When The Writing Platform asked me to discuss how working collaboratively – as I do from time to time – might have influenced my writing process, I wasn’t immediately sure. To give some examples of the kind of projects in question, last year Dicky Star and the Garden Rule, my novella reflecting upon the 25^th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, was published alongside a series of works by the artists Jane and Louise Wilson, and I wrote a script for their film The Toxic Camera. I created a GPS-triggered work of fiction called Missorts that was commissioned as a public sound work for the city of Bristol and launched at the end of the year, while in April 2013 the Science Museum publish my new novel Shackleton’s Man Goes South. An apparent flurry of activity, although of course all of these projects have been developed over periods of up to several years, and involved differing degrees and types of collaboration, but they were often written to slightly crazy deadlines and – last year at least – published with little space or time for reflection, so the question was a welcome one.

Working collaboratively? Of course much of being a writer and of the publishing process is collaborative even if it is not usually called that. Research and work done with other writers or with agents, commissioning editors, copy-editors, typesetters, proof-readers, designers, photographers, all the way down the line to readers; all of these can perhaps be thought of as collaborations of one sort or another. If you are starting out as a writer and think that you don’t like collaborating with other people, then you probably need to have a rethink and get to like it, as it is a fact of life even in what – to borrow a term from particle physics – might be called ‘standard model’ trade publishing. But in publishing as in physics the standard model is no longer the whole story. The book trade is changing fast, as are the ways that people read and engage with writing, and the book trade is not the only place where such changes – economic as much as technological – are being felt.

Reaching readers interests me, and going where readers are, and that may be partly why I also find it very useful to collaborate outside of the trade, to work with artists, composers and musicians, technologists and others, but this may not simply be a strategic response to a changing world. Thinking about it now, I have been working this way for much longer than I have been a published author. Perhaps it is something to do with the fact that I went to art school, catching the tail-end both of a post-punk DIY scene, and of a kind of multimedia ‘arts lab’ ethos in art schools that saw artists working with emerging technologies like sound and moving image, or with their own live presence. For a few years in the early 1990s I commissioned live works, screenings and readings at a gallery called The Showroom in London, working with visual artists and writers including Caroline Bergvall, Tim Etchells, Aaron Williamson and a Swallowing Geography-period Deborah Levy (‘Swallow this!’ she wrote on the title page of my copy after the gig). In 1994 I founded Piece of Paper Press, a samizdat imprint used to publish limited edition, 16-page, A7 books by artists and writers. I’m just about to publish the twenty-seventh title in the series: an exclusive new Jerry Cornelius story by the great Michael Moorcock, who has been a supporter of the press for a few years now. Between 1999 and 2007 I also worked for Arts Council England’s then Interdisciplinary Arts Department, supporting emerging practice in art and science collaborations, sound art and new forms of distribution across the arts. These days I pretty much write fiction for a living, but perhaps it is not surprising if I have brought some of those ways of working into what I do as a writer.

Sometimes collaboration is about needing to ask for help; wanting to do something different or needing to bring other kinds of knowledge, expertise or processes into a piece of writing. In my own work this might include a musician composing an accompaniment to one of my short stories for a particular gig. Other times, someone might know or be a fan of one of my novels and, because of that, approach me with the idea of developing something new together. That is how more than a decade ago I ended up on a remote Scottish island with art and science duo London Fieldworks, composer Kaffe Matthews and a world champion stunt kite team amongst others, contributing to an interdisciplinary project called Syzygy. Come to think of it, that did demonstrably shift my writing process: I haven’t written a review, per se, of a visual arts project or exhibition since then, instead choosing to use fiction as a way of writing about art, but in the spaces that are normally given to reviews or catalogue essays.

More recently I was commissioned to work with the brilliant Blast Theory on an interactive drama for mobile phones, commissioned by Channel 4 and broadcast in October 2010. Ivy4evr, as it became known, was a very complex writing project, but before any real writing began we had to do audience research. The brief had been to produce a drama for young people that would be delivered on mobiles, but rather than simply jump into the app market, or assume that this would be delivered by video onto iPhones, we needed to know what kind of technology our target audience had access to, and how they behaved with it. Perhaps surprisingly we found that among the sample groups we worked with there was almost zero use of so-called ‘text-speak’, so we gladly threw that cliché out straight away. A more important discovery was that only a tiny percentage had smartphones. Most young people at that time had old or hand-me-down Nokia hand-sets, usually with big bundles of free text messages on their contracts. We also found that being in a lesson at school or college was no barrier to our potential audience reading or replying to a text message. Ivy4evr would have to be delivered by SMS: a one-to-one, text messaging conversation taking place in real time and at any time of day. The mobile developers who joined the team were used to coding SMS engines with a large enough capacity to run real-time, interactive quizzes for prime-time TV audiences; technology that we stretched and pushed as far as it would go.

In addition to the story itself, and the considerable ethical and legal implications of facilitating intimate conversations with a fictional character, there were many interesting and challenging things about writing Ivy4evr. For all the apparent simplicity of the 160-character text message format on a basic mobile phone screen, the drama itself would be completely automated, and ‘the script’ was in fact a huge series of spreadsheets where each apparently discrete message from ‘Ivy’ to the reader/player brought with it a host of coding preconditions (what the reader might need to have done to be receiving this message now, rather than any of a myriad other), and needed to incorporate fields into which user profile data could be fed back, things that ‘Ivy’ remembered about you or wanted to tell you, or that related to how you had responded to a particular question, maybe days ago. Thus a single message might need to be instantly compiled from numerous sources on the project’s highly secure database without compromising either privacy laws and Ofcom regulations, or the ‘natural’ feel of a 160-character message.

Through early work with small groups, to paper tests, and on to a final, week-long, real-time systems test prior to the actual broadcast, we quickly found out what worked and what didn’t, and also that our initial ‘guesstimates’ about response times – how quickly users might reply to Ivy and how quickly she should reply back – were wrong. During the tests, texts were flying back and forth in a matter of seconds, taking minutes to burn through whole story-lines that we had initially thought might last hours or days.

During the complex rewrites that resulted from each test, and the long days in the Blast Theory studio, I was reminded of the old Burroughsian saw about collaboration: ‘The third mind is there when two minds collaborate.’[1] In the book The Third Mind, Gerard-Georges Lemaire elaborates: this ‘is not … a literary collaboration but rather the complete fusion in a praxis of two subjectivities […] that metamorphose into a third; it is from this collusion that a new author emerges, an absent third person, invisible and beyond grasp, decoding the silence […] the negation of the frontier that separates fiction from its theory. It is, finally, the negation of the book as such – or at least the representation of that negation.’[2]

‘Complete fusion’? Well, maybe not, and we weren’t negating the book but proposing – in effect – a new kind of book, but I was only half-joking when I said once or twice to Matt, Ju and Nick during our collaboration that I felt more intelligent when we were all in the same room.

It was brain-fryingly complex stuff at times, but Blast Theory’s experience of creating interactive and augmented- or mixed-reality dramatic experiences – through their own long-term collaborations since the mid-late 1990s with computer scientists on seminal, large-scale works like Desert Rain, Can You See Me Now and Uncle Roy All Around You – meant that they had ways of analysing and understanding what we were doing. They quickly found new ways to describe the kinds of story structures that we were creating – we talked of ‘stubs’ and ‘story ladders’, of ‘calls to action’, ‘triggers’, ‘pre-requisites’ and ‘response settings’ – and looked for ways to reinforce the reading experience not just through an unprecedented degree of personalisation but also by being explicit about when Ivy needed something, when she was asking a question that needed a reply: ‘Q.,’ she might say at such times. ‘Am I right to worry?’

Importantly, readers’ replies to such questions weren’t falling into a vacuum. The drama was not running on tracks like some old ‘choose-your-own-adventure’ book. The story unfolded much more organically than that. But neither were their messages to ‘Ivy’ being read and responded to by us (nor by a warehouse full of ‘work-experience students’ as one critic suggested!), it really was completely automated, with readers’ respective experiences of the drama being both dependent upon and defined by the fact that they were each having a unique and two-way conversation. So the final collaboration here was with the reader, who was supplying as much as half the text of their own private version of Ivy4evr. For a writer of stories this was and is fascinating. As ‘Ivy’ might say: Q. Where is the actual story located in a piece of writing that is being produced in such a way?

The experience of collaborating with Blast Theory on Ivy4evr throughout 2010 immediately informed development at the beginning of 2012 of what became Missorts, my public artwork for Bristol. The brief was open and the commission, from Situations and Bristol City Council, was for a site that I know well: a square mile immediately to the west of Bristol Temple Meads station that follows the line of the city’s mediaeval Port Wall, bounded to the east by a massive, derelict, former Royal Mail sorting office, and to the west by Phoenix Wharf and Redcliffe Bridge: an anonymous-seeming corridor of dual carriageways and roundabouts. Flanked as it is by the amazing Gothic architecture of St Mary Redcliffe and the house where poet Thomas Chatterton (1752-1770) was born, this part of Bristol is also associated with radical literary practices. Not only with the Gothic revival via Thomas Chatterton’s amazing and metafictional ‘Rowley poems’, and his legacy among the Romantics and with William Blake, but also with the earlier mediaeval heresy of Lollardy, and associated texts such as the alliterative, satirical and revolutionary Middle English poem The Visions of Piers Plowman.

Rather than simply plonking some new cultural artefact directly into this part of Bristol, I wanted to learn from the kinds of cultural behaviours that already existed in the area (just as with Ivy4evr we had taken time at the outset to find out what kinds of technology our target audience used). With the help of a group of Fine Art students from UWE we surveyed culture/media use in various parts of the site and at different times of the day. As with Ivy4evr, the results were surprisingly ‘trailing edge’: people weren’t playing with iPads or Kindles, tapping smartphone screens or even reading the Metro, they were – most of them – listening to music or other content (audiobooks? radio?) on headphones. Also, once a week, a surprising number and range of people attended a Thursday lunchtime organ concert at St Mary Redcliffe.

It was only after collating this research that the idea for a geo-located and fictional audio work that could draw upon the area’s radical heritage but be set within an experience of walking and listening to music was born. That was when Situations and I approached Clare Reddington of Bristol’s groundbreaking Pervasive Media Studio to begin the process of identifying a developer to collaborate with (i.e. to ‘ask for help’, as above).

I knew the area well because I had already done a lot of research towards – and had written an early draft of – a much more ‘linear’ work of fiction that orbited the derelict sorting office, a novella entitled Missorts Volume II (which has now been published by Situations in Kindle and EPUB editions alongside the finished sound work). Rather than adapt that novella, once finished, for distributed audio, I felt strongly that it should remain ‘a book’, but that the new work might create opportunities for new writers and new writing. I also wanted to bring St Mary Redcliffe’s organ music out into the street, if I could find a composer who could do justice to their celebrated, one-hundred-year-old Harrison and Harrison pipe organ. From a private shortlist of two or three, I brought in Jamie Telford, a composer with whom I had collaborated once before; in the late 1990s he regularly played a live, improvised accompaniment to some of my readings. Jamie has a pop background and is a classically trained composer, but most important in this context was the fact that he had played church organ as a child – his father had built a replica pipe organ for the church in his hometown.

With commissioners Situations bringing a huge amount of expertise and experience to the project, and offering a perceptive and hands-on production team, and with hosting and other support from Bristol Record Office (including invaluable work from their archivists Julian Warren and Alison Brown on the transcription of a letter from William Blake, which forms a central theme in the novella), I devised and ran a series of short story workshops that attracted writers from around the country. We used William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin’s ‘cut-up technique’ to create completely new stories from Piers Plowman and other texts. As the workshops progressed, the writers started to gravitate towards potential locations on site, with each writer also quickly asserting their own voice and practice in the stories being written. These were rich and diverse works of fiction but they began to interact across the site in unpredictable ways – architectural and other motifs recurring in an unusual combination of Gothic, psychedelic and quotidian topographies. Because all of the stories drew from similar, limited sources, markers like characters’ names began to echo and recur across all ten of the pieces chosen for development into the final work. Editing and abridgement brought these connections – in stories by Sara Bowler, Holly Corfield-Carr, Thomas Darby, Jack Ewing, Katrina Plumb, Jess Rotas, Hannah Still, Helen Thornhill, Isabel de Vasconcellos and Sacha Waldron – into a sharper focus.

As with Ivy4evr, iterative testing from as early a stage as possible was also urged by Calvium, the app developer, who have a very robust GPS-based audio app-building template that has been road-tested on some quite high-profile factual and local history projects, including the Guardian newspaper’s King’s Cross Street Stories. Missorts is a work of fiction, but the coding and locative principles were the same. However robust the engine though, it was only through dozens of iterations, countless person-hours spent by the team tramping around the site, doubling back, testing and re-testing boundaries, knowing every inch of it, that final edits and mapping of the work’s constituent parts could be reached. Interaction design – if I’m using the term correctly – was important here, too. For example, challenges emerged around the duration of the stories, where 400-500 words turned out to be about the maximum workable length in a noisy street environment. Then there was the question of how Jamie Telford’s music might give way so that a story could begin. Would it fade out? What would be helpful to the listener learning how to use the work? Should we include a tell-tale intake of breath in the split second before each story started, or a particular short musical phrase? Who would do the readings? Would everything loop? How would you listen again or access information? What would the map need to look like? How about the icons on the map? All such questions could only be resolved by a period of intense collaboration, of testing the work, re-testing it and then re-testing again.

Quite what impact these large-scale collaborative projects will have on my future writing I am not yet sure. My latest novel, Shackleton’s Man Goes South, is published in April. Some of the work that has gone into the novel was begun while I was writer in residence at the Museum in 2008, with further early research and writing undertaken through a wider series of conversations and collaborations. Now I am again collaborating with the Museum – an entity of about the size and population of a small town – on a publication of the novel as their Atmosphere Gallery commission for 2013. I was just about to say that with Shackleton’s Man Goes South being a more or less traditional literary novel there wasn’t really space for anything like user testing. Except that actually in this case there was. What now appears in slightly different form as the opening chapter – ‘Albertopolis Disparu’ – was first published as a chapbook for free giveaway in the Museum in 2009. I was reliably informed at the time that our chapbook had passed the Museum’s informal but stringent ‘litter test’: none of the 5,000 copies given away during that week or so were found dumped in stairwells, on windowsills, under benches or in litter bins around the Museum! It was also tested in live readings, while further feedback came from reviews on 3am and Londonist. Following that early ‘rapid prototype’ publication of ‘Albertopolis Disparu’, as the novel started to take shape I tested the basic structure and early drafts in the form of a lecture with readings at the Free University of Glastonbury, then later on presented other elements of the near-final draft as part of the Biotik programme at the Eden Project.

Now we are planning for a publication where alongside the print edition, ebook formats of the novel will be available exclusively (and later, as part of the same fixed-term license, non-exclusively) free and DRM-free on the Museum website, and for visitors to email themselves from a touch-screen within a dedicated display that will be up for a year. The Science Museum’s own detailed user-based evaluation has been more than just an interesting backdrop: audience breakdowns, dwell-time and visitor statistics around movement and interaction within the galleries have directly informed how the novel is being published, even if these were unknown quantities when it was being written.

From being unsure what impact working collaboratively might have had on my writing, it is clear that it has contributed enormously, and that lessons-learned and ways of working developed in projects like Ivy4evr or Missorts are transferable to more traditional literary forms. Perhaps this is also a useful reminder that the production of narrative is not always so seamless or unitary as the reading of it might suggest.

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.

Word of Colour Productions interviewed the self confessed tech geek, writer and editor Jacob Sam-La Rose on the impact of digital platforms and trends on his writing for The Writing Platform.

In 2012, Jacob’s poetry collection ‘Breaking Silence’ (Bloodaxe) was shortlisted for both the Forward Felix Dennis Award and the Aldeburgh Fenton Award. A techie and writer since the 1990s, Jacob has developed websites for literature development agencies, including Spread the Word, Apples & Snakes and Black Inc, and continues to advocate for the positive impact of new technology on literary and cross-art practice.

This interview was filmed by Words of Colour Productions in partnership with The Writing Platform. It will be the first of four profiles that Words of Colour Productions will produce for the new portal.

Interview by Joy Francis
Filmed by Nathan Richards
Supported by The Writing Platform

Welcome to The Writing Platform! Our aim is to provide neutral information and informed opinion on digital transformations in writing, reading, and publishing. In the build-up to the launch of this site, we’ve been surveying writers on their digital needs; a complex, fascinating picture of writers today has emerged. For more on the results of the first phase of the survey, go here.

We writers live in interesting times. Great change is taking place throughout the interlinked industries we rely upon for our livelihoods – publishing and bookselling. Reading and writing themselves are changing; new devices and new platforms proliferate. Phones are as powerful as computers; being online means you can publish yourself freely, no matter how big or small your audience. While the ‘end of the book’ has long been predicted, pundits are now predicting the death of the e-reader as tablets come down in price. Bookshops are vanishing from the high street, libraries struggle to redefine themselves while fending off cuts in funding, and a battle worthy of Star Wars rages over our heads between the three major tech corporations whose rapid infiltration of the world of books threatens to overwhelm even the largest of publishers.

On the other hand, books sales continue to boom. We are living through a Golden Age of reading; the ‘heavy reader’, that figure so beloved of all writers (and described for us here by Kassia Kroszer), has greater access to a larger variety of books, at lower prices, than ever before. Passionate readers around the world make use of both local and online book clubs; writing and reading continue to be activities central to the way we define ourselves as people. Good books still find their way to readers.

As well as that, opportunities for writers who are interested in moving beyond the book are also proliferating. Away from the world of traditional writing and publishing, new hybrid forms of literature have been emerging over the past decade, and with them, new business models are appearing.

And writers continue to write. But whether we are well established in our careers, or at the very beginning, or somewhere in-between, we are all part of an industry that is in extreme flux, an industry that will, no doubt, continue to shift and change for the foreseeable future. And this ever-changing landscape is difficult to navigate. Established writers have a tradition of out-sourcing their knowledge of the publishing industry to their agents; the recommended trajectory for most writers remains as follows: write that book, get that agent, let the agent worry about the rest. Our survey has thrown up a number of interesting trends: when asked ‘Where do you find out about developments and new opportunities in writing and publishing?’, writers listed websites (85%), other writers (63%) and live events (36%), with less than ten percent mentioning publishers (9.8%). The rise of self-publishing has disrupted the writer-agent-publisher trajectory; the one key thing that the successful self-publisher possesses – and that the successful traditionally published writer often does not – is an insider’s knowledge of how to publish a book.

All writers need to be bettered informed. We need to have access to clear, neutral, information about digital transformation and how it affects us; we need access to informed opinion and debate. The internet is full of information, of course, and a new future-of-publishing event or conference takes place every couple of minutes somewhere in the world, or so it seems. But very little of this information is aimed directly at writers. And that’s where The Writing Platform comes in; a website for writers, created by people who are dedicated to sharing knowledge and information. Please feel free to get in touch with us with your questions, comments, and ideas. We are commissioning content: tell us what you need to know.

In advance of the launch of The Writing Platform, we have been surveying the digital needs of writers; this article highlights some of our findings.

We had over 500 respondents; 67% female, 33% male; 45% between the ages of 35 and 55; 75% of respondents live in the UK, 9% in the US, 5% in Australia, 3% in Canada, and the rest spread around the world, including the Philippines, Lithuania and Venezuela.

35% are aspiring writers, 33% traditionally published writers, 15% both traditionally and self-published; and 9% self-published only.

By far the greatest number of people agree with the statement ‘I want my work to be read by lots of people’ (39%), with only 20% agreeing that the statement that most accurately describes their aspirations as a writer is ‘I want to make money from my writing’.

We had a good mix of genre and non-genre writers, and 74% of writers said they have a website or blog. 52% of respondents said they actively keep abreast of developments and new opportunities in writing and publishing, while 41% of people said they try to keep abreast, but find it difficult because the landscape changes so rapidly.

Digital transformation affects all writers and readers; the pace of it can be bewildering, and this is part of the reason we wanted to set up The Writing Platform, and hope that it will become a place you return to for clear and neutral information about how our industries are changing.

Another interesting trend revealed by the survey is that while 85% of writers find out about developments and opportunities in writing and publishing via a large range of websites, less than 10% state that they get this kind of information from their publishers, while 7% get this information from their agents.

This reflects a current disconnect between some publishers and writers on the digital front; while publishers focus on digital workflows, ebooks, and digital marketing, some need to work further with writers to develop what digital transformation might offer to writers and readers. Agents also need to continue to think about new opportunities for their writers, beyond the crucial, but seemingly endless, arguments about ebook rights and royalties.

As we moved on to questions regarding how writers publish and promote their work online, we found that 41% of respondents showcase their work on Good Reads, with the rest spread across a large range of platforms, including blogging platforms like Wattpad, Authonomy, WordPress and Tumblr.

Facebook and Twitter were the most popular social media sites with ‘connecting with other writers and relevant organisations’ listed by 77% as one of the main reasons for using social media. Not surprisingly, when surveying those who have self-published their work, 52% had done so via Amazon, with 19% using Smashwords.

When it comes to thinking about how digital platforms can afford new possibilities for writers, we asked ‘Have you worked on any multimedia or cross-platform projects?’ 42% of respondents said they hadn’t done any work of this kind but would like to, while 27% admitted they didn’t know what the question meant. However, 22% told us they were already involved in projects of this nature, and 19% of these writers citing their main aspiration is ‘to push the boundaries of creative practice i.e. to experiment with new forms’.

68% of all respondents said they were interested in working collaboratively. These figures show us that a new type of writer, a hybrid who works across multiple platforms, formats, and genres, is emerging.

The survey has given us a good idea of what kinds of information writers are looking for currently, and we’ll be doing our best to find ways to address the broad range of concerns and issues raised. Thanks to everyone who took the time to complete it. We’ll be keeping the survey running and will reassess the needs of writers as we go along.

Writers can fill in the survey here.