-state-poetry/ [Accessed 28 August 2018].

Hayles, N. (2006) ‘The Time of Digital Poetry: From Object to Event’. In: Morris, A., and Swiss, T. (eds.) New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories. Cambridge.M.A.: MIT Press, pp. 181-209.

Hayles, N. (2008) Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary. Notre Dame, IN.: Notre Dame Press.

Troy, V. (1999) ‘Thread as Text: The Woven Work of Anni Albers’. In Weber, N. and Asbaghi, P. (eds.)

Screenshots is a regular feature by Simon Groth, highlighting a project, app, or other resource of interest.

All the Delicate Duplicates
By Mez Breeze and Andy Campbell

Can a first-person gaming environment be used to tell a story? Of course! But, typically in experiences of this type, the balance between story and game falls heavily on the side of the latter. With All the Delicate Duplicates, Mez Breeze and Andy Campbell seek to turn that convention on its head.

The focus of Delicates is on John, a single father who inherits a collection of arcane objects from his mysterious relative named Mo. These are no ordinary objects, though and they lead John and his daughter Charlotte deeper into Mo’s memories and mysteries, changing reality around them.

The game world—filled with beautiful and haunting imagery, soundscapes, and more than a few startling turns—is accompanied by a web-based non-linear text that’s essential for filling in its wide-open spaces, especially for impatient readers like me. But make no mistake: story here is king and the emphasis of moving through the game’s world is to observe, discover, and reflect. More than a year on from its release, it remains a remarkable achievement.

Find out more at the project website.

Way back in the wilds of the year 2008, artist-extraordinaire James Morgan and I engaged in an animated discussion about Augmented and Virtual Reality. At that time James and I were collaborators-in-crime in the Third Faction Collective, a group of digital artists intent on constructing game interventions in Massively Multiplayer Online Spaces. During this discussion, I pitched to James an idea to establish an online space devoted to all things Synthetic Reality based (my umbrella term for Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, and Mixed Reality). This space, called Augmentology 101, intrigued James to the point where a decision was made to sponsor it through the Ars Virtua Foundation and CADRE Laboratory for New Media. What followed was an amazing exploration into the creative potentials of Synthetic Reality – what’s now known as XR (Extended Reality) – and how it might manifest within the realm of electronic literature.  

It’s now been 10 years since the initialisation of the Augmentology 101 project. During this decade, there’s been a major upswing in VR and AR production and development, with impactful XR content such as Firebird – La Péri (a 2016 English/Chinese/French multilingual VR Experience) and Queerskins VR (2018) being standout examples.

Screenshot from the 2016 Multilingual Virtual Reality Project “Firebird – La Peri”

My own attempts at merging digital literature into developing XR fields have been multiple and varied, originating in delving into VR in the 1990’s when VRML was the shiny new thing. Surprisingly enough, the creative and technical challenges that VR creators faced back then are similar to those we face today: high performance requirements, mainstream adoption hurdles (see: Gartner Hype Cycle), and monetisation dilemmas are all relevant. Likewise, skillsets required by VR content creators in the mid 1990’s again parallel XR creators of today, including developing a deep knowledge of spatial storytelling logistics; emotional intelligence; and the ability to formulate story experiences that take into account various hardware and platform limitations such as field of view constraints, tethered headsets restricting natural movements, and hardware specific limitations like the screen-door effect.

In terms of XR projects I’ve produced in the last decade, a brief selection includes conceiving of and co-developing the 2013 anti-surveillance AR game #PRISOM, and in 2015 mapping out with Andy Campbell the (now unfinished) PC/VR project Square Ebony that was to be filled with: “…movement/imagery like huge ‘Panic Room’ landscaped letters…a force field of green…branches intertwined…tangles being text…[that] revolves around an entity…this entity is slowly reconfiguring itself…at the top of a hill/mountain/plateau surrounded by brackish water” (notes from Square Ebony Project Meeting and Documentation, Breeze and Campbell, March 10th 2015). In 2016 I lectured as part of the “Future Possible: Beyond the Screen” Series which centred on how VR can transform creative practice, and which also included a live VR performance walkthrough using one of my Tilt Brush created works. In 2017 I keynoted at the Electronic Literature Conference with a VR performance presented both live at the Conference and simultaneously in Virtual Reality.

“Layering the New real: Tracking the Self in Disembodied [Un] Virtual Spaces” Keynote

Press Image for “Our Cupidity Coda”: VR Literature

Thorough participation in a high-end VR based experience like Perpetual Nomads hinges entirely on immersion, which is triggered initially through the audience having to don gear that firstly reduces their ability to engage in their actual physical space in standard ways (their vision and hearing being “co-opted” into a VR space). The leap of faith the audience needs to make to establish a valid and willing suspension of disbelief (as Samuel Coleridge so aptly phrased it) is already set in motion by the fact a user is entirely aware from the moment they slip on a VR Headset that their body is in essence hijacked by the experience (haptically, kinetically), as opposed to a more removed projection into a story space via more traditional forms (think book reading, movies, tv). Such body co-opting might lead a user to disengage from the VR experience from the very beginning which will reduce the likelihood of true immersion: alternatively, they may readily fall headlong into the experience with an absolute sense of engagement and wonder (the preferred option as a VR content creator!) if the work has been precisely crafted.

For the most part, XR projects such as those mentioned above currently exist only in the mainstream margins, with a majority of experiences requiring costly high-end VR rigs and expensive desktop computers that demand audiences experience the works in their optimal state. To counteract this selective catering to the exorbitant end of the XR market, in early 2018 I had the idea to create a VR Experience that would reduce the mandatory use of high-end tech. This project would instead cater directly to a range of audiences by crafting a work that could be experienced across a far larger (and much more accessible) range of lower-end tech. This VR Literature work is called A Place Called Ormalcy.

Title Image from the “A Place Called Ormalcy” Press Kit

A Place Called Ormalcy is digital literature designed for, and developed in, Virtual Reality. It was constructed using the Virtual Reality Application MasterpieceVR to craft the 3D models, with each chapter (made up of 3D models, text, and audio components) then combined and hosted via the Sketchfab platform. It’s comprised of a text-based story made up of seven short Chapters which are housed in 3D/Virtual Reality environments. It can be accessed via a wide range (crucial in terms of its social commentary aspect) of mobile devices, desktop PCs and both low-end and high-end Virtual Reality hardware. Audiences using the cheapest type of VR equipment (such as Cardboard headsets) are able to access complete versions of this VR literature experience, as are users of any net connected mobile device with a WebVR-enabled browser.

The story of A Place Called Ormalcy (warning: spoilery parts ahead) unfolds through a series of snapshots of the life of Mr Ormal, a happy-go-lucky law-abiding chap who resides in the aesthetically cartoonish world of Ormalcy. Ormalcy exists in an alternative universe complete with its own idiosyncratic language patterns. The storyworld initially presents as a Utopia full of innocent “claymationesque” contented creatures and happy citizens. As the story plays out, however, it soon becomes apparent that in actuality, this VR Experience allegorically traces the makings of a dystopic society, and how such fascist principles can arise in the most benevolent of places. This VR Literature work has social commentary at its very core, commenting directly on and about the rise of current totalitarian trajectories and the contemporary malaise, confusion and accompanying acclimatization patterns.

“A Place Called Ormalcy” Chapter Progression

A Place Called Ormalcy uses a combination of WebVR, 3D, VR, text and audio assets in ways that mirror a slow dystopian creep. In the desktop and mobile versions, each chapter becomes progressively visually cloistered, with dark fog and grainy distortions increasing to finally create a type of gun-barrelled claustrophobic effect. This combines with a gradual leaching of the intense colours found in the free-flowing organic imagery of the initial Chapters which results in a startlingly stripped back, fuzzy palette and model constructions: vibrancy gradually bleaches out to stark black, white and greys. Correspondingly, the 3D tableaus and audio tracks likewise alter from an initial complexity – Mr Ormal begins his story journey waving directly to the audience in “Chapter Wonne” in a bright and blooming space – which incrementally shifts towards the dramatically minimal in the final “Chapter Severn” where Mr Ormal transforms into (…spoiler alert here…) something vastly other.

In the VR version of A Place Called Ormalcy, additional effects mark the dystopic “boiling frog” dilemma that Mr Ormal faces. Each VR tableau subtly increases in size and scale as the Chapters progress, with the audience finding themselves in the climatic Chapter in a looming monochromatic set surrounded by huge windowless block-shaped buildings devoid of detail – except multiple, and menacing, “88” shaped logos (and the awfully transfigured Mr Ormal). In the VR version, the text becomes increasingly difficult to navigate, with the audience having to teleport, twist and turn in the VR Environment to read each annotation, echoing the “fake news” proclamations of our contemporary Western world where it is becoming increasingly difficult to access truth over relentless propaganda.

Although A Place Called Ormalcy may seemingly convey a message of hopelessness or helplessness, the ending does contain clues that all is not lost in this particular dystopian scenario – the final soundtrack offers hope, with protestors chanting and proclaiming resistance as key. Just as VR Literature can work to extend the creation of accessible electronic literature beyond the text-centric to truly encapsulate the haptic and the spatially-oriented, A Place Called Ormalcy illustrates how XR projects can act as relevant social commentary at a time when it is sorely needed. I look forward to continuing to promote, create, and experiment with stretching the limits of VR and AR while producing XR projects that are openly accessible, as well as socially relevant.

Screenshots is a weekly feature by Simon Groth, highlighting a project, app, or other resource of interest.

A Modern Ghost
By Stef Orzech

My writer-bias is showing in the byline above since this app’s creators take great pains to attribute it collectively to AltSalt, the ‘digital literature studio’ from which it emerged. Indeed, the drive of this short and somewhat tentative story of love and memory comes from the interactions between its text by Orzech, images and animation by Ricardo Morales, and soundtrack by Ethan Steigerwald. A Modern Ghost is at its best in its use of space on the screen, frequently changing its scrolling direction (with cues) and using layering and textures to suggest a three-dimensional space under the glass.

Described as a protoype, A Modern Ghost is as much an exploration of form and technology as it is a narrative and refinements to the platform (especially its overly touch-sensitive scrolling) are likely over time. But it is also a compelling vision for storytelling on a phone and it will be exciting to see where AltSalt takes these ideas next.

A Modern Ghost is available for iOSand Android.

Screenshots is a regular feature by Simon Groth, highlighting a project, app, or other resource of interest.

Paige and Powe
By David Thomas Henry Wright

On first sight of Julia Lane’s framing illustrations, readers might be forgiven for mistaking Paige and Powe for a kind of graphic novel. Instead, it is a nuanced and complex narrative built from a collection of found-object texts: a story of intersecting lives, a fortune lost, and a series of increasingly bizarre events. Bouncing between financial documents, emails, and interview transcripts, Wright’s technique shows impressive attention to detail, in particular his use of track changes to chart changes in characters and situations over time.

Reminiscent of comic panels, the story’s interface presents an interesting ‘semi-linear’ structure, suggesting a rough order and context in which to read each ‘document’, though the reader is free to read at random.

Paige and Powe is available to read online.

Origins

The Poetry Map has its origins in a feature on Facebook’s homepage by which users could list countries they had visited and see these appear as pins on a map. While this was a good way of ‘showing off’, it also got me thinking about the places I had lived in the course of a peripatetic teaching career. Google Maps was in its infancy at this time, and people had just begun creating their own maps with details of campsites in Cornwall and the like. I created my own Google Map, dropping pins into places where a poem was composed or set (often one and the same) and then typing the poem into the ‘information box’ which opened and became readable when the cursor hovered above it.

These poems tended to be orphans left over from my first collection, Boxing the Compass (itself arranged by compass point) and they weren’t always complete. By dint of the Google Map format, the poems did not follow any sequence. You moved the mouse and a poem appeared. You would often read the same poem twice. Some poems (and pins) were lost behind others. It was impossible to enter prose poems as there was no right-hand justification. The font was uniform. There was no bold or italic option. However, this map-page became a portable journal in which I could revise and develop these poems. After a while, it held about 45 poems.

There was a counter built into the program, and I was amazed to see that the page clocked up 6,000 hits in no time at all. This far exceeded the readership of most collections. The potential to reach new international audiences by making my poetry available through this channel was clear when I saw that most of the hits came from Canada and China. Some poems were set in Toronto, and I had previously translated poetry by the Taiwanese poet Yao Yun, but apart from these two facts, I cannot explain why those two countries, in particular, took an interest.

An early version of the Poetry Map

So I approached Jon Munson II, a programmer from Maryland. He found a way to link one poem to another, and for the page to refresh rather than opening a new window for each poem. By trial and error, we honed the user experience. To start with, we threw the kitchen sink at the text. There were accompanying videos, occasionally unrelated, such as my performance of a song on guitar at the site of one of the poems. This was evidently both distracting and indulgent, so we pared back to a minimal accompaniment. What was, and is, important for me about the map is the poetry first; the interface is there to augment the experience. Having said that, where relevant I included things culled from other projects. For example, the video accompanying the reading of ‘The Westbury Horse’ was made for Creative Wiltshire in 2014. As we progressed, I decided to incorporate work from two pamphlets-in-progress: a sequence of poems set in Poland and the Czech Republic, with a short diversion to Germany, tentatively entitled Ahoj! (this became the third path, Czech Film); and a sheaf of teaching poems I had compiled over the years (which became path two, A Discipline). Normally, I would not have trusted so much writing to the internet, preferring hard-copy publishing channels, but I came to trust the interface we developed.

Whistles and Bells

In the Poetry Map, digital accompaniments come in the form of clickable ‘Magic Tickets,’ bonuses to be opened as one progresses through the poems. One of the concerns of A Discipline (path two) is the different languages with which we communicate. So the magic ticket in ‘Half Term’ reveals a Polish saying about recovering from the common cold, while ‘Preston’ is written in Phonetic Script (an aid for teaching pronunciation) only to be rendered into conventional English with a click of the magic ticket. However, the photos detailed in ‘Group Portrait’ and ‘Two Photos’ actually detracted from the poems. So they had to go. The only remaining photo is accompanied by a newspaper article whose headline provides the last line of a poem (‘Leanings’).

An example of a Magic Ticket

The poem appears

The ticket is visible

The ticket reveals something linked to the poem

Choice of Content

As we worked on the map, improving sequence and interface and dividing the poems into four distinct paths, the sheer number of times I re-read the poems allowed me to hone them into better shape and create an order strong enough to withstand the leap from place to place. Strangely, once the project had become a ‘publication’ in my mind – and I had decided that these poems would never be published together in hard-copy – I found I could not add newer, perhaps stronger, work to them. There was a specific type of poem which worked on the screen. A poem had to read ‘fast’ – not lay too many roadblocks in the reader’s way requiring re-reading and unpuzzling. Where there was a sequence (‘Entries’), each section is revealed with a click, so the reader only entertains one section at a time, rather than seeing the full poem and perhaps being dissuaded from persevering. Jon and any other programmer I spoke to felt that the interface should display as much white space as possible around the words, but I disagreed. I felt that the frame of the map, often telling in itself, created an atmosphere for the poems.

‘Imagine a Forest’ screenshot

Not just this, but (with three exceptions) no poem was visible as a whole. The text screen is a visor, keeping the reader in the immediate present of the current section of a poem. This makes the experience interactive. The poem hasn’t already happened, it has to be unfurled.

Each path was arranged to be readable in one sitting. If it became over-extended, the tautness was lost and a reader might be tempted to check their mail or see what was happening in the outside world. Jon added flags in the top-right of the screen and a map in the bottom left-hand corner locating each poem’s position in its country.

Weirdly, despite all our best efforts, the map is not a static thing, but subject to changes in Google’s map technology. In this way, the woozy out-of-focus shots of the Czech Republic streets have been sadly lost through an upgrade. No doubt, as cliffs erode and shorelines advance, this will also be recorded on the map. The viewing experience is dependent on device and screen-size, determining whether you see, say, the Westbury Horse appear improbably white against its background before the text window opens over it with a poem of the same name. As David Lynch said about TV – everything is wrong with the medium: adverts interrupt you, you have no control over screen definition, a thousand interruptions incur. But despite everything…

Sequencing

The sequencing of poems required even more scrutiny than in the compilation of a book, where poems can immediately ‘sit right’ on a page beside each other. The singer-songwriter Courtney Barnett describes a road trip listening to her new album in ten or fifteen different orders ‘until it felt right.’ This was the approach we took. With online distractions one tap away, the sequence had to be compelling.

Reading it now, I can draw a link between each poem and explain it logically, though I doubt these reasons were explicit when I ordered them. For example, the first path begins with a poem about finding a dead deer. This is followed by a poem about the delivery of dead lambs from a dead sheep, which is then followed by a poem in which umbilical cords and afterbirth are visible in the grass. The next two poems deal with depictions of life – one of the Wiltshire white horses carved into the chalk hillside, and a life-drawing class. There follows the burial of a pet cat, before a number of poems featuring a life-line of some kind – a safety harness hung from a helicopter lifting people from a flash flood in Boscastle, a Rayburn at the heart of a house, a pilot light leading the cyclist safely home along a canal path in darkness, and a statue of a harvest maiden in Warminster. Continuing the theme of life, ‘lungs of water’ crossed by cattle lead to a swimming pool, which leads to poems considering ‘inner’ and ‘outer’, claims and possessions and finally letting go of a relationship.

I thought carefully about the beginning and end of each path. The second path is concerned with teaching, and the poems occupy the liminal spaces familiar to many teachers – a college hallway after dark, squash courts serving as classrooms – not to mention encounters with students of different nationalities. It opens with a non-teaching poem in which a drunk teenager stumbles behind a car and relieves herself. I had in mind a scene in Toni Morrison’s Beloved in which this physical action serves to draw a line between past and present, so it seemed apt to use it as a sequence-opener. It also touches upon the teacher’s vantage into private lives. Some of the poems are quite ‘minor’ (‘An Acquaintance’) – things scribbled on buses – but together they add up to a sense of glimpsed faces. The poems jump from Bath to Greenwich to Wandsworth before ending up in Exeter where I was a student myself.

Developing a Teaching Resource

When I received e-mails from teachers telling me that the map had been used on World Poetry Day in California and Taunton, I immediately became gravely concerned. It seemed so naked. Not just that, the poems mentioned labia, condoms, and dead lambs. So I developed a downloadable teacher’s guide (including a recommended age-range) and downloadable student worksheets, while Jon made improvements to the navigation (including a drop-down menu of poems on completion of each path). In the worksheets, I used the classic pedagogic trick of creating an information gap and putting students in the position of detectives on a trail. Some responded to the fact that the resource was online, and so in a sense were encouraged to read poetry by stealth. I saw immersion in the map as a way for students to learn to navigate ‘negative capability’, a skill required by the GCSE English Literature ‘Unseen Poem’ section. To my mind, one of the strengths of the sequences is that since the poems weren’t written with teenagers in mind, they don’t pander or patronize. The downside of this is that the poems can’t be used as an introduction to specific forms (such as sonnets and sestinas) as they are generally in free verse.

I imagine the site as something to be stumbled upon, like a map in an old desk. As long as people are drawn to the promise of a way to navigate, and rise to the challenge of cracking a code, then the Poetry Map will be relevant and the poems will mean something to someone somewhere. At least, that’s my hope.

I have tried again and again to become another person. I have spent years trying to think my way into different people’s heads, language, rhythms. These people have sometimes been real people. More often they have been narrators and characters. Sometimes, though, they have been writers – writers I tried to be.

One was the imaginary author of a novel that was published as King Death. I was convinced this novel should come out not by me but under a pseudonym – that of a Japanese woman. I wanted the novel to appeal to readers of Banana Yoshimoto.

This didn’t happen because my agent assured me that anyone reading King Death would know it was by me. (Still not sure about this.)

With Lilian’s Spell Book, the novel I first put out on the Wattpad website and am now publishing on kindle, I had another serious go at being another writer – in Lilian’s Spell Book’s case I was going to be Alex Warden. (Alex being either male or female but, in my mind, definitely female.)

The whole idea behind the book, right from the start, was that I – Toby Litt, male, “established”, literary author – might be putting potential readers off.

Here’s a quick summary of the story:

Lilian’s Spell Book is a paranormal adventure novel about an ordinary English family – mother, father, pre-teen son, baby daughter – who inherit an extraordinary house. They move to this vast Elizabethan mansion in rural Sussex from their small South London maisonette. Very soon, they all find out their new home is haunted. But it is the mother of the family, Jeane Jonson, who begins to suspect that the secret to the house lies in the Elizabethan portrait that hangs in a gallery just off the vast entrance hall – a glittering, gorgeous oil painting showing the proud, red-haired Lilian holding in her hand a small leather-bound book. But the real wonders start when the narrator discovers the book itself, in the secret library of the mansion. Lilian’s father was an alchemist…

Find Toby Litt’s latest novel here too.

What I hoped was to have my unnamed narrator be as close to her reader as possible.

In fact, by writing my narrator as I did, I was trying to entice my reader – a new reader for me, I hoped – to discover the book I’d made for her.

When the time came to submit the novel to publishers, I confused matters by insisting that it went out under the Alex Warden pseudonym.

This didn’t fly – none of the major publishers went for the novel, which they were told was by ‘someone they would have heard of, when the author’s identity is revealed’.

Lilian’s Spell Book was a ghost story, and publishers generally liked the first half, but then it didn’t continue as they expected. Put bluntly, it wasn’t scary enough for them.

But I’d never intended it to be scary. The haunting that takes place is meant to terrify only until it starts to be understood, after which it becomes wonderful.

Before J.K. Rowling gazumped the idea for her Book of Spells, I’d thought of calling Lilian’s Spell Book not a ghost story but a ‘wonderbook’.

After being rejected by all the publishers I’d hoped would love it, the novel sat around on my hard drive for a couple of years.

Cut to 2013, when I was teaching a residential creative weekend at Tickton Grange. This was part of the Beverley Literature Festival. (So, thank you to them.) I sat in on a presentation by Alysoun Owen, Editor of the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook. She was talking to my students about ‘bespoke tips on getting published’.

Alysoun mentioned What Pad – I think that’s how I first wrote it down – as one interesting platform. (So, big thank you to her.)

Once back home, I looked Wattpad up. Conventional publishing had told me Lilian’s Spell Book failed because it wasn’t scary enough – it took a generic detour. Fine. I’d see what readers with no investment in it thought; readers who’d got it for free.

Publishing on Wattpad also gave me the chance to do something I’ve always wanted to do – serialize a novel. Between 14 October 2013 and 10 December 2013, I put a new chapter of Lilian’s Spell Book up every day. (I did this under my own name, rather than Alex Warden. I wasn’t risking any future confusion about who’d written the book.)

Whenever a new reader started on the Prologue, I got a notification – and I made sure to message them, to say I hoped they enjoyed the book, if they got the chance to keep reading.

My first impression was that a lot of the readers were young, and the messages they sent back were often enthusiastically mistyped. These weren’t fussy people. What they wanted was a good story that gripped them – and that they could get for free.

I was really delighted. These weren’t my usual readers. Most of these new readers had no idea I’d written other books. They sometimes said I should keep going, because I had talent. I found this incredibly touching, and encouraging.

I wasn’t hiding my identity or that I wasn’t a first-timer. On my Profile page, I’d put up a biography, explaining a little about who I was.

Alex Warden aka Toby Litt (https://www.wattpad.com/user/TobyLitt)

I hoped a few readers might cross over from Wattpad to the world of physically published books. I’m not sure if any did. The Wattpad readers seemed to be a separate bunch. A typical message might say, ‘I enjoyed your novel so much I couldn’t put my phone down until I finished.’ Being read on phones – this was new for me.

I had been worried that as soon as it became clear that Lilian’s Spell Book didn’t follow the conventional ghost story structure of escalating scares, including false ones, that word would get around that the book was a disappointment. (Word on Wattpad can get around really fast – there are readers’ comments at the bottom of each page.) But as the days went by, the number of readers increased, and quite a few were sticking around waiting for the next chapter.

As a Wattpad author, you get access to a lot of stats about what you’ve written and how it’s being consumed. I immediately learned that the drop-off in readers between the Prologue and Chapter Five was high. Lots of people read openings of books online, just as they would if they picked a physical copy up in a bookshop. I tried not to find this disheartening.

Only about 4% of the readers who read the Prologue get to the final chapter. But the drop-off from Chapter 6 to the end is far more gradual. If a reader makes it to Chapter 6, there is a 50% chance they’ll continue to the end.

Writerly vanity would want both figures to be 100% – instant and total addiction, no quitters whatsoever. That’s never going to happen. (Not in my experience.)

By itself, without promotion, Lilian’s Spell Book picked up a much bigger than average readership. (I’ve put a few stories on Wattpad that have had around 200 reads in total.) Quite often Wattpad books are only read by a dozen or a few dozen people.

Each chapter that’s looked at is counted as a ‘read’. That’s exactly equivalent to a hit on a webpage. A hit doesn’t, of course, mean that someone has read a whole page, just opened it in a browser. But consecutive hits make it almost certain that someone is reading attentively. The number of reads for the final chapter is likely to be the total number of people who have finished the book. For Lilian’s Spell Book this is around 7,000 in four years. The reads figure is an impressive 750,000.

After Lilian’s Spell Book had been around for a few weeks, Gavin Wilson of the Wattpad Team contacted me.

He said they’d noticed that Naomi Alderman, another Wattpad author, had mentioned me in a tweet. It was possible, Gavin said, for the site to feature a novel. This would mean it appeared on the home page of both Web and App. Algorithms could be nudged, coaxed. Lilian’s Spell Book would appear on reader’s screens a little more often. I said yes.

The effect was immediate. Lilian’s Spell Book got into the top 10 in Paranormal and Adventure, and fairly soon was number 1 for Paranormal Adventure (when you combine both categories under the search). Then, for a while, it was the most-read Paranormal book on the whole site. [3 March 2014.]

Some of the other books there in the most-read had up to three million or in one case seven million reads.

Until very recently, Lilian’s Spell Book tended to climb back into the Paranormal top 200 every weekend. I can only assume that new readers find it, carry on for more than a couple of chapters, increasing my stats.

The comments I’ve had – because I politely asked for them, but also because they’re part of the culture of Wattpad – have been very useful. They’ve ranged from pointing out typos to full editorial run-downs. The most frequent comment, I think, was that people would like to know more – or to have a sequel in which the character Lilian is able to speak for herself.

In the Afterword, I asked for specific feedback on one part of the book. The narrator is a mother with two children, one of whom is still being breastfed. Several publishers saw this as a real flaw. In terms of plotting, it limited the main character – she wasn’t so free to roam around the haunted house, and to get into trouble. (Although she does do this increasingly, as the story progresses.) I asked in the Afterword whether the breastfeeding was off-putting, whether it was too much? Some people definitely thought so. Others said it was one of the things they felt was most refreshingly different about the book. They understood what I had been after – that the book was about the alchemy of family, and how that can turn time to gold.

When I finished writing Lilian’s Spell Book, in a hotel room in Belgium, I wept. Nothing else I’ve ever written has had such a powerful effect upon me. Partly because I was a little hungover and exhausted. Mainly because I thought, I’ve done it!

‘It’ being write a book that was straightforward, heartfelt, not distancing, and that would get through to lots of readers.

I’d also constructed a really complicated book (in terms of plot and backstory) but managed to bring it home, and in a way that felt genuinely achieved.

I thought it was the best end of a book I’d ever managed.

The disappointment when it didn’t find a publisher had been very deep. I hoped I’d written a gift of a book – it was returned; it felt like it had been unopened.

Wattpad enabled me to give the book away as a gift – I’ve made no money from it so far, except the £50 I’m being paid for this blog. Everyone who’s read it has done so for free. But now that the Spell book has found an afterlife on Wattpad, I’ve decided to go the whole way.

As so very few of the reader’s comments have been disappointed, I can only assume that the publishers were wrong and the readers – and I – were right. Ghost stories can be about wonder and healing as much as horror and screaming. I’ve decided to take Lilian’s Spell Book to other readers – making it available on Kindle to start with, then elsewhere.

I’ve been reluctant to do this because I like the first home it found, on Wattpad, and the readers there who made me think I’d done the right thing by not hiding it away as a shameful failure.

I believe that Lilian’s Spell Book is different from my other books. One of my tests of whether a book of mine is successful is whether or not, looking back, I can easily imagine myself writing it – can I trace an obvious line between it and me? If it’s too obviously me, that’s a disappointment.

So, I think I’m able to be a little proud of Alex Warden – the writer I believed I was, that I believed I was going to become, all the way through writing Lilian’s Spell Book. She wrote a good book. But I am more proud of the kind, insightful, magically enthusiastic readers of Wattpad. They collectively performed their own alchemy – bringing a dead book back to life.