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.

Paper Nations, a South West England-based creative writing incubator dedicated to diversity and innovation, has commissioned three writers with links to the region to develop exciting and experimental writing projects that use smartphone technologies to tell immersive stories. Paper Nations is led by Bambo Soyinka, Professor of Story at Bath Spa University.

The “Beyond the Book” commission, led in partnership with The Writing Platform’s co-editor Kate Pullinger, aims to develop innovative models for writing and publication, promoting dialogue between writers, technologists and new publishers. By supporting writers to work with technologists as part of a commission, Paper Nations is helping early-stage experimental writing to flourish. This will lead to a body of research into how to support and champion emerging digital writers, which will be shared both nationally and internationally.

In February, our three commissioned writing teams were beginning their projects. They each gave us an update on this early stage as they balanced story and technology with their wider ambitions of what they wanted to achieve through the work. They are all now in the middle of their projects and we have caught up with them again to see how they have been progressing, particularly during the national lockdown in the UK due to Covid 19. We will check in with the writing teams again in a couple of months as they reach the end of their projects. 

The Fog – Lucy Christopher and Rajiv Edward

Lucy Christopher and Rajiv Edward, a writer and technologist team, have been commissioned to develop “The Fog”, which uses smartphone sensors, such as geolocation, to tell a story about a mission to save Bath from a time-freezing fog.

It seems that a nationwide lockdown isn’t bad for all projects, not if the two project partners live together already at least. In fact, Raj and I used some of the lockdown time to do a lot of thinking about our digital project, The Fog, and to do a lot of talking about it too. Crucially, we feel like we have made some big leaps forward. For example, we have a structure for the project finally; something that had been evading us for months and causing me, as the primary writer, many headaches. Now, it feels like we know what we are doing in regards to the story arc and what we are trying to achieve. But, perhaps most crucially, we are starting to build the story on a digital platform. We have a prototype for the first 5-10 minutes of the digital consumption of The Fog. We can see it coming together. It’s exciting. 

So how have we got here? Well, Raj has been busy learning ‘React’, a Javascript library, in order to help with the technical build of The Fog, while I have been scribbling on lots of bits of paper trying to work out where parts of this story should go to make the most sense. 

It’s so different writing this to working on a novel. I have to think more about structure, and I have to think more concisely – two things that don’t necessarily come naturally to me as a novelist. I’ve always been the kind of writer who likes to feel my way into story. This is harder to do in this medium – Raj can’t necessarily feel his way into building a digital platform and me working intuitively like this will inevitably cause more work for him. I’ve learnt that a more accurate road map from the start is needed; a more accurate purpose and idea of where we want to take it. 

There’s still loads of work to do. I need to write the rest of the text, and make sure the components of the story arc are still thought about carefully. Raj needs to do loads of super tricky building and coding to make The Fog look pretty and exciting on the screen. We are still very much in the foggy middle of The Fog, but at least now we can see a little more clearly to the other side.

The Wallet Chapters – Lucy Telling 

Writer Lucy Telling is developing “The Wallet Chapters”, which will use e-tickets accessed within the Wallet app, on both Apple and Android, to create an overarching story inspired by the information supplied in the tickets (dates, times, locations and other details). 

It’s fair to say that the world has changed since my first blog post. In the lead up to the Coronavirus crisis, I made good headway with regards to developing the technology for The Wallet Chapters, and the story I want to tell. 

Back in January, I was occupied with questions relating to the possibilities and restrictions within the Wallet application. At this mid-way point, I feel I now have answers to many of those questions and a much clearer understanding of the parameters within which my story will sit. This is important in relation to the narrative I am writing, but it also allows the concept to become a platform, which could be used for multiple different stories in the future.

Your Wallet is full of tickets, which allow for a range of locations, modes of transport and events. A quest story, therefore, fits well. Initially, I imagined the story would span a period of ten years, but I now know it’s not possible to add tickets retrospectively. So, I have decided the story will be contemporary and delivered in real time, probably over the course of a week or two.

 Each ticket sets the scene for each new chapter. When a ticket is available, as a reader, you receive an email with a link to download it into your Wallet. The layout relates to that particular ticket, so it looks like a train, event or flight ticket. This gives basic info about the ticket, but no story. When you turn the ticket over (virtually) you will be able to access a back page where you will be able to read a text synopsis of the chapter and further content via web links.

 There are various options regarding the links. For one, this offers the opportunity to add audio, so it is possible to listen to a full version of each chapter. I imagine this will be a location recording made by our protagonist describing each event just after it has happened. The links also offer scope for additional content that could add finer detail, depth and texture including audio recordings of (fictional) overheard conversations, Youtube videos and links to existing websites that could be woven into the story or (perhaps in future iterations) fictional websites.

 The story revolves around what Alfred Hitchcock termed the “MacGuffin” – a mysterious object that sets the chain of events in motion. The object itself, although central to the story, is largely unimportant in itself to the reader, but of utmost importance to the main characters. The first chapter is a train ticket. Our protagonist has just had an unnerving encounter, where she helped a homeless man who had collapsed outside the station. Moments before he was taken away in an ambulance, he gave her something and asked her to return it to “Virginia”. He leaves before she has a chance to ask him any questions.

The story revolves around this intriguing object and his instruction, which, over time, becomes her mission – to carry out what ends up being his last wish. In her quest to discover more about it, she finds herself in new and increasingly weird situations. A series of coincidences lead her to believe she is on the right path. She feels compelled to follow, but becomes mixed up in a strange, dark world that causes her to question her own life choices and, at points, the nature of reality itself. 

seer – Melanie Frances

Writer Melanie Frances is producing “seer”, a reader-led interdimensional journalistic investigation where readers will act as the protagonist, a journalist who is investigating a new technology that claims to allow people to see into alternative dimensions. 

I both love and hate the middle of a project. I find that it is here, in the middle, that you really get to grips with what your piece is doing, what it is saying and with the experience you are creating for your reader. 

In a non-linear, interactive project like this, in the middle of a process you begin to step into the middle of what you have created. I have the stories, the routes and journeys, the characters and moments, the hundreds of post-its surrounding my office walls. Now I begin to shape what I have made. I reshape and refine – see where to push and pull and what needs more or less. 

Central to seer, the piece I’m making, is the idea that two people can look at the same information, the same stimuli, and understand two different stories – that our perception and our perspective shape what we believe to be real and true. The experience of this difference, of the multitude of ways we can put together information to build a narrative, is an experience that lies not in words but in the gaps between them, the connections we draw – in what is left unsaid between two people, the discrepancies between one account and another. To tell a story of many perspectives, you have to tell a story in the gaps. 

seer is experienced on a website that presents the reader with an archive of information to search through. The reader plays as a journalist and to progress they have to ‘publish’ stories, making choices about what information they think is important, and what they want to know more about. 

Now that the website is up and running, I am getting a sense for the first time of how the reader will experience the world of my piece, what it means for them to guide themselves through the narrative and make choices. In this moment I centre my audience, and begin to understand our conversation. It is a conversation of perspectives and perceptions, a conversation that lies in the gap – the gap between what I’m saying and what they’ll say back. 

For more details on Beyond the Book and the writers visit Paper Nations.

Writer Profiles

Lucy Christopher and Rajiv Edward 

Lucy Christopher and Rajiv Edward are a creative and real life partnership interested in all the possibilities that digital storytelling presents. Rajiv is a Frontend Web Developer and UX designer who works at the University of Bath, and is looking to push further into app development. Lucy is an international bestselling Young Adult author, including novels Stolen, Flyaway, and Storm-wake. Her books have won the Branford Boase Award, the Printz Honor, and have been shortlisted for the Costa and Waterstones prizes. Lucy also works as a senior lecturer. Through her work leading the MA Writing for Young People at Bath Spa, she has helped to kickstart the careers of many writers who have gone on to have several books published themselves

Lucy Telling 

In 2009, Lucy Telling co-founded Stand + Stare, an interactive design studio, with her brother Barney. Since then, the Bristol and Stroud-based writer has worked on numerous creative projects, including a recreation of two sets from The Muse by Jessie Burton, using touch tech to trigger audio extracts from the novel in 2018. An extensive list of her projects through Stand + Stare can be found on their website. Lucy is also an award-winning playwright and film-maker whose work has been performed across the country, both in theatres and schools.

Melanie Frances 

A writer with many hats, Melanie is a theatre-maker, artist, game designer, and mathematician who is also Co-Artistic Director of digital, interactive performance company Produced Moon. She has authored several app-based works, including The Inventor’s Squad, an audio guide that tells the stories of female scientists, mathematicians, engineers or inventors, such as Ada Lovelace and Hedy Lamarr.

Paper Nations, a South West England-based creative writing incubator dedicated to diversity and innovation, has commissioned three writers with links to the region to develop exciting and experimental writing projects that use smartphone technologies to tell immersive stories. Led by Bambo Soyinka, Professor of Story at Bath Spa University, Paper Nations promotes collaboration across all sectors.  

The “Beyond the Book” commission, led in partnership with The Writing Platform’s co-editor Kate Pullinger, aims to develop innovative models for writing and publication, promoting dialogue between writers, technologists and new publishers. By supporting writers to work with technologists as part of a commission, Paper Nations is helping early-stage experimental writing to flourish. This will lead to a body of research into how to support and champion emerging digital writers, which will be shared both nationally and internationally. 

Following an open call and a selection panel made up of experts, (Hachette Publishing’s Chief Innovation Officer and Innovation Program Director Maja Thomas, Forward Prize highly commended writer Louisa Adjoa Parker, Bath Spa University’s Steve Hollyman and Kaleider’s Andy Wood) three writing projects were selected for commissions of £5,000 each. These three projects each experiment with different opportunities that the smartphone offers for telling stories and adds to a growing creative field.

The writers are in the early stages of their projects and are scoping out what might be possible as they grapple with story and technology. We have checked in with each of them to share details of their process so far. We will return to them each in the middle and end of their projects to see their progress. 

The Fog – Lucy Christopher and Rajiv Edward

Lucy Christopher and Rajiv Edward, a writer and technologist team, have been commissioned to develop “The Fog”, which use smartphone sensors, such as geolocation, to tell a story about a mission to save Bath from a time-freezing fog.

The idea for our digital story came from the idea of fog – both literal and metaphorical fog. We saw the call for Beyond the Book and thought it looked like a fantastic opportunity that spoke to both of our skills – Rajiv is a web developer and I am a writer for young people – but we didn’t know how to approach it. Neither of us have engaged in digital storytelling before. We started by talking through loads of ideas. The problem was that every time we thought we’d found the best one, we got stuck.

“It’s like descending into a fog,” I said, looking out into a foggy afternoon in our hometown of Bath. “In fact, being in a fog is a good metaphor for having writer’s block in general.”

“So, why don’t we make the project about fog then?” Rajiv said.

It was a throwaway line, but it got us thinking. What if the impetus for the digital story was a fog that descended into the character’s world? What if the reason the story couldn’t be finished was because a fog was in the mind of the author, also? What if the only way out was to get the reader / digital consumer to clear the fog themselves … i.e./ finish the story?

Being a writer for young people, I’ve always been interested in the idea of writing for a very specific audience. I believe a story has as many different readings as it has readers. For example, read the sentence ‘He got into the car’ and we each imagine a different kind of man getting into a different kind of car, for a different kind of reason.

But what if a story could literally have as many different versions as it has different readers? In this way, our story would be like a Choose Your Own Adventure story, but with even more options and moments of uniqueness.

Through The Fog, Rajiv and I are exploring participatory creativity. We are exploring the act of writing as well as the act of reading. We want to create a participatory story that clears a fog and, together with us, creates a story. It’s ambitious, and we are still in some fog ourselves about how we will do it, but we have well and truly leapt in. 

The Wallet Chapters – Lucy Telling

Writer Lucy Telling is developing “The Wallet Chapters”, which will use e-tickets accessed within the Wallet app, on both Apple and Android, to create an overarching story inspired by the information supplied in the tickets (dates, times, locations and other details). 

As I begin the process of developing my project, I have a whole bunch of questions. My proposition is to use the Wallet app on a phone, often used to contain tickets for events, air travel and trains, to access a fictional narrative. My intention is that each ticket contained within the app will unlock a chapter and provide a time and place for that part of the story. I have had an iPhone for roughly ten years and am imagining the story could span that kind of time period.

With this type of project, I often find there is a balance to be struck between immersing myself in the writing and working out the parameters of the technology. At this early stage, I feel it is useful to understand what’s possible with the tech, before going too deep into the story. In fact, in the past, I have found working out constraints is often inspiring and liberating because it sets out useful boundaries.

Working in-house with my company Stand + Stare – an interactive design studio – we are beginning to figure out how to upload the chapters into the Wallets on readers’ phones. Existing platforms, such as Eventbrite, allow you to generate your own tickets, but we have also found a few apps/websites – e.g. Pass2U and Passkit – that look preferable because you can use these to create different kinds of tickets, which can be stored within the Wallet.

We need to consider the look of the tickets themselves, what info we can include and whether we can access web links from each ticket. Links would allow us to deliver parts of the story via audio or link to additional websites.

I have further questions about how the story will be sent to readers’ Wallets and how it will work alongside their own personal tickets. If the dates do go back 10 years, will the tickets appear chronologically amongst the tickets already stored in their Wallets? Will I need to somehow make the story feel like it is connected to them, or will it be okay to have a story appear that is not related to their tickets or connected to them personally? The other, more practical consideration, is how the tickets appear at all. Is there some kind of sign up process, and, then, would a reader receive all the tickets at once? Or would they appear one by one, perhaps daily? Or maybe a reader would receive all the tickets up to the present time and then a few tickets that are time sensitive, such as an epilogue? At this stage in the process, there is a lot to think about.

The inspiration for this project came partly from a Stand + Stare commission that I worked on for Birmingham Library, where we responded to the Wingate Bett Collection of travel tickets. There was no provenance, so I was free to write a fictional narrative. The story was a glamorous, yet tragic, tale of unrequited love told through diary entries between 1934 -1964. Each entry was inspired by a ticket in the collection.

I am always drawn to stories that span generations and reference historical events. I am considering using the Wingate Bett tale as a backdrop for this story, which could be set in the present day or in the recent past. It may link to characters or themes, such as music journalism or the experiences of a woman looking for love and a fulfilling career.  

It is vital that the story fits with the structure and that the tickets in the Wallet underpin each chapter. Once I have some answers to my practical/technical queries, I am excited about getting down to the planning and working out how this story will move the reader through time and place.

seer – Melanie Frances 

Writer Melanie Frances is producing “seer”, a reader-led interdimensional journalistic investigation where readers will act as the protagonist, a journalist who is investigating a new technology that claims to allow people to see into alternative dimensions. 

It feels somewhat contradictory to be sat here, writing about beginnings, considering what it means to start something, when in my work itself I am explicitly trying to push away this structure.

The piece I’m developing, seer, is non-linear and interactive. It offers not a story, but multiple potential stories for the reader to piece together, accounts to believe or doubt, reports to accept as fact or dismiss as fiction.

As I start – because as much as I riff on terms I am actually starting – I’ve been reflecting a lot on what it is to write a non-linear narrative well.

By ‘well’ I absolutely mean considering what good non-linearity looks like – offering meaningful choices, opening a dialogue with your reader, building a sense of the other potential routes they could have gone down – but I’m also asking myself ‘How do I write in a way that best facilitates this?’and ‘How do I write without a direction?’

How do I write without making the choices myself, but instead leaving them to someone else?

For now, my solution lies simply in embracing duality, celebrating multitudes. I accept that all versions of the story are true, all of them happened, and write as such.

“Multiverse” by Leo Villareal in the tunnel which connects the East and West buildings of the National Gallery of Art, Washington

This puts you at a distance from the world you create. If you want to leave the choices to someone else, you can’t also make them yourself. Each potential route has to be treated with the same care and respect. At the moment I’m finding pleasure in leaning into ambiguity and writing accounts that can be read a multitude of different ways. 

A surprise to me has been the ways in which this approach of embracing multiplicity is proving more broadly useful.

In my schedule, I have a period of research, a deep immersion, followed by a period of creation. I’d consume and then I’d respond. But I’m here at the start of my writing period and it feels important for the research to continue. I’m not ready to stop yet. 

I’m building a digital platform for the piece with a creative technologist. I want to be able to tell them exactly how the story will work – what all the choices will be, all the multitude moments I want to hit. But I haven’t written them. I want the platform to be ready so I can write on it, play with it. But I also want the whole story to be written so I can create a platform that suits it.

Everywhere I feel stuck in-between.

So, across the board, across the project, I am pushing myself to embrace duality, accept that things don’t have to happen in an order. I’ll do them all at once, not because that’s how it has to be, but because to make something truly non-linear, you have to inhabit the space of duality. You have to embrace the ambiguity, and celebrate it. Here I go.

For more details on Beyond the Book and the writers visit Paper Nations.

Writer Profiles

Lucy Telling 

In 2009, Lucy Telling co-founded Stand + Stare, an interactive design studio, with her brother Barney. Since then, the Bristol and Stroud-based writer has worked on numerous creative projects, including a recreation of two sets from The Muse by Jessie Burton, using touch tech to trigger audio extracts from the novel in 2018. An extensive list of her projects through Stand + Stare can be found on their website. Lucy is also an award-winning playwright and film-maker whose work has been performed across the country, both in theatres and schools.

Lucy Christopher and Rajiv Edward 

Lucy Christopher and Rajiv Edward are a creative and real life partnership interested in all the possibilities that digital storytelling presents. Rajiv is a Frontend Web Developer and UX designer who works at the University of Bath, and is looking to push further into app development. Lucy is an international bestselling Young Adult author, including novels Stolen, Flyaway, and Storm-wake. Her books have won the Branford Boase Award, the Printz Honor, and have been shortlisted for the Costa and Waterstones prizes. Lucy also works as a senior lecturer. Through her work leading the MA Writing for Young People at Bath Spa, she has helped to kickstart the careers of many writers who have gone on to have several books published themselves

Melanie Frances 

A writer with many hats, Melanie is a theatre-maker, artist, game designer, and mathematician who is also Co-Artistic Director of digital, interactive performance company Produced Moon. She has authored several app-based works, including The Inventor’s Squad, an audio guide that tells the stories of female scientists, mathematicians, engineers or inventors, such as Ada Lovelace and Hedy Lamarr.

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.

Multiple recent digital narrative works utilise recombinant poetics. Yet such an approach to fiction is not dependent on code. Multiple examples predate the computer. In Electronic Literature (2019), Scott Rettberg argues that the study of digital literature ‘not only takes us forward to explore new horizons but also on a retrospective journey that can lead to better understanding of how the past of literature propels us toward its future’ (6). By exploring earlier literary works that utilise recombinant poetics, we can develop a better understanding of the future of digital narratives. To do so, I will first explore early works of recombinant fiction. I will then analyse and reflect on my own creative practice in developing Little Emperor Syndrome (2018), which was born out of researching William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929). I will then draw comparisons between Oulipo works and recombinant fictions by exploring the value of consistency in the recombinant digital novel novelling (2016) by Will Luers (video, design, coding), Hazel Smith (text), and Roger Dean (sound).

English author B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates (1969) is composed of twenty-seven unbound booklets, held together by a wrapper, contained within a box. The first and final booklet are specified; the other twenty-five booklets are presented in a random order. The reader is advised, by a note on the wrapper, that if they ‘prefer not to accept the random order in which they receive the novel, then they may rearrange the sections into any other random order before reading.’ 

The text offers 15,511,210,043,330,985,984,000,000 ways to order the text (Hooper, 2014) but it always tells the story of a sportswriter sent to an unnamed city who is haunted by memories. The twenty-five disordered sections represent these memories, which give the work the impression of unreliable recollection. If one re-reads The Unfortunates, the experience is somewhat different. Yet Johnson wrote the work in some form of linear mode. Even if he composed and drafted various segments simultaneously, sentences were not randomly selected by a computerised word generator. At the very least, Johnson had some conception of an overarching, chronological narrative.

From the author’s perspective, there are numerous ways to approach writing recombinant fiction. One approach is to create a linear fiction and then break it into parts to form a database. Such was the process in developing my Little Emperor Syndrome. The work is a contemporary global drama of the Selkirks, a middle-class Australian family. It contains multiple chapters told from the perspective of each family member. In its development, the text had three iterations. The first draft is a traditional print novel without any digital functionality. It contains eighteen separate chapters with a total length of approximately 80,000 words that depicts six different characters’ perspectives: four chapters for the characters Craig Selkirk, Jocelyn Selkirk, Rosemary Selkirk, and Lachlan Selkirk; and one chapter for the characters Graham Selkirk and Aldo Bulgarelli.

A few years after writing this first draft, I was researching William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. I found Faulkner’s novel challenging as it depicts the titular ‘sound and fury’. The first two chapters are particularly chaotic, reflecting the stream-of-consciousness of the intellectually-disabled Benjy and suicidal Quentin, respectively. Faulkner uses involuntary memory to trigger recollections. For example, in the following sample from the first chapter:

‘Wait a minute.’ Luster said. ‘You snagged on that nail again. Can’t you never crawl through here without snagging on that nail.’

Caddy uncaught me and we crawled through. Uncle Maury said to not let anybody see us, so we better stoop over, Caddy said. Stoop over, Benjy. Like this, see. (2)

Benjy is caught on the nail, and this causes him to recall a memory, which is indicated by the change to italics. The whole chapter takes place in the ‘present’ (April Seventh 1928), but fluctuates between Benjy’s memories. There is no indication as to which period is being referred to, only that a change has occurred. This is signified by a change to italics or reversion back to roman.

As an experiment, I rewrote Little Emperor Syndrome in a style inspired by Faulknerian stream-of-consciousness and his desire for ‘unbroken-surfaced confusion’. This second print draft contains six chapters, with a total length of approximately 44,000 words. The four Jocelyn, Craig, Rosemary, and Lachlan chapters were each compounded into single chapters. As the initial draft uses a free indirect style to allow the characters to recall past events, each of these chapters has multiple periods between which it fluctuates. For example, the Jocelyn chapter contains twenty-four distinct time-frames. Contrasting my two first drafts, the most obvious difference is length. While there were minor changes to the narrative, the fundamental choices and scenes remain in both versions.

In 2018, I again transformed the work by adding digital functionality. This digital version was inspired by the 2012 Folio Society colourised edition of The Sound and the Fury. This 2012 edition was based on an assertion Faulkner made in an angry letter to his literary agent, following a rewrite of his manuscript with which he was dissatisfied:

I wish publishing was advanced enough to use colored ink as I argued with you and Hal in the speak-easy that day. But the form in which you now have it is pretty tough. It presents a most dull and poorly articulated picture to my eye… I think it is rotten, as is. But if you won’t have it so, I’ll just have to save the idea until publishing grows up to it. (Faulkner, 2012, viii)

Included with this edition is a key, which the reader can use to orient themselves in relation to the events depicted in the characters’ stream-of-consciousness. 

The digital version of Little Emperor Syndrome takes Faulkner’s proposals further and allows the reader to additionally fragment the text by introducing various modes of reading. Time-frames are grouped together and can be randomly ordered in a ‘chaos’ mode. Functionality then allows the reader to put the work back together. It can be read chronologically using a ‘cosmos’ mode or colourised and, using a key in the margins, navigated in relation to the diegetic timeline of events. While Little Emperor Syndrome has recombinant functionality, it is not solely a recombinant narrative. Yet as recombinant narrative (i.e. reading using the chaos mode), the randomisation of the lexias creates new connections, making subsequent readings of the narrative seem a little different, not unlike the uncertainty of one’s own recollections. 

Rather than a complete surrender of authorial control to the reader/user to construct the narrative, Little Emperor Syndrome controls the boundaries of play. For example, the first chapter depicts the claustrophobic thoughts of Graham Selkirk as he dies of a heart attack. Whichever way this chapter is ordered, the final lexia always represents a potential dying thought. The chapter depicted in chaos mode always depicts the character’s death of a heart attack. Despite the recombinant functionality, there remains a narrative cohesion that persists (though it should be noted that it is impossible to test out every single permutation, given that number would approach infinity). The reader does not appear to remake the text, at least no more than any other traditional print text.

In 1995, media researcher Bill Seaman, in comparing and contrasting the literary experiments of Oulipo with recent digital works, coined the term ‘recombinant poetics’ as a ‘particular approach to emergent meaning that is used in generative virtual environments and other computer-based combinatoric media forms’ (423). The origin of the word ‘recombinant’ is biological: ‘Of genetic material: assembled by genetic recombination or genetic engineering. Of an organism, cell, or protein: being or containing the expressed product of such genetic material’ (Oxford English Dictionary). 

A recombinant narrative requires a database of materials. This can include text, audio samples, video clips, photographs, and other media. It also requires rules for how these materials are presented or arranged. These rules are determined using computer code or, as in works such as The Unfortunates, set out paratextually. 

In recombinant poetics, Seaman argues that computer code ‘enables a jump from literary invention to literally inventing…’ (428). He believes that recombinant digital works represent a coupure. While the reader of a work such as Johnson’s The Unfortunates is still creating within the bounds of Johnson’s rules of play, Seaman argues that in digital recombinant works the reader well and truly becomes the author of their own experience and meaning.

If Seaman’s assertion is true, then what impact does this have on authors of recombinant fictions in digital environments? Can one even be said to be an author of recombinant fiction? Despite Barthes’s assertion of the death of the author/birth of the reader, the narrative author must, as a practical matter, believe they have some degree of control over what the reader feels and experiences. 

A text that represents a database without a clear narrative is Italo Calvino’s The Castle of Crossed Destinies (1973). It dramatizes a group of gatherers telling stories through a game of tarot cards. A set of tarot cards is essentially a database and the laying of the cards is a set of rules for recombinant functionality. The reading of the cards by the ‘fortune teller’ is a remaking of the narrative from the database. The Castle of Crossed Destinies is made first of pictures (tarot cards, images from the database) and second of text. The reader is presented not only with the interpretations, but illustrations of the laid-out cards. Various tales are told. Once all the cards are laid out, the narrator describes a tale called ‘All the Other Tales’. The tarot card arrangement contains not an infinite number of stories, but too many to stage in such a way as to be notable for the reader. The second half of the novel introduces a new group of gatherers at a tavern. Again, the tarot cards are laid out and various short tales are told. The novel ends by using the tarot cards to simultaneously tell summative versions of Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth. In his notes on the text, Calvino expresses a desire to write a third frame. This idea, however, was abandoned. Calvino claims that he published The Castle of Crossed Destinies to be ‘free of it’:

it has obsessed me for years. … I realized the tarots were a machine for constructing stories; I thought of a book, and I imagined its frame: the mute narrators, the forest, the inn; I was tempted by the diabolical idea of conjuring up all the stories that could be contained in a tarot deck. (119)

The Castle of Crossed Destinies represents not a recombinant fiction, but the dramatization of a recombinant fiction being played out. The initial appeal of such a hypothetical text is the belief that it contains all narratives. The text would allow a reader to read any and all stories, just as Calvino was able to simultaneously read Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth. In Cognitive Fictions, Joseph Tabbi poses the question ‘when all information is archived for eternity … what communication is possible?’ (52). If Calvino’s tarot card machine were allowed to produce (approaching) infinite stories, would it become incommunicable? In telling every story, does the deck of tarot cards in fact tell no story? This is the risk of recombinant fiction. If no set meaning or narrative borders are prescribed, then the recombinant fiction can potentially contain every story. When everything is expressed, nothing is expressed. Such is the shift in the contemporary writer’s attempt to construct meaning and reality: narrative construction is less an act of discovery, more an act of navigation. This much was clear to Calvino in his decision to abandon The Castle of Crossed Destinies.

In Calvino’s final work, Six Memos for the Next Millennium (1988), he composes a series of lectures on literary values he holds dear: lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity. Calvino intended to write a sixth value, consistency, but passed away before the lecture was completed. Nevertheless, his potential treatment of this value can be inferred from his treatment of the other memos. Calvino’s memos are defined through binary opposition. For example, he defines exactitude as the opposite (or absence) of opacity. His memos, however, are not ‘values’ in the sense that one value is preferable to its opposite. Calvino does not posit that exactitude is superior to opacity. While he makes the case for particular values over another, he makes allowances for the possibility of the other value. The memos have ‘anti-constraint’ built into them, e.g. the possibility for an exact text to depict opacity precisely. Indeed, it is the possibility for one value to contain another value that gives it its preference. Regarding consistency, Calvino prefers consistency in that it can contain inconsistency. Such consistency informs the structure of his later hypernovels. For example, in his If on a winter’s night a traveller… (1979), every second chapter of the book presents the first chapter to a different book. At first glance, this does not appear to exhibit structural consistency. Yet, once this inconsistency is established, the expectation is always fulfilled. The inconsistency is consistent.

Shifting from the recombinant fiction writer to the recombinant fiction reader, how does the reader approach the work? Almost all works of electronic literature are defined paratextually (Block, 2018). This is true of digital recombinant fictions. For example, Luers, et al.’s novelling begins with the declaration:

novelling is a recombinant digital novel that employs text, video and sound. … The work is a generative system that algorithmically orders and spatially arranges fragments of media (design elements, text, video and sound) in 6-minute cycles. Every 30 seconds the interface changes, but the user may also click the screen at any time to produce a change.

… novelling unfolds through suggested narrative connections between four characters. The characters, immersed in their isolated life-worlds, appear to be transported elsewhere by what they are reading. Are they reading and thinking each other? How does the writing relate to the reading? Are the words on the screen versions or even drafts of the novel? Do the sounds come from a different interior world? … The variable and deterministic system of selection and arrangement produces a fluid, ever-novel and potential narrative.

The reader is not thrust into the work with nothing. Rather, they are informed not only of the digital construction, but also of the narrative construction (i.e. that there are at least four interconnected characters). In other words, the paratext introduces a level of consistency. Of his process, Luers (2016) writes that the narrative and generative system emerge symbiotically (6). Of novelling, he (2018) writes that the text fragments of a ‘virtual’ or ‘potential’ novel suggest ‘other fictional characters in acts of reading, observation and interpretation of the world.’ He highlights that the work uses ‘repetition, abstraction, multiplicity, absence, opacity and noise to depict and enact the liminality of reading and authoring fiction’ (it should be noted that Luers’s values – repetition, abstraction, multiplicity, absence, opacity, and noise – seem to echo/invert Calvino’s values of lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity, and consistency.) Luers’s use of the term ‘noise’ refers not only to the use of sound, but of confusion, clamour, and chaos. Yet ‘narrative’ itself suggests some level of order, some attempt to make meaning.

In the case of ‘noise’, the binary opposite is ‘order’. In novelling, there is some level of consistency: the four characters. Somewhere, in the work, the reader/user maintains the assumption that the four characters remain, on some level, consistent. With no consistency, the work would cease to be a recombinant narrative. It would simply be recombinant. 

Luers (2016) writes that in digital fiction, ‘narrative’ is understood as a process: 

‘If every reading is different and there is no “correct” path, then the “narrative” remains an untamed force within the text and may never be completed, extracted or fully mapped by any reader. Is such a text still a narrative? Perhaps not.’ 

I would argue that in recombinant works such as Luers’s, the narrative is not completely untamed. While no one is able to read all 15,511,210,043,330,985,984,000,000 orderings of The Unfortunates, there is still a narrative that is comprehended on some level. The same is true, to some degree, of novelling. The success of Luers, et al’s work comes from the fact that it pushes the limits of ‘reading’ and meaning-making, yet it is not so untamed that all consistency is abandoned. In fact, it is hard to imagine what a truly untamed narrative force would look like. Not an absence of narrative that can be filled with all meanings, as in Calvino’s tarot cards, but a narrative work of total inconsistency. One imagines a work like Beckett’s prose, constantly attempting to snip any attempt to comprehend. Yet there is still a character somewhere in Molloy, just as there are (at least) four characters in novelling. The work that is perfectly inconsistent would be perfectly consistent in its inconsistency. This would be its meaningful process, which would be understood as narrative.

References

Beckett, S. (1959) Molloy. Richmond: Calder and Boyars.

Block, F.Q. (2018) Electronic Literature as Paratextual Construction. MATLIT: Materialities of Literature. S.I., 6(1), 11–26. https://impactum-journals.uc.pt/matlit/article/view/5244. Accessed 19 May 2019.

Calvino, I. (1988) Six Memos For The Next Millennium. Translated by Patrick Creagh. London: Vintage.

—. (1976) The Castle of Crossed Destinies. Translated by William Weaver. London: Pan Books.

Faulkner, W. (1987) William Faulkner Manuscripts. Edited by Joseph Leo Blotner, et al. New York: Garland Publishing.

—. (2012) The Sound and the Fury. London: The Folio Society.

—. (1995) The Sound and the Fury. London: Vintage.

Hooper, M. (2014) Why BS Johnson suits the digital age. The Guardian, 15 Oct. https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2014/oct/14/why-bs-johnson-suits-digital-age. Accessed 19 May 2019.

Johnson, B.S. (1999) The Unfortunates. London: Picador.

Luers, W. et al. (2016) novelling. Cork: New Binary Press. http://novelling.newbinarypress.com. Accessed 19 May 2019.

Luers, W. (2018) Getting Lost in Narrative Virtuality. Electronic Book Review. https://electronicbookreview.com/essay/getting-lost-in-narrative-virtuality/. Accessed 19 May 2019.

—. (2016) Having Your Story and Eating It Too: Affect and Narrative in Recombinant Fiction. The Creative Media and Digital Culture Program. Washington: Washington State University.

“recombinant, adj. and n.” (2019) OED Online. Oxford: Oxford University Press. www.oed.com/view/Entry/159697. Accessed 19 May 2019.

Rettberg, S. (2019) Electronic Literature. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Seaman, B. (2001) OULIPO vs Recombinant Poetics. Leonardo, 34(5), 423–430.

Tabbi, J. (2002) Cognitive Fictions. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Wright, D.T.H. (2018) Little Emperor Syndrome. www.littleemperorsyndrome.com. Accessed 19 May 2019.

“Is the smartphone – always with us, always on – the perfect reading device?” – Kate Pullinger (Writer and Professor of Creative Writing and Digital Media at Bath Spa University)

The newly launched Beyond the Book commission is for digital writers with a connection to the South West of England who want to answer this question.

Developed by creative writing incubator Paper Nations and The Writing Platform’s editorial director Kate Pullinger, this newly launched commission has been created to challenge writers to develop innovative models for writing and publication and promote dialogue between writers, technologists and publishers.

A commission of up to £5,000 is available for three writers with a connection to Somerset, Wiltshire or Gloucestershire (in the UK) to spend six months experimenting with the possibilities of using a smartphone to tell stories. This might involve paying a creative technologist to help you bring an idea into reality, to help develop your own digital skills, to buy tech or pay for writing time.

The commission is looking to support text-based works, which could include text shared through audio (but not films that focus only on visual images, scripts, or plays). Projects could look at how text is experienced on a screen, or how the functions of a smartphone, such as sensors, cameras, or GPS, can be used to tell a story. Digital writers might want to develop a work of ambient literature, an experiment in augmented reality, or a poetry film. Or something completely new.

Beyond the Book’s selection panel brings together experts in the field; Maja Thomas (Hachette Publishing’s Chief Innovation Officer and Director of the Innovation Program), Louisa Adjoa Parker (Writer and Immersion Fellow in the South West Creative Technology Network), Steve Hollyman (Programme Coordinator and Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University) and Andy Wood (Creative Technologist at Kaleider, Exeter).

Paper Nations will support commissioned writers to create a finished digital work, which will be showcased at a premiere in Bath, UK, in spring 2020, and at Bath Spa University’s MIX 2021 – a leading conference on writing and technology. Writers will also create a series of short articles for The Writing Platform.

This commission has been developed as part of Paper Nations’ 2019-21 Writing for All programme, which works to increase innovation and diversity the the South West of the UK.

Writers can apply at www.papernations.org and until 1st September 2019. Successful applicants will be announced in October 2019.

Email writers@papernations.org for more information.

There is sand in the motors and in the corners of my eyes. The few notes I’ve made are smudged with rain and when my fingers become too cold, I sacrifice writing for the shelter of my coat pockets. For the last few months I’ve been writing on, into and with the muddy sands of Morecambe bay as a writer-in-residence for Ensemble – an environmental science and digital technologies project at Lancaster University – and it involves spending much more time writing on the beach than at my desk.

 As a writer and researcher, I’ve developed an approach to storymaking that involves following the subject I want to tell a story about and seeing where it takes me. This means I set out not knowing what form a finished work will take – I don’t imagine a story housed in a book or on a screen. Instead, I try to follow the subject and let the story develop from there, both imaginatively and physically. This results in a curious interplay between subject, content, form and medium and in the making of what I think of as whole stories. Working in this way I’ve made an altitude-responsive version of the Persephone myth, where the reader has to keep climbing higher to hear more of the story, a flood lantern tale that’s only illuminated when the flood risk is higher at spring tides, and stories about lichens that respond to air quality and light.

For Hades, an audio story made to be read by touch in the dark, 2016

I’m currently creating stories for a sand library by following the subjects I encounter on the beach –  barnacles, oystercatchers, periwinkles, the tiny zooids of hornwrack, and sand mason worms are current favourites. Alongside time spent observing species and reading about them in books, I’ve found myself pleating and crumpling paper to try to understand shell architecture and hacking toy cars so I can use them to write in the sand. Skipping across disciplinary boundaries and learning new things makes me happy – I originally trained as an actor, later did an MA in creative writing and then a PhD in design and computing, but at the centre of everything I do is story. I want to make good stories and I’m fascinated by the ways that the materials and methods used to write fiction, and the technologies used to make and share the work, all help shape the stories created, often without writers being aware of this at all.

When I first started working with digital technologies several years ago, I was curious about how I could use them to create stories, but I didn’t expect to end up playing in sand and making stories that dissolve in the rain. Once I started asking questions about how technologies shape stories, though, I soon realised all materials are up for grabs. A stick shaped to write in the sand is a technology too. N. Katherine Hayles (2002) has written extensively on the relationship between digital writing and print technologies. She points out that materiality and meaning is entangled in all forms of literature and that working with digital technologies usefully reminds us of this. And print technology doesn’t just shape the medium of the book, it shapes form and content too. Walter Ong (2012) notes that without print technology, the novel – with its emphasis on individual authorship, linear storytelling, interiority and closure – couldn’t have evolved (pp.143-6). Print technologies enabled stories to be shared over vast distances of space and time, but they also brought with them commodification and gatekeeping. For hundreds of years, print technologies have inspired, enabled and limited who has written stories, how they’ve gone about it and what they have chosen to write.

The interior of altitude-responsive story, Persephone’s Footsteps, 2016

Comparatively, digital technologies are in their infancy, yet as James Bridle (2018) writes, there’s an urgent need for people to become literate in new technologies. It’s not enough even to understand how things work, he says, we need to know ‘how things came to be, and how they continue to function in the world in ways that are often invisible and interwoven’ (Bridle, 2018, p.3). For me, working with awareness of the lineage and impact of many technologies is part of a necessary exploration of how I can best make and share stories in and about the world. 

I started the list below on the beach one freezing cold morning when everything I was trying to do was going wrong. I called it ‘rules for sandwriting’ to help remind me what I am focusing on and why. I’m sharing a fleshed out version of the list here in the hope that even a writer who is wedded to their desk, or who is filled with horror at the idea of grappling with code, might still be prompted to think about their own relationship with technologies, and the ways these might be shaping the works they write.

We are Riverish, a water-soluble flood story, 2018

1 Write outside

I could be sat at my desk in the warm and dry and remember all the times I’ve been to the beach. As a writer I am used to bringing scraps of memory, reading and imagination together to construct a story. My fictional beach would be made from words and sentence structure and hazy impressions, and would probably be convincing enough, but when I write outside, the materials I have to hand to construct my beach are immediately expanded. Before starting this project, I didn’t know a curlew’s calls and hadn’t watched periwinkles leave grazing trails on stones. I would never have imagined waves frozen into flakes of ice, or fields of lugworm trails so crowded they darkened the sand. Writing outside brings paths of curiosity to follow, vivid specificity to my writing, and most importantly, serendipity. I never know what will happen and how that will feed into the work. Virginia Woolf wrote of the need for a room of one’s own and Stephen King (2000, pp.121-122) says a writer needs a space with a door, so you can shut out the world, but I don’t want to shut out the world to write –  I want to explore it instead.

Writing outside is also a perspective-widening way of working. Rather than being alone in a room with my thoughts, I’m exposed to the overlapping world-making projects (to use Anna Tsing’s term: 2015) from many lives lived on the beach. The sands are a palimpsest of footprints, wave marks and breathing holes. Here, I can ask myself about the sea’s stories, if bird tales are carried on the wind, and if barnacles dream in their shells. If I’m going to make stories about the world, for people to experience in the world, then sitting at a desk to imagine them into being isn’t going to be enough.

2 Play

Why do we stop playing? Writing is a creative act, but the play is all inside our heads. I’ve sat in rooms of writers who can’t bring themselves to attempt to draw for fear of being rubbish at it. Sadly, I’ve encountered the same thing in primary school classrooms, where already children have become inhibited by the desire to do something ‘right’. Maybe it’s better to think of drawing and writing not as nouns – shiny, finished things – but as mud-spattered verbs like the word making, and to think of all these actions as methods for discovery. For me, anyway, this somehow makes it easier for finished works to eventually emerge.

On the beach, I try writing with stones and wind, shadows and sand. I also play with technologies, not to determine what shape stories will take but to explore how different stories could be shared. I often work with microcontrollers, tiny low cost and robust computers that are easy to code and experiment with. Using Microbits and Arduinos I can play with ways of using sensors so a story can be revealed in response to light levels or a reader’s movements or tide times. Treating this work as play helps me be less intimidated by any new technologies. I can play around with story ideas, materials and tech, moving back and forth between them all as an idea starts to accrete a more solid form.

3 Watch out for the incoming tide

Working in the bay with its quicksands and rapid tides this is a literal reminder to look up regularly, but also to look up from what I’m doing and check I’m not getting swept away by novelty. I know that I am prone to getting excited about whizzy new tech. Scoping out possibilities helps me to understand what I could do but running from one new technology to another without ensuring there’s a reason to use them doesn’t work. Cal Newport’s (2019) take on the philosophy of digital minimalism is helpful here; he says to start with values and then ask ‘Is this the best way to use technology to support this value?’ (p.29). Too many works I’ve seen prioritise a new technology over the creation of meaningful fiction, or they use technology in a way that’s incongruous to the story being told.

I’m trying to make sure any tech I use helps me to:

…reveal something that’s usually hidden

…ask people to pay close attention to something in the world

…encourage shared experiences of story

…invite participation in storymaking

…or emphasises a sense of wonder in the story and in the place

 If a technology isn’t helping me to do any of these things, I’ll know I’ve got carried away.

 4 Hold your nerve

 It takes longer for a story to come together like this. Works-in-progress, fragments and scraps, driftwood and shells are strewn all over my house. Not all my stories are written like this. Some are much more straightforward, and I send them to editors so they can live in books. The other stories though, the ones that escape easy categorisation and library classification, require me to hold my nerve. I have to keep remembering to make outside my imagination, in the world. Writing habits are hard to shake off and as I keep finding out, sand is not paper.

Experimenting with sandwriting using Microbits

The Sand Library project is still very much a work-in-progress. At the moment, I’m trying to find a way to write bird stories with footprints, making a tidal story dispenser, some tiny tales in shells, and working on a pen that makes the wind visible when you write. Needless to say, all of this is writing as exploration. There’s no opportunity here for creating fictions that can be easily packaged, marketed and distributed in bookshops or online. There are, however, opportunities for sharing thought-provoking narrative experiences and for encouraging engagement with stories and storymaking outside.

Working in this way has encouraged me to trust that whatever else happens, when the end product isn’t fixed in advance, the story will find its own shape and I’ll learn a lot along the way. The process is risky and fraught, and living with the imaginative and physical detritus of storymaking in this way can be more than a little overwhelming, but the sense of possibility keeps me exploring. If you have any questions, I’ll be on the beach.

 References

Bridle, J. (2018) The New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future. London: Verso.

Dean, C. (2019) Making wonder tales: an exploration of material writing practice for ecological storymaking  http://www.research.lancs.ac.uk/portal/en/publications/making-wonder-tales(ae3caa21-321f-4b4b-9b07-5557033e8170).html

Hayles, N.K. (2002) Writing Machines. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.

King, S (2000) On Writing: a Memoir of the Craft. London: Hodder & Stoughton.

Newport, C. (2019) Digital Minimlaism: On Living Better with Less Technology. London Penguin.

Tsing, A. (2015) The Mushroom at the End of the World. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 

When I first began writing my short story ‘Rupture’, I didn’t intend to work with artists I’d never met to produce a piece incorporating animated visuals and sound; this collaborative process came about as the project evolved. Initially, I had the fundamental elements of a primarily print-based work: I tapped into an omniscient narrator who had the capacity to access the psyche of my two primary characters, both of whom seemed to be facing emotional and psychological challenges. Specifically, I envisaged a mother figure, Janelle, who was struggling with her marriage and the responsibilities associated with parenting. There was also Jeffery, her twelve-year-old son, who—for some reason to which I was not immediately privy—had developed mutism. As I connected with Janelle and her son more deeply, it became evident that Jeffery’s condition was the result of a traumatic event he and his mother had witnessed: a violent bank robbery. Although Jeffrey was unable (or unwilling) to speak, I discovered that he often chose to draw as a means of expressing himself; thus, it made sense to have the story illustrated. Images, I believed, would add a level of depth and texture to the work, while also providing Jeffery with a ‘voice’ and, therefore, an opportunity to communicate directly with readers. So, almost by chance, the first step towards creating a multimodal piece was taken.

When considering ideas for illustrations (image, style, and composition), I knew I wanted simple, stark lines with a substantial amount of block, contrasting colour. This approach, it seemed, would fit with Jeffery’s age and so lend the story greater verisimilitude. Yet, I also needed the images to be sophisticated and emotive. After trawling the Internet, I found the art work of Baltimore-based artist Joe Maccarone. I reached out to Joe, then anxiously awaited his reply. I heard back a few days later and was thrilled to learn he wanted to collaborate. As serendipity would have it, Joe is also highly accomplished in the field of digital animation. After ‘watching’ some of his work online, it occurred to me that we could use animated visuals (GIF’s) as a means of creating a more immersive reading experience. Joe agreed and began transforming the eight initial illustration proofs into animated image files. At this point—given such files require a computer and/or mobile-based operating system in order to be run—‘Rupture’ entered the realm of born-digital narrative.

Importantly, born-digital works cannot be transposed to another medium without negatively impacting some aspect of their aesthetic or artistic features. Further explanation is provided by the Reading Digital Fiction website:

Rather than existing as a digital version of a print novel, digital fictions are what are known as ‘born-digital’—that is, they would lose something of their aesthetic and/or structural form and meaning if they were removed from the digital medium. For example, they may contain hyperlinks, moving images, mini-games or sound effects. (https://readingdigitalfiction.com/)

The above definition is fitting for ‘Rupture’ which, when confined to the realm of print, loses digital-oriented aesthetics generated by the use of animated visuals and sound. Significantly, the move to an electronic medium opened up a realm of creative possibilities; we were suddenly able to have the images move and morph in a way that might intensify their impact and even amplify meaning. Take Image Four from the narrative, for instance (see below):

Image 4 – Jeffery and his Demons

The above visual accompanies a scene in which Jeffery has been asked by a psychiatrist to draw whatever comes to mind when ‘you think of that day at the bank’. Evidently, the image depicts a wolf-like figure quivering over Jeffery’s shoulder, almost breathing done his neck, so to speak; this implies he is in the process of recalling a frightening presence and/or occurrence. Indeed, the visual is deeply connected to Jeffery’s recollections: the men who held up the bank were wearing wolf-masks to disguise their identities. In this way, the image literally ‘paints a picture’ of Jeffery’s thoughts, providing insights into the source of his internal trauma. The visual is also designed to pique readers’ interest in terms of what happened when he and his mother were at the bank; it works to foreshadow the traumatic and violent nature of the bank robbery, an event that is revealed via a flashback later in the narrative.

The next visual to appear in the story not only works to illustrate the scene of an unfolding counselling session attended by Jeffery, Janelle, and two psychiatrists, but also to deliver a multilayered message. (See Image 5):  

Image 5: Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing

When the above image file runs, the face of one of the psychiatrists transforms intermittently into a wolf, symbolising Jeffery’s ongoing anxiety, along with the tendency of wolf-like men to haunt his psyche. If this image were static, it would not represent Jeffery’s thought processes with the same degree of emotive impact and thematic resonance as that achieved via the GIF. Hence, it can be argued that animation adds a layer of complexity to the visuals; it allows them to transmit a sense of heightened emotion and immediacy, while also prompting readers to search for deeper meanings.

As I viewed the complete catalogue of animated visuals set to accompany ‘Rupture’, I wondered what other digitally-oriented features could be utilised. How else could we provide immersive aesthetics designed to enrich the reading experience? This led me to consider the incorporation of music and sound effects, or, more specifically, to have each GIF accompanied by an individual soundtrack. Another Internet search followed—this time for a music composer/sound engineer. During my investigations, I stumbled across Stu Campbell’s award-winning webcomic ‘These Memories Won’t Last’. I observed how, as I scrolled, the music changed, deepening the sensory experience while echoing alterations in setting and scenario. After perusing the ‘credits’ of the webcomic, I discovered the composer and sound design artist responsible for the soundtrack was a gentleman by the name of Lhasa Mencur. A quick Google search led me to Lhasa’s website. I fired a message through cyberspace explaining the nature of my project and, again, waited. Lhasa responded promptly and, much to my delight, said he was happy to come on-board.

In composing the tracks for ‘Rupture’, Lhasa deployed sound design techniques previously used in his commercial sample libraries (which includes sound for video games) to create looping ambiences with minimal memory footprint. He produced a total of eight music-based soundtracks—one track for each GIF—all of which have been optimised for HTML5. The industrial ambient feel of the music is intended to reflect the narrative’s serious, sombre tone, as well as amplify alterations in mood and tension. In addition, carefully constructed sound effects kick in at certain times, lending yet another layer of drama and texture to the narrative. Ultimately, the soundtracks complement the animated visuals in such a way as to bring the storyworld to life for readers, intensifying their immersive experience. To complete the narrative’s audio features, Lhasa worked upon an audio narration (where I read the story aloud), which has been over-laid and synchronised with the eight soundtracks mentioned above. The audio narration function ensures that visually-impaired site visitors can listen to the story, as well as the music and/or sound effects associated with different scenes and visuals.

As the project proceeded, it became evident that I would need somewhere to ‘hold’ and display the work— i.e. a website. I contacted a few web programmers, but found the cost of their services to be prohibitive. Then, acting on a hunch, I emailed Shekhar Kalra, a computer science lecturer at the Royal Institute of Melbourne Technology. Shekhar graciously agreed to organise a small group of fourth-year RMIT computer programming students to build the Rupture site under the supervision of Amir Homayoon Ashrafzadeh. The students —Dae Yong Kim, George Hanna, and Jiajun Zhu—constructed and coded the website using the Heroku platform, an integrated data service system designed to deploy and run modern applications. The students designed all aspects of the site, including its full screen layout, the dynamic (moving) homepage, and colour scheme. They also established internal links that lead to separate webpages associated with Teaching Notes for the story and a list of creative credits.  Finally, the students embedded the GIFs into the site and ensured the soundtracks were correctly matched to each image which, as I have been informed, was not a particularly easy task.

The finished product is a work that incorporates different communication modes, prompting readers to deploy skills associated with multiliteracy—as we all do when accessing and navigating the digital medium. If you’d like to immerse yourself within the multimodal aesthetics of ‘Rupture’, then head to http://rupture.net.au/story. I hope you enjoy the experience.

I first went to MIX in July 2013. It was the second MIX and the first conference I had ever attended. When I arrived, I stood at the bottom of Corsham Court’s long driveway and looked up at one of  the grandest houses I had ever seen; an Elizabethan mansion that houses Bath Spa University’s graduate courses. The grounds had been designed generations ago by Capability Brown and there were peacocks wandering across the lawn.

The conference – which is all about creative writing and technology – was special. At that time I was an independent researcher and gave a paper on collaborative forms of digital authorship. I had never presented at a conference before and didn’t really know the conventions of what was expected. Everyone was supportive; they asked questions about my research, they prompted me to think about my subject in new ways and I met people that I still know today.

Over the years, I have kept coming back to MIX for conversations about digital writing, for the keynotes and workshops, for insights from writers who have worked in the field for decades and from new researchers. Held every two years, this year is the fifth MIX conference. I have now been to dozens of conferences but MIX is still special to me. This year, the conference is returning to Corsham Court, to the peacocks and one of the grandest houses I have ever seen; where I now work.

Returning to Corsham Court means that the conference will be an intimate, single strand version, curated for a smaller audience. We want to bring an international audience to a beautiful corner of Wiltshire for the time to think and the space to talk about the intersections between writing and technology.

This year, I’m  producing the conference, along with Professor Kate Pullinger, Lucy English and Dr Helen Goodman. We are focusing on experiential storytelling, including immersive technologies and new forms of publishing, from transmedia and poetry film to virtual reality to AI in storytelling. We are proud to an announce a packed programme of six panels and our speakers; Guy Gadney, CEO of To Play For and Charisma.ai, a storytelling platform powered by artificial intelligence; Dr Donna Hancox, transmedia and digital storytelling scholar at Queensland Institute of Technology and editor of The Writing Platform; Thomas Zandegiocomo, Artistic Director Zebra Poetry Film Festival, Berlin; and writer Nikesh Shukla.

We think we have curated a MIX that will appeal to new scholars, writers and practitioners attending their first conference and those who have given keynotes all over the world.

We hope you’ll book your ticket and join us. There will be plenty to talk about.

After the success of the last four MIX conferences, MIX 2019 returns to the beautiful surroundings of Bath Spa University’s Corsham Court Campus in Wiltshire on the 1^st and 2^nd July 2019. This year’s conference will be a more intimate, single strand version, curated for a smaller audience to give time and space to instigate conversations around digital writing with a focus on experiential storytelling, including immersive technologies and new forms of publishing, from transmedia and poetry film to virtual reality to AI in storytelling. Confirmed speakers include publisher, Maja Thomas, Chief Innovation Officer, Hachette Innovation Program; Thomas Zandegiocomo, Artistic Director Zebra Poetry Film Festival, Berlin; Guy Gadney, Charisma.ai and writer Nikesh Shukla.

Bath Spa University is the UK’s foremost provider of creative writing programmes at undergraduate, masters and PhD level and MIX is well-established as an innovative forum for the discussion and exploration of writing and technology. MIX has previously attracted an international cohort of contributors from the UK, Australia, and Europe as well as North and South America. MIX is situated within the international research centres, the Centre for Cultural and Creative Industries, in collaboration with the Centre for Media Research, Creative Writing Research Centre, and The Writing Platform.

This year, our conference focuses on experiential storytelling, which encompasses works that foreground the experience of the audience or reader. Within the single-strand programme there will be four themed panels. We would like to encourage the submission of research papers and artist/practitioner presentations on the following topics;

• Emerging forms of digitally-mediated narrative, including projects that use artificial intelligence, machine learning, algorithmic writing practices and locative-aware narratives.
• Poetry film, including the future of poetry film, current developments in social media sharing, current developments in poetry film content and practice.
• Immersive technologies and narrative, including Extended and Mixed Reality, VR, Augmented Reality, and Ambient Literature
• Ethics of Storytelling, including accessibility and appropriation, but also issues around technology and ethics, i.e embodiment in VR, algorithmic bias in cultural works that use AI, etc.

A conference where creative writing and media creation intersect with and/or are dependent upon technology should be as interdisciplinary as possible, and that’s what we are aiming for with MIX 2019. The conference will host a vibrant mix of academic papers, practitioner presentations and keynotes.

We are looking for proposals for 15 minute papers/ presentations or 60 minute panels (composed of three 15 minute papers with time for q&a). Please submit 300 word abstracts for each paper/presentation you are proposing via http://mixconference.org/submit/ by Monday 4th February 2019. We will let you know whether your submission has been successful by the end of February 2019.

Speakers who are selected to present at the conference will be encouraged to develop their papers into innovative, practice-focused outputs published in Bath Spa University’s recently launched International Journal of Creative Media Research. The journal is an interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed and open access journal devoted to pushing forward the approaches to and possibilities for publishing creative media-based research.

For queries on your conference submission, email mix@bathspa.ac.uk

You can find the full call for papers on our website.