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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Core Values
by Benjamin Laird

Shortlisted for the QUT Digital Literature Award, Core Values is a response to the iconic Australian poem My Country, by Dorothea Mackellar. Updating the original text, it uses technology to not only animate language but transform the experience of the poem itself. The formality of the original poem is replicated, but also cut apart and interspersed with dehumanising jargon, map coordinates, GIS data, and technobabble made to scroll endlessly within a three-dimensional box, lined by historical maps of the nation.

It’s a poem and a representation of an Australia in which you are quite literally trapped, a prison. The poem’s ‘stereoscopic mode’ for viewing in a simple VR device only accentuates the feeling of being closed in, a confronting and powerful match between text and technology.

https://poetry.codetext.net/core-values/

Since taking on my role in the team building the Digital Literary Atlas of Wales, I’ve been lucky enough to visit some spectacularly uninteresting places: motorway service stations, forgettable B&Bs, generic fast food outlets, characterless pubs. I’ve spent countless hours in my battered little blue car, crawling behind tractors on snaking mid-Welsh B-roads, swearing loudly as traffic stops to standstill on some stretch of the M4, stubbornly ignoring the disconcerting noises coming from beneath the bonnet as I reach speeds upwards of 60mph. It has been a pleasure. And I say that without a hint of sarcasm, because if this project has taught me anything, it has been to be attentive to unique moments in space and time.

I’ve also been to some genuinely spectacular places. At the risk of sounding like Rutger Hauer in that scene at the end of Blade Runner, I’ve seen some amazing things this year. I’ve visited Baron Hill, a ruined mansion on the island of Anglesey which nature has almost completely occupied. I’ve climbed sketchy ladders to the top of a church tower to gaze at Skirrid Fawr, the magnificent “Holy Mountain” in the Black Mountains of the Welsh border country. I’ve ripped moss away from gravestones to read inscriptions in a remote cemetery on a mountaintop in the south Wales valleys.

Yesterday, I drove north and visited a breathtaking abandoned slate quarry in Snowdonia. Each of these has been a profoundly moving experience. Each has affected my understanding of spaces and my place within them.

The Digital Literary Atlas of Wales is an AHRC-funded project based at Cardiff University. It is a new exercise in “Literary Geography”, and follows the much-vaunted “spatial turn” in the humanities, which resulted in the reconsideration of the notion of “space” as not essentially “there”, straightforwardly available to perception, but as socially and culturally encoded, an intellectual construct. While there is an undeniable phenomenological aspect to the way we experience spaces, there is also another deeply social, cultural dimension to this: we may experience spaces through the body, but we understand and make sense of them through language and culture. As a result, spaces accrue meanings through time.

As Jon Anderson has written, ‘the product of the intersection between context and culture is place.’ These accrued social conceptions of place invariably impinge on the ways we inhabit and experience them. One of the aims of Literary Geography is to explore the role of language and literature in this interactive process of creating “place”. It asks: how do literary texts affect our conceptions of space/place? How does the location of fiction affect the kinds of stories that can be told? How can a “spatial” reading of literature help us forge new understandings of places and our place within them? And, importantly, how can digital deep maps of literary texts enhance the ways we answer such questions?

In order to explore these issues, the project team is currently curating and building an innovative website – a Digital Literary Atlas – that will provide digital “deep maps” of a selection of English-language novels set in Wales. “Deep mapping” involves not only “geoparsing” the locations described in works of fiction – that is, pinpointing locations on a map

– but, further, supplementing these data-points with a range of other material: historical maps, sociological data, visual representations of the regions (films and paintings, for instance), interviews with authors on location, and more. This material is then curated and read against the themes and plots of the texts themselves.

We have deliberately chosen novels set in “real”, or at least “locatable” places in order to do this. One of those we have chosen to map is Christopher Meredith’s Shifts (1988), a brilliant novel that charts the personal, emotional effects of the decline of the steel industry in south Wales. This is a text closely attuned to the meanings that places accrue in time, and the ways in which individuals and communities construct and experience themselves in relation to them. Based in the town of Tredegar, close to what was once the colossal Ebbw Vale steelworks in south Wales, the novel explores the ways in which the economic forces that were dismantling those steelworks in the late 1970s were at the same time dismantling the social and psychological frameworks that gave the region its sense of identity. Shifts periodically clocks into the consciousness of three main characters, each struggling to locate their identity at this time and place of profound social change. Tellingly, the characters visit “real world” locations in their process of reflecting on their place in this changing community.

One site of major significance in the novel is Cefn Golau cemetery, a burial ground built high on a mountain above the valley for the victims of a nineteenth-century cholera epidemic. Gathering material for the deep map of Shifts, Kirsti Bohata and I visited the cemetery with Christopher Meredith on a windswept day back in September. It is, undeniably, a profoundly affective place.

Chris summed it up in our interview with him later that day: ‘it’s a powerful place […] something comes out of the earth there’. Indeed the gravestones do appear to rise out of the earth in an almost elemental way – jutting out of the ground at all angles, with some so heavily mossed that they appear almost timeless, part of the fabric of the landscape. Even without an understanding of its historical origins, it’s impossible not to be moved by the rugged, ghostly power of the place. But beyond this, viewing the cemetery through the lens of the novel enables other kinds of perception. Indeed, Shifts’ depiction of Cefn Golau invites us to think about the symbolic power such places accumulate over time, and the ways we locate our selves in relation to them.

In Shifts, the cemetery is viewed very differently from the perspective of two different characters. Jack experiences the site from a purely personal perspective, through the lens of personal memory and physical experience. Visiting the cemetery on a hangover, the physical experience of being exposed to the elements offers Jack a (perhaps unwanted) reminder of the life left in him. Yet at the same time, the powerful symbolic charge of the site forces him to reflect on his mortality:

A sense of space. Journey’s end. The two sounded at odds, yet he felt them both. He felt, too, the blood move in his head. A full throb in his temples and pain in the eyeballs.

Jack’s friend Keith, however, experiences the site very differently. An amateur historian, Keith attempts to combat the encroaching anomie caused by the decline of the steel industry by learning about the history of his town as an early industrial ironworking community. His visit to the cemetery is informed by his understanding of its past, and he finds solace in situating himself within the historical continuum of the region and connecting himself with the people that once inhabited it.

He walked on a few paces. The ground was rutted with settled graves, which were very close together. The next stone was wide, not such a dark grey as John’s. Benjamin Davies. A man in his thirties. 7fed Mawrth 1850. How soon after John? Keith imagined John small and dark with curly hair. At nineteen, already working for nine or ten years. Ben was a larger man, looked older than his age.

Shifts is a novel that eloquently explores the ways in which locations and landmarks function as part-real, part-imagined co-ordinates, symbolic reference points by which we orientate our senses of self. Moreover, its own depiction of the cemetery has now further contributed to its symbolic, cultural resonance; I would now find it impossible to visit Cefn Golau cemetery without contemplating Meredith’s descriptions of it in Shifts. Read against the real landscape it describes, the novel throws into relief the curious ways in which we both physically experience and intellectually construct the spaces we inhabit.

The aim of the Digital Literary Atlas of Wales is to encourage readers and writers to explore the symbolic resonance of such places for themselves. On one level it will serve as a digital resource, providing textual and contextual information about novels and the locations in which they are set. The deep map of Shifts, for example, will provide maps, images and video footage of the locations imagined in the text, alongside historical and cultural material to augment readings of the novel. When explaining this, I usually reach to Damian Walford Davies’s description of deep mapping as a ‘critical and affective inhabitation of the cultural dimensionality of a literary work’. In this sense, users will be able to adopt Keith’s perspective, and experience places and landscapes through a culturally and historically-informed lens. Indeed, even if users are unable to visit the locations in question, the website will itself be an online space with which they can digitally “inhabit” these places.

But crucially, the website aims to encourage readers and writers to adopt Jack’s perspective too. Part of the pleasure of working on this project has been the sheer phenomenological thrill of visiting new places, seeing new things; of embracing the unusual, the new, the accidental –even the banal. The Digital Literary Atlas of Wales aims to show that literature can provide the starting point for more responsive, sensitive understandings of places and our relation to them. It invites people to step outside the normal flow of their lives, to re-orientate themselves within known and new landscapes, and inscribe places – and themselves – with new meaning.

The Digital Literary Atlas of Wales project team consists of Jon Anderson, Reader in Human Geography within the School of Geography and Planning, Cardiff University (Principal Investigator), Kirsti Bohata, Director of CREW (the Centre for Research into the English Literature and Language of Wales), Swansea University (Co-Principal Investigator), Jeff Morgan (Research Associate), and Kieron Smith (Research Associate).

For further information: Literaryatlas.wales

Literaryatlas.cymru

@LitAtlasWales

litatlaswales@gmail.com

The first ever UK competition to find the best new examples of popular digital fiction has been launched by Sheffield Hallam University and Bangor University.

The Opening Up Digital Fiction Writing Competition, run by Sheffield Hallam University and Bangor University, and part of the AHRC-funded Reading Digital Fiction project, is inviting entries from people across the UK and in two languages – English and Welsh.

Digital fictions are different to e-books and are known as ‘born digital’, as they would lose some of their form and meaning if they were removed from the digital medium.

Digital fictions require the reader to interact with the narrative throughout the reading experience. This may include hyperlinks, moving images, mini-games or sound effects. In many digital fictions, the reader has a role in constructing the narrative by controlling a character’s journey through the story.

Hypertexts, text-adventure games, multimedia stories, interactive video, literary games, and some mobile apps are all examples of types of digital fiction.

There are five prizes up for grabs in the competition – Judges’ Prize, People’s Choice, Welsh Language Prize*, Student Prize and Children’s Story Prize.

Winners will receive a cash prize, publication on the Reading Digital Fiction website, and a series of mentoring meetings with select judges on a future digital fiction project.

Dr Alice Bell, a reader in the Humanities department at Sheffield Hallam University, is running the Reading Digital Fiction project with Dr Lyle Skains from Bangor University, a practitioner-researcher in digital fiction in the School of Creative Studies and Media.

Dr Bell said: “There is a new generation of readers and writers who see digital media as a dynamic and genuinely immersive means of experiencing fiction. We’re trying to capture that within the Reading Digital Fiction project by engaging with established audiences as well as introducing more readers to this form of storytelling.

“The competition is designed to expand digital fiction readership to include a broader segment of the public and is open all writers – from rookies to veterans – and all types of digital fiction. We’re keen to see entries that will be accessible to different audiences compatible across different devices.”

Dr Skains said: “As a writer of digital fiction, I’m excited to see the public engage more with it, and to see more popular forms emerging from this engagement. Our judges, too, have expressed a keen interest in seeing what digital fiction can do once it hits the mainstream. We’re really pleased to have such high profile judges join the panel, from very popular digital fiction writers to Welsh-language researchers in digital media and creativity.”

Click here for more information on the competition or to submit an entry.

*(Welsh language entries are eligible for all prize categories).

In 2014, we decided to set up digital platform for the young people of Bristol. As part of a talent development programme and as a magazine to amplify young exciting voices in the city, we wanted to see if we could affect positive change among young people. It would be called Rife Magazine. Rife meaning widespread, everywhere, full of life. Rife, subverting the common usage of the word (‘nepotism is rife’, ‘disease is rife’) in the same way Vice and Crack did.

The biggest question facing us when we were setting up the platform that would become Rife Magazine wasn’t: how should a bunch of people in their 30s chat to young people? It was, why are we, a bunch of people in our 30s, chatting to young people?

If we were going to run a site that presented issue-based articles about things important to young people, spanning politics (local, national and international), social issues, arts and culture and frivolous fun shit, and use those articles to push positive activities for 13-19 year olds in Bristol, well, who better to write it than its target audience?

Let me back up.

Rife Magazine, and her twin sister, Rife Guide, are both aimed at 13-19 year olds in Bristol. On the magazine, we cover everything from the aforementioned politics, social issues, arts and culture, to more fun listicles, like ‘Dessert Island Discs’, an investigation into the best music to listen to when you eat your favourite puddings.

Watershed took over Bristol City Council’s virtual youth service in order to create something young people actually use and engage with. Watershed is known for its creative, collaborative and risk-embracing co-producing attitude to projects. I had recently moved to Bristol and was looking for a creative project to get in to. Interestingly, I’d been hired once, to go into a Young Offender’s Institute and do an inspirational talk as a writer. The day was…terrible. I was awful. The kids were difficult. I didn’t know how to handle them. But I walked away from that experience realising the value of youth work and what the potential for my role could be. So I was really into the idea of creative youth work as a way of putting back into my community.

The first thing we did, before we even had a name for the platform, was to invite a bunch of young people in-house to consult with us on how they used the internet, and what they wanted from a new platform.

Without giving our secrets away, I’ll tell you the three best things I’ve ever learned about working with young people. These are really important, and will help you to not be ‘patronising out-of-touch 1950s stoic dad’ around them should you ever need to do a school visit, run a workshop or make a thing. Ready?

Tips for working with young people:

• They know more than you. Ask questions. Listen. Without judgment or feeling like ‘it was better in my day’.
• Pay them. Feed them. Respect them. Snacks go a long way. Money goes further. If you feel uncomfortable paying young people for consultancy, maybe ask a large advertising/brand consultancy firm what its day-rate is.
• Jeez, look, there isn’t a number three. Okay? If you struggle to talk to teenagers, you probably don’t remember being one.

The way we work on Rife is simple: I don’t decide the content. We have an in-house editorial team who does that for me. We offer 6-month paid jobs, where 18-24 year olds come and work with us. I mentor them, help them to create digital content, make videos, tell stories and promote those stories on social media. Because obviously, in a world saturated with content, the worst thing we can do is create something and publish it online and then take the rest of the day off to watch Netflix. We have to push the content out, seed it with key influencers, manipulate the metadata and source the right imagery.

The ideas generated by our in-house team is very much based around what’s important to them. I try to balance the content between the personal and the external, the things they are knowledgeable about and the things they are curious about. Often, we run lists and guides to help other young people create things, like set up businesses, go freelance, ask to be paid when someone tries to commission them by telling them it’s ‘good for their profile’.

Every Wednesday, we have an hour meeting to go through the next two weeks’ content schedule. We go through what’s happening in Bristol at the moment (constant travel chaos, a new mayor, Massive Attack’s first gig in near decades,), what issues are irking/delighting our content creators and what other youth projects are up to that might be of interest and spark off a piece of content. We build the schedule, based on ideas pitched. I work with the guys to shape the ideas into pieces of content. Often this involves turning a piece from a vague abstract idea into a story, sourcing interviewees, igniting hot takes and working on production plans for videos.

The genius of this set-up: a broadcast standard set of video equipment provided by Rife, a platform built on a simple wordpress, all the social media accounts we can muster, and a board of post-it notes filled with ideas. We’re only as good as our ideas. The way to keep this momentum fresh, and keep our journalists excited on projects, is to keep the ideas visible, the potential for a new exciting project prominently displayed, and work on a selection of long and short term projects. This means that our journalists can try new things, get better at things they can already do and always feel like the next new thing is around the corner. This set-up allows us to be flexible, adaptative, reactive and also keep the focus on the content. Because we’re only as good as our content.

The learning points for me as a writer, and as an editor, and as a youth worker, have been largely around thinking young people think this and that. It’s been challenging and inspiring to see how brave, adaptive and opinionated they are. How, if you give them the freedom to develop their own voices, where their opinions are valued above all else, then you have a happy, enthusiastic and hard-working workforce who hold a mirror up to Bristol. Getting the team to sit in alongside Watershed’s larger creative department, gives them soft skills like understanding larger more long-term creative strategies, as well as how to conduct yourself in a professional manner. It also means that their opinions, their thoughts and their feedback directly effects all of Watershed’s planning.

This chaotic and collaborative method of working means that we can cast a large net over Bristol, dealing with localised stories and projects as well as covering the larger cultural implications of Beyoncé’s new album. The trick for me is to have a flexible approach and to not be afraid of having no content – because, if there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s this: in the right environment, one that is creative, supportive and collaborative, we are never short of ideas.

Nikesh Shukla is the author of the critically acclaimed novel Meatspace, the Costa shortlisted novel Coconut Unlimited and the award-winning novella The Time Machine. He is also the editor of a forthcoming collection of essays by 20 BAME writers, called The Good Immigrant. He wrote the short film Two Dosas and the Channel 4 sitcom Kabadasses. He is the editor of Rife Magazine, a digital platform created for and by 13-19 year olds in Bristol.

It’s a little tricky trying to recall just how ‘The Kills‘ developed. The books were pitched as a series of inter-related novels, and in the first discussion with publisher Paul Baggaley and editor Kris Doyle, it became obvious that Picador, if they took on the project, would want to do more than publish the novel as a straight forward publication. It’s my good fortune that these two people were enthusiastic about the project, and very open to offer and consider ideas. At that point there was no specific plan to have multimedia elements or digital publication: it was a project of four books.

The progression from text to image is natural for me. I trained as an artist, and worked with a group called Haha in the 1990s where we developed public art projects, which differed from piece to piece (a lipstick slathered blimp in France, a series of camera obscuras in Italy, an HIV/AIDS resource in Chicago). The process of creating work with a team, so that the work changes through its development is something I value, highly. One of the questions I ask is about form: what is the most suitable way to represent these ideas? What would be the optimum way to encounter and experience the work? So there’s plenty of fluidity, and I like to keep the possibilities open throughout the entire working process.

The idea to publish digitally first came from the publisher. A highly sympathetic idea about how to stage a work, which needs to be read in sections. Releasing a work (The Kills is four novels in one), one book a month for four months, handsomely referred back to serialisation – which suits projects that are large and dense.

In developing the third book, a self-standing crime novel, I had produced a series of treated photographs, where I reconstructed the faces of the principal figures in the novel from images found online. These composite faces were deliberately darkened and blurred, and I had the idea that they should be presented before each chapter or section in which that character featured. The problem is, I didn’t want them to last. I liked the idea that you would turn a page and these faces would dissolve as you looked at them. In writing this book I was also interested in genre. What, exactly, makes a crime novel a crime novel – not just a body, a murder, a crime – but what, structurally, is it about the form that makes it what it is? I’d worked on an earlier novel, where the story was, pretty much, only a premise, and hoped that the reader would continue the story beyond what was written. Potentially each reader would have a different notion about what might and should happen (I’m not sure that worked). In printed-form books are somewhat absolute. There is the possibility that you can read chapters and sections in different order, if you wish (as with Cortazar’s ‘Blow Up’), but the very physicality of the book means that there’s an authority to the way it is presented to you, as a reader, and to be honest, flicking back and forward through a book, while a minimal effort, is still, an effort.

The digital elements aren’t just the ‘extras’ – and this is where my thinking is developing – I liked the idea that text can be reorganised, presented in shifting hierarchies, orders, to change emphasis. For the moment, digital texts are a stream, a continuous chain of words without heft. Location, for most of us depends on the weight of the book in your hands, and memory is acute enough for us to remember the placement of sections and events physically within the book. Think about Sebald’s images and how they work as anchors. These anchors are important; they let you know where you are. There are expectations in reading, given how much of the book you have physically on your left side and on your right side. The less you have on the right, the closer you are to some kind of resolve. With a digital book I have only a slider to indicate that shift forward, or a counter to tell me (worryingly) how many hours and minutes I have remaining. I’m thinking that images can be anchors to help with navigation, as well as providing content. Alongside this there’s another crucial relation, which is also increased by having the book physically in your hands, and this has to do with how time passes within the narrative you are reading, alongside how time synchronously passes in your life, as you read. It isn’t that this doesn’t happen with ebooks, but there’s less of an awareness (because of habit: we don’t only use our devices to read but for business and play, which can make for a certain kind of attention). There’s also less of an examined history and analysis about the processes and functions of reading digital work. With a physical book a great deal is taken for granted. With digital texts we are still, happily, figuring it out. As a writer, that slight indeterminacy is intriguing.

With ‘The Kills’ we decided very early that none of the films, extra texts, or audio, would effect change in the main narrative. They might inflect, but they wouldn’t deliver significant plotted elements, which would transform the text. This, mostly, was to recognise that not everyone who might read the book could be supposed to have an expensive digital device. I also wanted the short films to be free standing, if possible. We also bumped into technical limitations very early on. Some things just weren’t possible. The technology keeps changing, adapting. It isn’t stable – and this is a very significant difference between physical and digital texts. It’s possible that a digital text can be fugitive, impermanent – which contradicts our expectation as writers that when you publish you enter into permanent record. Each ‘extra’ was to be a taste, a sense of a place or a person, a piece of history, and as far as could be managed, self-standing. We didn’t want them to look like illustrations. Optimally, they appear at the ends of chapters, so that you can pause, if you want, and not feel that the main narrative or flow is being interrupted (that’s a nice feature of having different media side by side).

I’m a big fan of performance, 8mm film, and early video – particularly works that were developed in transitory periods when artists were finding their way around ‘new’ media. William Wegman and early video; Sadie Benning with Fischer Price toy cameras; Stan Brakhage playing with basic film elements; the comedian Ernie Kovacs amazing live transmissions; et al. They all met these new technologies with a kind of innocence and curiosity, which keeps the work honest and direct. I’ve tried to keep to that sensibility with a deliberately lo-fi approach – it’s no different to me than writing, where you build a narrative through simple accumulation. At the moment we are in a transitory period, the challenges for publishers are acute, no doubt, but the opportunities for writers are open. You don’t need a huge amount of know-how to enter this arena, and while the debate often sticks on certain subjects (self-publishing; the demise of printing), we are developing a discipline that is, by its nature, unfixed.

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

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

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

Following the success of the MIX DIGITAL Conference 2012, The Writing Platform is partnering with Bath Spa University to co-host a second MIX Conference this July. The three-day series of events will take place at Bath Spa University’s Corsham Court campus, a Grade One-listed Jacobean mansion in the bucolic Wiltshire landscape.

Day Three of the conference should be of particular interest to The Writing Platform readers, providing a series of hands on workshops. At ‘The Making Day’ on Wed 17 July attendees will have the opportunity to partake in workshops and introductory sessions run by practitioners, technologists, web designers and digital publishers, giving them the chance to develop their web presence and digital know-how on the spot.

The first two days of the conference will mix academic papers and artist presentations, with keynotes from Naomi Alderman on her prize-winning blockbuster independent game Zombies! Run. and the Literary Platform’s Sophie Rochester on the intersection between writing and technology.

Text on Screens: Making Discovering, Teaching will continue the conversation started at the first MIX Conference in 2012; through a series of high quality papers and presentations of creative works we’ll be talking about text on screen in the many forms it takes including fiction, video, poetry, mobile, locative, and site specific works, non-fiction, games, text-based digital art, and other electronic, hybrid forms. We will discuss classic texts as they are re-imagined for digital platforms and will look at how these works are taught and what they mean for the future of literature.

Mix Digital Conference 2013: Text on Screens; Making/Discovering/Teaching

Date: 15 -17 July 2013

Location: Corsham, England

BOOKING NOW here.