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.

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

Sleepless
By Natalia Theodoridou

What happens to dreams if no one sleeps? That’s the question explored in Natalia Theodoridou’s dark and unsettling short story built on Twine. Based on the premise that human sleep has suddenly become a thing of the past, the story follows its characters—never quite asleep, never quite awake—through all-night coffee shops, nightclubs and call-in help lines.

Maintaining a tight focus on the text, the story makes sparing and sometimes subtle use of visual and audio accompaniment to reinforce its mood. Sleepless is at its best though in its use of dynamic text and arrangement on the screen, capturing all too well a liminal state of consciousness. Like many Twine stories, it can feel a little slight depending on the choices made by the reader, though it is worth repeating for a fuller experience.

Sleepless is available online.

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

The Cartographer’s Confession
By James Attlee

The Cartographer’s Confession is the story of Thomas Andersen, who, as a child, migrates to London with his mother during the second world war and the fallout from that event in the decades that follow. Presented as a series of source documents—tapes, letters, and photographs—collected by the present-day researcher and screenwriter, Catriona Schilling, the app reveals its story through layers of fiction and non-fiction, timeframes, and locations.

Commissioned by the Ambient Literature project, The Cartographer’s Confession is designed to be experienced on location, appropriately using a map as its primary navigation. It’s not hard to imagine the power of walking through the streets of London as the story unfolds on in your ears and your phone. Though it does offer a chronological ‘armchair mode’, the app’s dreamy soundscapes and contrast of present and past lose some of their impact 16,000km away.

But even with a diminished experience, Attlee’s writing is concise and emotive, the performances are solid, and the app’s design, especially its sound, shows beautiful attention to detail. The soundtrack by The Night Sky is also very cool, if sometimes distracting. Given the quality of its writing and production values, it’s easy to see how The Cartographer’s Confession won over the judges of the 2017 New Media Writing Prize.

The Cartographer’s Confession is available to download from the App Store and Google Play.

Following on from his article about the first five years of the New Media Writing Prize, co-founder James Pope interviews some of the key players in the Prize’s five year history.

Andy Campbell is the brains behind Dreaming Methods, and One To One Developments; he has worked with Kate Pullinger, Mez Breeze, and Christine Wilks amongst others, on many pioneering digital projects. Andy has built and supported all the web sites and online functions for the NMWP since 2011.

Christine Wilks is a digital writer/artist whose piece, Underbelly won the Main prize at the first ever New Media Writing Prize.

Dan Franklin is the Digital Publisher at Random House  and has been a  been a judge and a speaker at the New Media Writing Prize.

Katharine Norman is a aural and visual artist whose interactive ‘installation’ Window, won the 2012 NMWP.

Chris Meade is founder and director of if;book UK and is currently working on his Nearlyology project. Chris has been a speaker, judge and sponsor of the main prize since the beginning.

Samantha Gorman and her partner Danny Cannizzaro won the 2014 main prize with their best selling app PRY.

Since 2010, when we began the New Media Writing Prize, what have you been up to? What sorts of stories have you created? How would you describe them?

Andy: Between 2010 and now I’ve started working on digital fiction projects pretty much full time. I’d describe them as experimental narrative games for the most part.

Christine: The same year I won the New Media Writing Prize for my digital fiction, Underbelly, which I created in Flash, the first iPad was released but Steve Jobs had banned Flash from the iPad. Somewhat ironically, having received one as my prize (thanks!), I was immediately struck by how the iPad would be the perfect device to read-play interactive narratives such as ‘Underbelly’. Now I am totally focused on creating apps for mobile platforms as well as for the desktop browser, which has meant abandoning Flash and learning a lot of new technologies. Besides this, as a natural progression from creating interactive narratives, my work has become more game-like, although storytelling is still the driving force. Currently, I’m in the middle of a practice-based PhD in Digital Writing at Bath Spa University, where I am developing a text-based interactive narrative called Stitched Up – it’s a psychological thriller that adapts to reader choice.

Katharine: My background is sonic arts and music composition (mostly digital/computer) and, since then, I’ve done more and more work that combines digital writing and sound and seeks to integrate them. In 2013 I went on to make Making Place, a poetic text manipulated and animated ‘live’ by the sounds from performers.

I’m currently working on another sound/digital writing piece, Paul’s Walk, for performance by Paul Roe in Dublin, in April – it’s for iPad and performer. I’m hoping to make a few pieces for iPad and performer – the idea being that they’re ‘user friendly’ for any performer, not just those who know about techy stuff.

So, basically I’m working towards integrating my work as sound artist/composer and digital writer. Also – since I won in 2012, with Window  I have programmed an iOS app version of Window, which has reached a wider audience and is on the app store – grab it! And a couple of people have written about the piece, and I have written a chapter for a forthcoming book on Art and Everyday Life (Ashgate, ed Berberich, out soon) that also examines my approach  – it was programmed (by me) in Processing and puredata, and has had quite a few live performances, and one coming up in New York this June.

How do you see the field more broadly? What changes have you observed since 2010, when we began?

Andy: The biggest change has been a wave of new media stories created for tablet and mobile devices, without doubt. And perhaps a slight rise in interest in the medium – from a reader, writer and funder POV. It’s always been difficult to know where “the field” starts and ends. I don’t think it particularly has boundaries.

Christine: There has been a resurgence of interest in text-based narrative-driven games which I think is largely to do with the popularity of mobile devices.

Dan Franklin: I think there have been some outstanding text-based games that have broken through commercially and critically – 80 Days and Device 6  spring to mind – and this reflects how indie gaming is changing and that there is an audience for a text-based experience like that. It’s encouraging.

Katharine: What I don’t see – and perhaps it’s there and I’m not looking – is much development in terms of getting the work out there, apart from things like the ELO and the amazing Leo Flores.  Also, I’m still quite often depressed by the lack of discussion, and the lack of truly inter-multi-media digital writing outside of gaming – it seems like there are only a few individuals working at a high level in non-commercial/more experimental digital storytelling. I still – and I hate to sound arrogant – find a lot of it really naive, or a bit one-dimensional.

Chris: There’s been a revolution in how we read. I remember the iPad was the big prize the first year – it was the bright new toy then, but some entrants weren’t interested. It came as a shock to those who made digital literature to find there was a potential readership and maybe even a market for their work as tablets became popular.

Samantha: Many things move in cycles  – including interest in new media writing and VR. Personal history: wider interest in hypertext, CAVE VR. But instead of an endlessly cycling escalator, starting from the ground-up, I hope that production and support of New Media Writing (like VR development) is like steps on a stairway. Each iteration of interest getting us closer to somewhere.

How has technology influenced what you are writing/making?

Andy: Between 2010-2012 I found rapid changes in technology difficult to keep up with and very frustrating. The technologies I’m using now however (HTML5 and Unity3D) can target pretty much any modern platform – from Android and iOS to WebGL and consoles – so that’s been a huge game-changer for me, having attempted to create digital fiction in almost everything over the years. Not having to worry so much about how to actually reach certain platforms has allowed the storytelling/creative part to come back to the forefront again.

Christine: As mentioned earlier, due to the rise of mobile devices, I’m designing my new work for multiple screen sizes – smartphones and tablets, predominantly, but also desktop/laptop computers. This means embracing responsive design techniques, which also has repercussions for the multimedia and multimodal content of my work. Since I’ve switched from Flash and ActionScript to HTML5, CSS and JavaScript, I’ve had to learn these open source web technologies in depth so that I can create with them. While the learning can be arduous, I find the process of authoring directly in code (to a greater extent than when I worked in Flash), as well as natural language, creatively exciting and empowering.

Dan: Technology is transforming the book industry from top to bottom and through all its functions, and has done for many decades to be honest. In terms of new types of digital product, we have come off a spree of creating products that exploit the features of a device and now focusing again on what is good, authorially led, experimentation at the core of our editorial function.

Katharine: I think in code – I have always been a programmer but even more so now, I seem to be more fluent at thinking ideas directly into code. (not necessarily *good* ideas!)

Chris: I’ve been trying to forget about the technology and concentrate on telling my story, but in the knowledge that it can include much more than text if I want it to. Now I’ve realised I want some animated text as well as songs, a game and readers’ own writing to feature in the novel, so there are positive creative reasons why it needs to be an app.

What do you think new media writers need to do in order to reach out to a wider, more ‘mainstream’ audience?

Andy: I no longer think about this – I’ve wasted too much time thinking and worrying about it.  There’s a growing audience for new media writing that is coming quietly and effortlessly, I’m sure.

Christine: Good storytelling is the key, but stories told and experienced in new ways, not merely enhanced ebooks. The user-experience design also needs to be considered so that the audience knows how to approach these works. We’re still in a highly experimental phase, the technology is changing rapidly, but some best practices and design principles are emerging. I also think the vehicle of dissemination is vitally important for reaching larger audiences and this is where mobile devices, among other things, have a big part to play.

Dan: I don’t know if they should! A lot of them are artists and are pushing the formal boundaries of the space with good use of funding and their own passion. If they want to break out more they need to think more about the audience needs, or at least what they can get their head around.

Katharine: That assumes that they need to – perhaps it’s more a case of reaching out to the audience you want? I don’t write work for a mainstream (or any particular) audience – I write it to realise my artistic vision/aims, and keep sane.

Chris: Write compelling stories and seek out the publishers/producers with the guts and vision to try to make and sell them commercially.

Samantha: I don’t think there is necessarily any one path or trajectory. The important thing is to consider your audience. To think creatively and spread your enthusiasm. For us, we are beginning to know more about the indie game community. In general, I think that advanced experiments with writing through media will be more prominent/developed by the game sector.

Are there any signs that publishers are beginning to see new media as a place where literature exists?

Andy: Again this is something I no longer really think about. Publishers have done nothing at all for me as a new media writer (or for any new media writers I know) and they do not interest me much any more. None of my funding comes from publishers. Over the years I’ve been approached by quite a few, but it’s never led on to anything concrete/worthwhile.

Christine: I have always self-published my new media works (although some have been published in anthologies too), so I’m not best placed to answer this, but, yes, I think so. However, publishers seem to be focussing more on new media as a viable form of literature for young readers rather than all ages.

Dan: I think so. The awareness is there, its more a question of whether it’s an area to actively pursue.

Katharine: I don’t see much that isn’t rather basic….

Chris: They’re obsessed with the possibility but still weedy about taking on anything but the safest most saleable classics to ‘appify’. The world still awaits a new media writing phenomenon – the equivalent of Sgt Pepper or Mad Men or Fifty Shades or … whatever it takes for a new media fiction to become essential cultural fodder. That’s what I’m trying to write, but so are lots of others.

What is your hope for new media writing?

Andy: I hope that individuals with a genuine passion for the medium and who can see the potential of it manage to find the financial backing and create space they deserve to realise their visions. It’s an extremely exciting medium with limitless potential. I hope it becomes easier to actually create work of this kind – because it can be hellishly difficult with so many platforms, technologies and complexities.

Christine: That it reaches a broad readership, no longer relegated to the fringes of culture – which is not to say there’s anything wrong with being on the fringes, that’s where exciting experimentation happens, so I hope that thrives too! I would also like to see more new media writer/makers taking up the creative challenge. The greater diversity of writer/makers, the more exciting the field of new media writing, electronic literature, interactive storytelling, whatever-you-want-to-call-it, becomes.

Dan: I hope it continues to evolve and continues to make incursions into the mainstream in one guise or another. It’s survived for many years on the fringes of literary culture and long may it remain doing its thing.

Katharine: I hope that there will be more attention and incorporation of other media than simply visual onscreen interactive text, and that there will be more multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary collaborative work – it may be going on, I’m not in the loop.

Chris: That a readership for such work grows and grows because writers get better and better at telling brilliant stories in that form: the best possible words in the best possible order in the best possible digital form.

Samantha: The future doesn’t necessarily change the impulses or inspirations at the core of storytelling, rather it adds an additional toolset for expression. It is easy to overemphasize the technological revolution, but the future lies in approaches to storytelling rather than core judgements about how stories will irrevocably alter. PRY was written with new tool sets, but it is still a very human story.

You can read James Pope’s reflections on five years of the New Media Writing Prize here.

Beginning in 2010, the New Media Writing Prize has been the only competition in the world to open its digital doors to every kind of online, multi-media, interactive storytelling, whether amateur, professionally funded, solo, or collaborative. The competition has placed no boundaries around definitions of literature or game – the only requirements for eligibility have been that the submitted work should only be able to exist in digital media, and that there should be interactivity for the audience. This has truly embraced a spectrum of work that is hard to define, hard to name, hard to grasp, but always innovative and challenging, as well as entertaining.

Since 2010 well over 500 entries have been submitted to the judges, some of dubious new-media status (e.g. text-only Word documents), some of huge significance in the field, showing a way forward and highlighting the massive potential for the future of narrative in the new-media environment. So, where have we come in five years and what are the key developments?

In the first shortlist, everything we saw relied upon browsers, because the technology around smart phones and tablets was not well established: interestingly though, and somewhat prophetic, one of our speakers on the first ever awards event was Chris Stevens, the creator of Alice for the iPad. We also gave an iPad as the main prize, showing how ahead of the game we were! Reading Chris’ piece for The Literary Platform reminds us how big a deal the iPad was, but also how crucial the relationship between technology and story is: “The temptation will naturally be to throw this technology at every book, but the craftsmanship behind implementing this technology is as important as the technology itself. It’s not a short-cut to “enhancing” a book for the digital age, and the power to create these books must be wielded as deftly and wisely as an illustrator’s pen.” As time has gone on we have seen more apps entered into the competition, but not one app winner, until 2015, but more of that later….

The 2010 shortlist did demonstrate admirably that the field had already moved hugely on from the days of hyper-text, to an era of hyper-media, and animation, video, sound, mobile text, film were all presented. And Chris was/is right – the technology is only as good as the story it is delivering, which is why Christine Wilks won the 2010 prize for her outstanding, and still effective, piece Underbelly. Underbelly seamlessly blends text, visuals, animation, sound and mouse-driven interactivity into what is a beautiful story about the struggle of women to live in an environment of oppression. I am still moved by this piece, and what it tells me in 2015 is that (as long as the technology still operates!) the narrative is key.

In 2011, Serge Bouchardon and Vincent Volckaert knocked us out with Loss of Grasp, a whimsical, free-flowing story of, well, loss of grasp. It showed how form and content could (should) be welded together in new-media. So, to activate the narrative you had to interact – interaction was not just page-turning, or a gimmick, it was the narrative, and the further one interacted with the piece, the more one’s grasp of it eroded. Brilliantly built, visual, funny, kinetic: it was short but oh so sweet, and showed us that new-media could tell short stories as pithy and satisfying as anything in print.

But there were other highlights, that showed how diverse the field was: Welcome to Pine Point by Paul Shoebridge and Michael Simons was beautiful, easy to navigate, superbly constructed to be engaging, narratively coherent, and never obscure. As with Loss of Grasp, interactivity was driving the narrative, never holding it up for ransom. There is still sometimes the problem that some artists and developers are putting techno-wizardry before story: and of course, no names mentioned, but there were entries in 2011 and after, that, although maybe built with professional funding, did not deliver that all-important story that we love to lose ourselves in. Another lesson learnt: interactivity must be integral to the story, not simply bells and whistles.

In 2012, our eyes were treated to some beautiful visual work, from JR Carpenter’s gorgeous visual poem CityFish, to Stevan Zivadinovic’s 3D graphic novel, Hobo Lobo of Hamelin. The visual quality showed us that, in future, everything would have to look amazing, as well as work amazingly. Perhaps in the past we might have overlooked graphic excellence for a clever idea or intriguing writing, but now we wanted it all! The screen demands to be beautiful, as well as gripping – just as the greatest filmic narratives draw us into their visual world, just as theatre attracts our eyes as well as our ears, so must new-media narratives. Katharine Norman’s prize-winning Window draws you into an atmospheric sound/image poem, through a photo-real window. In 2012 I began to know that the form was truly ‘working’, not just at the avant-garde edges, but across the board. It was hard to draw up a shortlist, because there was plenty of great work going on everywhere, with new names popping up, delivering great story-experiences.

2013 developed an emerging trend that we had spotted in 2012, the trans-media potential, the use of digital media to take the narrative out of a single space into many. In 2012, Kristi Barnett’s Hurst narrated via YouTube and Twitter; and another great writer and innovator, Caitlin Fisher, experimented with augmented reality, breaking down the walls between media. Her piece Circle, via an iPod, hard-copy images and QR codes, took the viewer/reader/listener into a strange three-dimensional world of sounds and images, hovering somewhere between the virtual and the actual. In 2013, Declan Dineen’s Foursquare Tales used the locative app Foursquare to create fiction out of his hometown of Glasgow.

Another emerging note in our shortlist was the journalism of Mat Charles and Juan Passarelli – The Engineer is a moving, intense portrayal, via text, photography and video, of El Salvador gangs, and this piece was a precursor for two outstanding journalistic shortlisters in 2014 (We Are Angry, and What I am Wearing). Imagine what that infamous literary journalist, Hunter S. Thompson, would have done to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas if he had had an iPad!

The 2013 winner was an indication of how mobile technology had moved into every part of our lives: Siri and Me was a fiction based on the iphone/iPad search engine-personality of Siri. A carefully crafted conversation with a non-intelligent but frighteningly believable piece of software. Esmeralda Kosmatopoulus saw that technology was becoming more and more seemingly-sentient, and her piece explored that strangeness in a visual/textual way, also demonstrating another trend that we noted earlier – Siri and Me was first presented via Tumblr, Facebook, and Twitter.

And finally, 2014: with tablets clearly established in the mainstream of personal communication and computing, it is no surprise that we have now seen the first app as the main winner of the competition. We have had several apps submitted as entries, but none that quite ticked all the boxes of great story, great interactivity, great visuals, great engagement. But PRY, by Samantha Gorman and Danny Cannizzaro, gets everything right. PRY uses the interactivity for the iPad as an integral aspect of the story form. In this piece we see all of the elements of old media (words, film, sound, image, character, plot) fused to user-input, with ingenious deployment of touch-screen possibilities. For example, to ‘pry’ into the main character’s mind we must ‘open’ rifts in the screen of text to reveal further words. It is visual and essential – interactivity is narrative. At the awards event in January, Chris Meade, sponsor of the main prize and a digital explorer in his own right, remarked that PRY might well be the ‘breakthrough’ piece that the field needs. As I write, PRY has been listed as a top download from the App Store. But back to 2010 and our first thoughts: no amount of animation, touching, swiping, clicking, choosing, interacting will engage the reader if the story does not speak of human issues and feelings – PRY does this. As Samantha Gorman told me, ‘Pry was written with new tool sets, but it is still a very human story.’

Sam Gorman and Danny Cannizzaro Skyping from San Diego at the 2014 awards

 Telling a good story will always be the aim and the magnet, for writers and audiences, and in five years we have seen the relationship between narrative and medium become more closely wedded. It’s also clear that developing technology has enabled improved interfaces, visuals, and more meaningful interactivity. As digital pioneer Andy Campbell has said: ‘The biggest change has been a wave of new media stories created for tablet and mobile devices, without doubt.’ For me, the tablet is the medium that can bring together all the media with all the audiences: narratives that will please lovers of literature, lovers of games, lovers of film, as I think PRY demonstrates.

But what I find most fascinating, especially given the success of PRY, is that there is no category on the App Store, called ‘fiction’ or ‘narrative’ or ‘story’. It’s as if apps do not do stories, only functions. Maybe there is still some work to do in bringing a wider audience on board, assuming that is what we want (I do). As Christine Wilks told me, ‘We’re still in a highly experimental phase, the technology is changing rapidly, but some best practices and design principles are emerging. I also think the vehicle of dissemination is vitally important for reaching larger audiences and this is where mobile devices, amongst other things, have a big part to play.’

Looking to the future, the New Media Writing Prize will embrace all the technologies that emerge, because so will the writers – and, hopefully, they will keep sending us their stuff!

Jim Pope at the 2014 awards

I would like to use this space that I have been given to tell you something about the life of a forgotten man. His existence was briefly dramatic, and it always struck me as unfair that he should now go unremembered even amongst those historians who specialise in such men. Don’t worry, I won’t spend too many lines on him. I know that you are reading this to learn about my fictions, and it can get very boring when all that you are flung instead are dates.

Isaak Charles Walter Scinbank was born in Derby in the early months of 1808, in the house of his mother. His father, Walter, is credited for establishing one of the first paediatric practices in Britain. Walter was also an ardent angler, and Isaak was named for the near-legendary writer and fisherman Isaak Walton, whose book The Compleat Angler was written on the shores of the Derbyshire rivers Dove and Derwent. Young Isaak spent many salad days as a boy exploring the valleys, courses, springs and rills of the Derbyshire Dales with his father, and became an accomplished rodman himself.

 Much of Isaak’s adult life went unrecorded, and the present day is left only a few unsubstantiated rumours of him entering the naval profession and sailing to the China Sea and the Okhotsk. The only certainties are that he married Elagail Hopwood, the daughter of a Buxton bathhouse impresario and a forthright and defiant victim of scoliosis, and built a house with her on the limestone cliffs overlooking the Dales hamlet of Mill Dale, where Isaak Walton had fished atop the bridge.

 Though he did not seem cut from the soggy, gumptious cloth of a sailor, Isaak was commissioned in the summer of 1852  by Lady Jane Franklin, wife of the famous polar explorer Sir John Franklin, to travel to the Canadian Arctic in search of her husband who had gone missing amongst the ice and seal-blown islands some seven years previously. Scinbank accepted and left in November of that year with one ship, the Otranto, and a Benettonesque crew of Derbymen, Americans, Orcadians and even a Dutch wildman. The travails that they faced in the polar regions almost cost them their lives, but after nearly one year at sea Scinbank found John Franklin, with the remnants of his crew, on the western shores of what is now Axel Heiberg Island. Bringing him home to his expectant wife and an ecstatic public, Scinbank quietly slipped away from the hubbub and returned to Mill Dale and his Elagail, where he peacefully fished the rest of his life away on the proceeds of his reward. He died in 1878 at home, of a septic ulcer.

In September of 2014, 136 years after his death, I made up Isaak Scinbank entirely, beginning with the portrait at the beginning of this article, and extrapolating out from that.

Isaak is, and was, entirely fictional, but prosing him into existence was not as mean a feat as I imagined; mostly because I have spent the last six months narratively burglarising my way into an institution where the written word, even my own, is quite literally treated as a treasure; the British Library.

 Isaak is the main creation of my time as the Library’s interactive-fiction-writer-in-residence, a hyphenated, gamey mouthful of a title which I am in the process of discarding. During my time here, attached to the very successful Lines In The Ice exhibition, he has come about through a series of accidents, circumstances and serendipities which have all served to make him the man he never was.

 In retrospect, this is not so different from how most of us are made, fictional or not.

It is this happenstance which has always so intrigued me about the Library, and more generally about the processes of history. As I began my residency, with little notion of what it was that I would actually be producing for the money I had been kindly given, I firstly did what had been expected of me; I lowered myself into the archives, began to read, and felt really awful about myself. Lines In The Ice, still open at the Library until the middle of April, concerns the Western world’s almost-drunken misunderstandings with the Arctic region throughout history. I spent several months gingerly tree-hugging pages that had not been trees for six hundred years, or two hundred, or two, reading about exciting, psychotic men such as Martin Frobisher, a Tudor explorer so desperate for recognition that when he failed to find gold in the far North he resorted to tricking an Inuit hunter onboard his ship, subsequently treating the man so badly that the native preferred to bite off his own tongue and die of sepsis rather than spend another moment in Frobisher’s company. Amongst the volumes and volumes of unironic body hair and phenomenal tales of derring-do which served often to make me feel like a plump, smooth pattycake of a man, unremarkable and to-be-unremembered, one story stood out as particularly heroic and mythic. Sir John Franklin, his life standing as the factual scaffold of Scinbank’s fable, disappeared into the Arctic in 1845 in search of the Northwest Passage, another entirely-fictional construct in which it is convenient to believe.

 Searching for an ice-free line across the roof of Canada and down into Russia and China, Franklin’s crew were stranded and came to a chocolate box assortment of sticky ends, including scurvy, lead poisoning, tuberculosis, exposure and starvation. There was evidence of cannibalism amongst those who survived the initial ravages, vehemently denied by a Victorian public who could not comprehend the existence of their heroes’ oesophagi. Though many bodies, and the least-edible parts of other bodies, have been discovered in the intervening years in those still-desolate lands, Franklin’s corpse and the wrecks of his two ships had not, and this void in the historical record has since been deluged by a never-ending wash of conjecture, academia and expensive science. Only a few months after I had begun at the Library, a state-funded Canadian expedition uncovered the mouldering hulk of Franklin’s flagship, the HMS Erebus, denuded on the shallow seabed off King William Island. The elation that we all felt at the free publicity and fortuitous timing was a little sullied, as if we had all glimpsed the leaked pornography of an untouchable celebrity and felt immeasurably sad afterwards.

 You may have noticed that in my brief biography of Scinbank that I obstinately refuse to utilise this neat, settled, official history for my narrative, instead opting to clumsily divert the flow and insist that my fictional explorer found Franklin alive and mostly well. I made no attempt to transplant my alternates onto existing fact, so skilfully that you could barely see the join, but instead brutally established them and moved on. To me, this skimmed stone of a biography, the second thing of Scinbank’s that I completed after his portrait, is perhaps the least interesting element about the man-character. His official story, what might be pasted into his Wikipedia entry, is remarkably similar to how we are permitted to remember most real historical figures.

 History, as it actually happened in all its contradictory, meaningless, tangled impossibility, is hard to digest. In order to have any chance of understanding, no matter how imperfectly, it must be smoothed and made lozenge-like, so that it may pass through us and do whatever good it might do. What is lost in such abstractions, unfortunately, is perhaps what makes history so unbelievably interesting; the unpickable knots, the apparent nonsense, the unplanned chaos, and at its centre the bilious, vile, gorgeous, transcendent humans, who rarely really act on the historical scale with anything approaching sense. History as it is taught and written rarely allows us the jumbled, confused view of events from the many angles that they were experienced, a view more accurate but less saleable. Instead it permits us access to only those few scant details which had the wherewithal, or random chance, to survive to the present day. These feelings coalesced when I went to visit the National Maritime Museum, which houses a permanent Franklin collection, and saw the best that history could allow to survive of the man; a monogrammed fork, found in the possession of Inuit by Leopold Flintlock in 1859. It was such a silly thing to survive, such a utilitarian, bizarre thing, owing less to its rhetorical potency and more to the particular chemical makeup of metals on our planet. There was also the political factor to consider, which things are actively preserved according to the beliefs and values of the curators in charge of them. Accordingly, the innocuous fork has been press-ganged by the museum environment to stand for this boring, extraordinary, stupid and kind man’s life, and the eyes of millions each year pass over it and subsume it alongside the other scant prescriptions through which they move, like care home residents with their tiny cups of pills.

 I became more and more concerned with this erosive view of history because Isaak, my precious imaginary human, was going to be represented physically in the Lines In The Ice exhibition by some hardy, insufficient symbol, just like Franklin and Frobisher and all those other complicated humans made allegorical by time. A book is perhaps more complicated than a fork, more representative of the networks of temporal spaghetti that make up a human being, but in this complexity it has the potential to become even more political and overbearing. In my research I read many books that said little at all, despite running to many hundreds of pages, other than to bale the reader’s mind with a choking hay of imperialism or personal glory. Being resident in the Library, I knew that Isaak would have to be represented by a book, and thus it was. Alongside the Library’s incredible Conservation Centre I created another fictional character; Isaak’s sea-journal, kept aboard ship all those years ago.

 A fictional character queue-jumped into real events is not worthy of comment alone; it has been attempted by countless other writers before me. However, alongside this book and its own deceptions, Isaak went further than most in the brazen physicality of our installation. The book was given its own biography, covering both its fictional nascence at the hands of its publisher, Thomas Whiflick of Derby (another fake man, hurriedly notioned). Supposedly a present from his father and originally designed as an angling ledger, the book went with Isaak to sea and suffered numerous environmental indignities before returning with him to England along with Sir Franklin. On his death, it passed through the negligent hands of several unremarkable collectors, was dampened and scorched and forgotten, and was eventually accessioned by the Library, or so I say, into its great, partial repositories. Having created it and explained why it was in the collections, we simulated this age and travail (with tea leaves and candles, as if we were hurriedly completing primary school homework) and fastened to its own lectern within the larger exhibition. Isaak’s portrait and his biography hang on the wall next to it, in the same format and font as all the others. Apart from a minuscule caveat which I was forced to include by nervy Library executives, there is no indication that any of it is false. If you are timely you can go and see it for yourself, and unlike the other exhibits you can actually go and touch its leather, scrawl graffiti when the security guards aren’t looking. You can read the unfolding story of Isaak in his own spidery hand, a hand that I had to invent and learn as well as my own. Sometimes, unfortunately, the book is gone from the exhibition, seemingly spirited off for a minor repair; in actual fact it is only me, writing out the next piece of Isaak’s story, the next day of his voyage, the next complaint about the weather, the next unanswered letter home to his wife, all of it warped and faded through a dishonest process.

 It is tempting to think that my fears about the disingenuousness of the stories which history leaves to us would be combated by being in command of Isaak’s story myself. The diary is a form that lends itself to candid revelations, saucy details, human folly and complex unfoldings. How else can we know a person other than by breaking the heart-shaped lock, making sure nobody is looking, and reading their secrets? This may be true of other fictional characters, unaware that their lives are surveilled by the reader, but not so for men like Isaak. Explorers, or more generally heroes of their age, did not write their journals just for themselves, but instead for the presumptuous understanding that history would truly care what it was they had to write, unlike all those other poor unknowns putting down their hopes and faults. It is true that I wrote Scinbank as a minor figure in British history, overshadowed utterly by the man he was sent to rescue; indeed, at the very start of his diary he reassures himself that “they shall never publish mine, no matter what Mr. Whiflick says”. However, what becomes apparent, as he writes himself further and further away from home, is that Scinbank cannot help but daydream of the public adulation, scholarly interest and historical adamantine that other explorers have enjoyed. He certainly lived in the right Age to be remembered for his efforts. Therefore, throughout his writings we see him comfortably self-censor, prune and topiary his words, and the reported facts of his mission, into a shape that befits a Victorian officer and gentleman. He mentions dry statistics, boring homilies as to his men’s resolve and initiative, the ‘Boy’s Own’ clichés of his time and other times, and entirely fails to mention any difficulty not overcome, any behaviour not befitting, any disaster too horrible or weird. He does not bring back stories of what happened to Mr. Kjaer on Euston Island, or what he gave the Inuit of Bathurst which ruined their civilisation forever, or even what they found floating in the North Sea off Berwick-Upon-Tweed, just days after their departure from London.

Ordinarily, such weirdness and coincidence and life, base life, is lost. For every book in the Library’s archives there are thousands of other books unwritten, on everything that went on in between those initial authorships. There is so much of Franklin and Frobisher and Ross and Parry and all the others that went unrecorded or instead perished, so much life beyond their roles as dry tools for political machination and scholarly top-downings. These men deserve better, and far worse, than forks, books, wrecks and flags.

 In Scinbank, then, I saw a way to emancipate true history, as never experienced by any one human, from its role as a linear allegory that we tell ourselves to convince that there are patterns and causal logics to things. I could not draw out the unspoken facts of the lives of these great men, but I could create a lesser man, an honest man, a flawed and flabby man not so different from myself, and tell every one of his stories. In his diary, in the exhibition, in the encapsulated and endlessly contextualising environment of the Library, Scinbank is represented as an understandable, typical gentleman of his age. In there, he is all dates and places. However, the vast, hidden bulk of my work at the Library, the underwater trunk of my iceberg, lay in building Isaak’s secret world. I stepped beyond the physical survivals of his diary, and those scant artefacts which I have cribbed from junk shops to stand for him; a scrimshawed whale’s tooth, a leaf, a few oxidised coat buttons. I wrote music that was sung by his sailors onboard ship and in their bunks at night, ancient tunes reinvented and given new, imperfect and off-key meanings. I constructed maps which show this tension between the public and the unreported, allowing that public to fly over Scinbank’s Earth like an Inuit shaman in the form of a tulugak, a holy raven, in which nothing physical or spiritual is left unnoticed. I built text-based games for the web, locked behind passwords which take the form of locations and places mentioned in Scinbank’s diary; it is only by reading this conventional history that you may access the true, visceral accounts of what occurred in those places, and what Scinbank hid from himself. In doing so you may play the role of this man, and other men and women, and enact and make choices about those stories from his life which did not survive with his memory into the present; the stories of his incredible wife, of the native peoples which he met, and of the brief intimacies that he and Elagail could snatch behind their coal bin, a few moments before he left their house in Mill Dale.

In Scinbank’s long-vanished life, the distinct moments and fleeting impressions which are usually left to the romanticising preserves of literature, I have built him more truly than any story could, more honestly than he would ever tell himself, and in doing so I have created an amalgam of him and me, an indistinct, febrile yet complete presentation of what my residency was all about; being a particular person, in a particular place, and at a particular time. The casserole of our two lives begins in the curves of Scinbank’s face, a vampiric mix which is so coincidentally similar to my own, and which extends out into every glovefinger of this man’s frustrating, barely-reported, overshadowed existence.

I have been to the Library several times and watched people walking through the exhibition.  They follow the labelling avidly, their eyes passing over important things, partial things, and in so doing building a chunked, optimised version of the past. Scinbank’s diary is no different; though some may pause and thumb through his words, there are too many for any one person to stand and read at once. However, what I can only hope is that some people, some ersatz scholars or bored chroniclers with nothing else to read, will take the leads and hints from that book and move out into the great spiritual landscape that I have built for him in webspace and other spaces, all of it confounded and refusing to conform to any conventional structure. In reading this they will see how accidental Scinbank is, how circumstantial the events of his life, and below it they will start to plot its genesis; how I took the Library as a culture, as a part of the history that it contains, and made myself resident in it, noticing everything, taking nothing as disposable, and subsuming it all randomly into the mass of Scinbank complete. In that mess they will see scraps of the trip I took to Orkney some years ago, when I was so unsure of myself and of my place in the world, and how I unwittingly camped in the same bay that Franklin himself moored in on his way to the Arctic all those years ago, and how it would not be strange if he had felt that same way, in the same place, as I did. These scholars will see glimpses of the time I spent in Wapping trespassing on the foreshore, nearly drowning on the inward tide amongst the ghosts of the Otranto and the Erebus and all of those other blunderbuss, obvious ships. And in my bibliographies, the research and self-scholarship which I will continue to write, my readers will see that I have left nothing out; no truth too embarrassing, no story too insignificant, no horror too horrible.

Perhaps by that point, some twenty years from now, I will have finished the work I began at the Library, and I will have joined Scinbank’s story and life back up to the present, bringing my own unique catch of history ashore as he used to do in the River Dove with his father. By then it will have been accessioned into the Library’s archives, as I have been promised it will. Perhaps my readers will be true scholars by then, and they will call up On My Wife’s Back, as I have been calling this project, on the catalogue system with as little pomp and ceremony as Franklin’s journals, or Shakespeare’s folios, or the Gutenberg Bible, and they will see both Scinbank the encyclopedia entry and Scinbank the human, Scinbank as he would like to be remembered and Isaak as I cannot help but draw him. In this work they will, in turn, see myself, feeling dreadfully depressed in front of all those colossi of history, and feeling that the only way to make my mark was to be subversive, to point out how the Library is not an impartial observer of history but a prime suspect in its committal. I have called On My Wife’s Back a sort of hooliganism, with a vain, pointless hooligan at its centre, and in weighing the life of my Isaak against the history of which he is a part, perhaps this is all that writers and artists and game designers and musicians can hope for; to conduct a soon-forgotten bit of violence.

Bath Spa University have launched a competition to create an interactive literary artwork for their MediaWall, to be launched at MIX DIGITAL 3: Writing Digital conference (2-4 July 2015). 

The deadline for applications is midnight GMT on Sunday 8th March 2015

Bath Spa University will support the creation of the new artwork with two short funded residencies and the opportunity to display the work for the month of July 2015.

Proposals need to be related in some way to text-based narrative – they can be software/ data-driven, interactive, live, internet/ mobile linked. They should also reflect one or more of the themes of MIX DIGITAL 3, which are: creative writing and digital technology, digital fiction and poetry, digital art, interactive scriptwriting and theatre, transmedia practice, transnational activity the emergent field of ambient literature.

The artwork needs to be designed display at very high resolution and in daylight. The artist will also need to be able to realise their idea technically (with appropriate advice and support from the MIX DIGITAL team).

Details of how to apply, along with a full list of requirements, technical specifications, eligibility criteria and budgets are available on the MIX DIGITAL 3 site.

About the MIX Conference: hosted by Bath Spa University’s School of Humanities and Cultural Industries, has established itself as an innovative forum for the discussion and exploration of writing and technology, attracting an international cohort of contributors. This year’s conference will take place from 2-4th July at the university’s Newton Park Campus, confirmed keynotes include Naomi Alderman and Blast Theory. Tickets will soon be available through the MIX website. 

One rainy evening somewhere at the early end of 1997, I found myself hepped up on adrenaline while zigzagging through a dungeon. Even though I was being hunted through mazelike hallways by grappling-hook-flinging assailants, I still somehow managed to maintain my grasp on a large red flag and ebony nail gun.

…and thus was my introduction to “Capture the Flag” (CTF), a multiplayer game mod – or modification – of a tremendously popular video game called Quake. Although now considered outdated by contemporary First Person Shooter (FPS) standards, in its day Quake was considered highly influential, especially in relation to the concept of emergent gameplay.

Emergent gameplay occurs where players employ various workarounds – which are not necessarily scripted by the game’s creators – in order to further game progression. One such instance of emergent gameplay popularised by Quake players (but originating in Quake’s FPS precursor Doom) was the rocket jump.

The rocket jump allowed Quake players to utilise an in-game weapon in a quirky and unorthodox fashion: “…rocket jumping is the technique of pointing a rocket launcher or other similar explosive weapon at the ground or at a wall then firing and jumping at the same time. The rocket’s explosion propels the player to greater heights and distances than otherwise possible. The aim of this technique is to reach areas that are either unreachable altogether, or unreachable from that position on the map quickly and/or efficiently.”

The Game Designer and Educator Warren Spector views games that produce emergent gameplay as “engines of perpetual novelty.” When participating in such novelties back in the 1990’s, I was struck by the subversive aspects of such player-directed (as opposed to strict developer guided) behaviours. I became intrigued by the idea that if a scripted game mechanic failed to work to a player’s satisfaction, that player could then effectively hijack such mechanics to suit their own agendas.

While I was racing around in multiplayer game environments rocket-jumping my way out of (and into) various shades of trouble, this idea of fiddling with (or subverting) the very mechanics of such a system was being mirrored in another of my creative practices termed mezangelle.

The initial development of mezangelle – a method of poetic writing influenced by, and incorporating, code – coincided with a steep learning curve involving programming and online communication. As David Prater says of mezangelle: “In an online world where more and more of us are exposed to the vagaries of computer code, Mezangelle chews up that code, parses it with human language and spits out art.” Mezangelle fuses traditional poetics, programming code, social commentary, and digital communiqué: it now manifests in all areas of my creative life, including my captivation with online gaming.

In 1999, I fell headlong into the Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game EverQuest. While learning the intricacies of the MMORPG genre, I happily reappropriated aspects of the game to suit my creative purposes, including the use of mezangelle during “Poetic Game Interventions”. This subversion of intended game pathways continued to evolve during my time playing World of Warcraft (both individually and as a member of The Third Faction Collective), and when crafting transmedia projects such as co-writing New Media Scotland’s Alternate Reality Game “Cryptic Nights/Alt.win.ning” in 2009.

In 2011, my level of involvement in subversive game development increased when Andy Campbell invited me to write the text for a literary (also termed “synthetic”) game. Andy is the driving force behind Dreaming Methods, a website described by the Times Educational Supplement as “a semi- cinematic, semi-literary blend… a distinctive voice that couldn’t be replicated in print.” Since 2011 Andy and I have worked together to produce The Dead Tower, #PRISOM and Pluto (which is currently in development). While writing for each of these non-conventional, or “anti”, games, we took great delight in crafting deliciously subversive angles for each storyworld.

In The Dead Tower (or TDT), a player is presented with minimal cues concerning best ways to progress, where in-game navigation depends on deciphering instructions that are actually embedded directly into the game text. The challenge when writing the scripts for TDT included the insertion of textual clues without sacrificing aesthetic cohesion: function and mystique were deliberately blurred in order to increase a players’ curiosity.

When entering TDT, the player finds themselves enveloped by an ominous 3D landscape where phrase-snippets hang suspended in the claustrophobic terrain. The focal point in the landscape is a looming stone castle. As Leonardo Flores states: “Like the proverbial moth, the reader’s attention is drawn towards the brightest things around [in TDT]: white words float in the air, static or rotating. And the lines of mezangelle verse both heighten the dread by telling fragments of a ghostly narrative prefigured by the bus crash site the reader finds herself in, and soften the tone with hints about the interface that nudge the fourth wall.”

While it can be fascinating to short cut, or at least heavily modify, many of the conventions – and muscle memory based habits – that traditional gamers expect as part of their gaming experience, it can be risky in terms of execution. Alterations to standard dynamics may impact significantly on a player’s overall sense of agency (the amount of perceived control a player experiences whilst in- game).

One significant challenge that subversive game writers face is the lack of financial/industry support for non-traditional, non-commercial games. A current example is the Australian Government’s decision to suddenly defund the Australian Interactive Games Fund, a fund that has help support the creation of many smaller scale games.

Another downside of writing for subversive storyworlds is the risk of alienating players who have had no, or little, customary gaming experience. There’s also the risk of frustrating expert gamers who might bristle at the reduced, or inverted, functionality – a significant challenge we faced when constructing #PRISOM.

#PRISOM is a synthetic reality game that’s set in a 3D space in true First Person Shooter style. Unlike standard FPS game creators, we actively attempted to repurpose a player’s ability to engage with the gamespace. When a player first enters #PRISOM, the navigation appears to mirror FPS conventions (space bar to jump, arrow keys and “wasd” to move, and c to crouch). However, as a player begins to move around the prison like environment, it becomes apparent that functional elements and subversions of these standard FPS actions are woven tightly together. Instances of this include some – but not all – of the travel platforms being marginally difficult to jump on, or when players seek to shift into areas that they assume are safe, but their movements instead trigger explosive glass walls.

As a writer, juggling this game and “anti-game” orientation can be tricky. If you finely balance the writing alongside other subversive game variables/assets, you’ll create strong narrative(s) without sacrificing a player’s sense of agency (or reducing the likelihood of emergent gameplay instances), resulting in a world that successfully caters for a general sense of player fulfilment.

Regarding the overall benefits of writing subversive (or anti) games, the artist Alan Bigelow pinpoints just how delicate and important the results can be: “Thanks to #PRISOM, I am now successfully indoctrinated…This took a bit of navigation, but the payoff is definitely worth it. The environment is easy to get into, especially with the supporting audio, and once I got into the hang of what I was supposed to do…all went smoothly. I was actually entranced by the whole experience, and felt that I just HAD to get to the end. This is [a] most ambitious work…with a piece that delivers a political message within the framework of a game that is actually no game at all – it’s the serious business of where do we all go from here.”

Someone suggests a theme – perhaps the way a person’s tone shifts when talking about a loved one – and Daljit Nagra instantly writes a poem, keystroke by keystroke.

the warmth o-

f a blush

on his

eve-

r

so lightly altered voice

The words appear on two large projector screens in the Royal Festival Hall, linked directly to his laptop, which sits between.

Writer Sarah Butler is tucked behind a desk between the literary gift section and the shop counter. Prompted and encouraged by a family of booklovers eating cake and browsing the shelves of Woolfson & Tay, she writes a tale of four bunnies named Rose, Rabby, Snowflake and Nibbles.

Following an afternoon in the Jewish Museum’s archive and a quick review of his social media feeds, novelist Joe Dunthorne lists possible subjects to use as prompts. His tale of a miserable old man who steals the football from a game played next door is written for a Twitter user who watches online from home. “They have an instinct for weakness, children,” Joe writes. “It’s admirable, really, the accuracy with which they exploit human imperfection.”

Over seven weeks, David Varela and I managed a programme of events, each exploring writing as performance and also how digital technology can impact on the way writers write. For the Live Writing Series, we used technology developed by Alex Heeton and Riccardo Cambiassi to show every tap of the keyboard by seven writers, live online and in public. We put poets, scriptwriters and novelists in busy venues where they came face to face with the people they were writing for and about. Over 4,000 people engaged with the project, either in person or online, and almost 100 musings, poems, lectures, jokes, anecdotes, stories and other new pieces of writing were produced.

We had ambitious creative goals. Our aim was to offer writers taking part in the LWS project a chance to develop their improvisational skills, finding new sources of motivation, reaching new audiences in new contexts, and hopefully achieving a new mindset of openness regarding their writing practice. We were keen to see the range of work produced by writers under pressure and whether literature formed live, for screen rather than page, resulted in a new kind of text. We enjoyed seeing how the stories and poems had a fluid quality, how narrative and structure were looser, and that many of the pieces had a sense of immediacy and urgency.

Our plan was to produce technology for writers with fairly modest digital expertise. The live writing platform we have developed is functional and accessible. We don’t think that writers need to be well-versed in the digital world to develop an exciting online literature project. Rather, it’s a case of switching a writerly mind away from its traditional focus on the printed page towards the possibilities of a screen and real-time performance, and enjoying playing with the way text and stories can be presented and experienced online.

Since its conception in 2011, when Heeton and Cambiassi created the website and technology behind David Varela’s online writing project 100 Hours of Solitude, the live writing platform has been refined with a photo gallery, an area to highlight the most interesting pieces of work, and improved navigation. Our long-term aim is to keep developing it further with writers of all genres.

That includes writers who are keen to perform and those reluctant to; writers in the UK sat in venues with enormous screens; writers in other countries, their words beamed online to readers. We want to provide a tool that can be grabbed by other writers and used easily as part of a live production.

Technology has given us a chance to forge new relationships between readers and writers, turning conversation into inspiration, fans into patrons, and the act of writing into performance. By cultivating this skill in a generation of writers and opening up this possibility to new audiences, we hope the live writing platform could be a major step towards making the possibilities of digital literature available to all.

GS, DV 23.02.14

—

We interviewed Gemma and David in back in October at the start of the project. Read the interview here.

If you’re a writer interested in finding out more about immersive entertainment – discovering how your audiences can be immersed and play an active part in your story – then we have a great series of specialist immersive writing guides made available to The Writing Platform by Portal Entertainment and the Immersive Writing Lab team.

The guides, created by Mike Jones, Portal Entertainment’s Head of Story, will help writers who want to write ‘immersive entertainment’: writers who want their audiences to be immersed and play an active part in their story. This fifth guide explains how to create use memory and ritual to affect emotional states.

—

We watch, read or play stories in order to feel something. We might feel inspired or excited, we might feel moved, intrigued or challenged, we might feel thrilled, joyous or terrified. Not only do we hope for and allow story experiences to effect us in this way but we expect them to do so. These feeling-states are part of the contract of expectations we have with the story we pay to see, read or play. For creators of multi-platform, immersive and interactive storyworlds this contract with the viewer is no less important, and moreover it prompts us to think in an audience-centric way, focused first on their experience of the story rather than our internal conceptualisation of it.

Emotional-States

Genre, mood, tone, style, theme are all tools we can employ that shape not only how an audience feels about the story they are experiencing but also how they expect to be made to feel even before they enter. If I sign up to engage a romantic-comedy based storyworld my expectations are that it will make me feel a certain way – happy, excited, nervous and elated. If that storyworld turns out to be more scary than funny, more tragic than joyous; then the audience is going to be very unsatisfied because their emotional expectations haven’t been met.

In the storyworld bible for Battlestar Galactica – which informs the broadcast series, tele-movie, webseries, comics and video game incarnations of the BSG storyworld – creator, Ronald D. Moore, writes;

“The Battlestar Galactica lives in a perpetual state of crisis, one in which the Cylons can appear at any moment, and where terrorist bombs, murders, rebellions, accidents, and plagues are the unfortunate routines of day to day life. There are no days for our characters, no safe havens, nothing approaching the quiet normal existence they once knew. They are on the run for their very lives. This series is about a chase. Let the chase begin.”

In this simple paragraph he has summed up the core emotional states that underpin the BSG storyworld and are consistent right across any and all platform incarnations of BSG – crisis, paranoia, terror, tension, the feeling of being chased and hounded. Each and any story told in the BSG universe is predicated on eliciting these emotions. They are not only what we get, they are what audiences expect.

So there are two key questions we should ask at the front of our storyworld development process:

How do I want my audience to feel whilst they are in the storyworld?

How do I want my audience to feel after they have left the storyworld?

The two are not the same and indeed can vary widely. Whilst I’m within the storyworld I may feel frightened, thrilled or confused. But once outside of it, at the completion of all or part of it, I might feel differently – satisfied, intrigued, relieved or hopeful. This idea of movement between emotional states is fundamental to good storytelling on any medium. If I were writing a story where I wanted the audience to be moved to feel sorrow and sadness I could write a scene showing a character very sad and crying. But this is going to be very dull and not nearly as effective as a scene that shows the same person as joyous and happy but who then looses the thing that made them so and they fall into sadness. It’s the movement between two different – and often opposite – emotional states that makes an audience emotionally engage. And this goes as much for the macro level of a storyworld as it does at a micro scene by scene level of an individual story.

What we need to ask then is, what are the dominant emotional states of your storyworld experience and how do they change for the viewer as they move between platforms, in and out of the storyworld. A good story is not disposable, it’s not simply felt in the moment of the experience and then forgotten. Great story experiences continue to effect us long after they are over. And long-form episodic stories – those that demand we return to watch, play or read more – effect us most profoundly of all. How do you want your audience to feel before, during and after the experience? What are the different emotions they move through? How do different platforms bring out or emphasise different emotional states and their variations?

Memories

A way of developing a storyworld that can effect audiences in this way is to focus on articulating the memories the storyworld generates for the audience. The definition of a ‘memory’ is simply something retained and recounted in the mind. So as the creator of a storyworld you need to ask what memories do you want to create for the audience…? We can think of these in two ways;

What will the audience be prompted to remember? And, what will they need to remember?

The former encompasses the experience of the storyworld, what images and imagery, what actions that were taken (by characters or by themselves), what ideas, what emotions? The later question is more connected to activity and action in the storyworld and speaks to plot and returnability; what thing do the audience need to remember in order to comprehend or take action within the storyworld? What events, circumstances and relationships do they need to be able to recall in order to advance the story? What memories need to be planted in order for the audience to make clear connections between plot and thematic elements? What ‘objects’ do you give the audience as a way for them to retain the memory?

Being specific about how you want your audience to feel allows you, as a writer, to connect emotions to writing choices in character, plot, platform, design, tone, style and mood. When we can answer these questions about memories – being specific about the memories we want to construct for the audience – we can start to build and make decisions about how the storyworld is presented, how it is narrated and experienced. How can iconography, colour or particular imagery be used to connect memories for the viewer? How do you highlight specific things that need to be remembered by the audience? What mood or tonal aspects do need you put in place to ensure audience is feeling a particular way? What locations and settings best provide a space to deliver on these feeling states? If you want to move your the audience from feeling claustrophobic and trapped to feeling free and liberated, then you will need a storyworld that naturally encompasses these two types of spaces – confined and expansive vs closed and open – and dramatise these two spaces as opposites that motivate characters to seek one space over another.

Rituals

Memories are best shaped not by what happens but by what you ‘do’. Even when watching a traditional movie the moments that stand out will be the moments that made us emotionally active or compelled us to think about our own lives in a particular way.

“I’ll never forget when I first saw X because after that I… it was the first time I realised… it changed the way I….” etc

With this idea of a link between action and memory – the things we do and the things we remember – we can observe that deep memories are shaped and perpetuated by ritual. Ritual is set of actions learned and repeated and which have emotional weight, significance or necessity attached to them. Religious services around weddings and funerals are forms of ritual, but so to are the personal habits and patterns of behaviour that people perform around certain events – things they always do on their birthday or the sequence of tasks they perform before going to bed in order to get a good night sleep.

So, if we think about childhood memories they are often recalled as part of a pattern rather than in isolation; “As kids my Dad and I would always X when we did Y” – and we remember such ritual memories by place, repetition, and significance.

Ritual requires ‘investment’, that objects and activities are invested with significance. This is the basis of narrative suspense – allowing the audience privileged information to know that an object, event or person is MORE than just an object, event or person, but a harbinger of something bigger.

In an immersive and interactive storyworld, considering rituals is a useful way of thinking about the embedding of memories into actions and investing objects and spaces with significance. What rituals, repeatable actions, are your audience introduced to and asked to perform? Are there specific activities they have to repeatedly undertake? Are there certain tasks they have to do before they can advance? Do they have to collect, gather, find, assemble, decode or arrange? Do they have to change or manipulate the environment in particular ways or follow defined procedures.

An open world video game like L.A. Noire has very specific rituals around interviewing suspects. These rituals are clearly defined, have a repeatable pattern and must be performed over and over to achieve different outcomes. The ritual of interviewing is a key part of the immersion and role-play of the storyworld. More importantly, it both generates memories and compels audiences to recall memories in order to solve cases and advance the story. More than just a game mechanic, it is one that demands the viewer to immersive themselves by compelling memory and ritual.

The central idea is that powerful memories are constructed by engaging the audience with rituals they can perform. This puts the onus of the writer to embed their storyworld with repeatable actions that are loaded with significance. At the same time, rituals become powerful tools for escalating narrative drama. High dramatic stakes come when established rituals are broken or threatened because such threats are directly to the memories the audience has built up around those rituals.

Immersive Writing Lab Series Summary

In the five parts of the IWL writers guide we have looked at a toolkit for helping to build viable, dynamic and compelling storyworlds that can move across platforms, involve the viewer to take part in the story and generate rich narrative experiences. On a practical level, these guides cover the 5 key areas immersive writing should address in order to demonstrate an holistic approach that is audience-focused and viable as an immersive experience.

1. WORLD – Logline, Timeline, Dramatic Pressures and Genre

2. CHARACTERS – Protagonists, Antagonists, Communities and Points-of-view

3. MULTI-STRANDED PLOT – Dramatic Questions, Events, Thresholds, Inversions

4. AUDIENCE – User-Journey, active and reluctant pathways

5. MEMORIES – Rituals and emotional-states.