I am no spring chicken. In my writer’s memoir My Animal Life  I told how I lived  through the dramatic evolution of printing into a universal capability. Now I am poised on the great wave that’s rushing us from paper to silicon. Will I fall back into the papery past where most of my life has been lived, or dive quickly, briefly into this dazzling future?

When I learned my colleagues Kate Pullinger, Lucy English, Donna Hancox and Katharine Reeve were running the MIX2 Text on Screens conference at Bath Spa University, I couldn’t believe my luck. I was also afraid. I lack the magic skills, I thought. The other delegates, younger than me, will all have them. What will happen on Day 3, the Making Day, run by Sophie Rochester and Joanna Ellis at The Literary Platform? Will I be back in my school Needlework lesson, age 13, the only one who cannot thread my sewing machine?

The first two days were a storm of flying fish. Dave Addey’s ‘The Thick of It’ app that reinvented the expletives on Malcolm Tucker’s missing phone, Andy Campbell’s lyrical Dreaming Methods, Jillian Abbott’s Air Quality – ideas and URLs soared through the air, with me leaping right and left to get hold of the brightest as they passed. I took pages and pages of notes – on paper. Didn’t sleep a wink on night 2 – over-stimulation plus nerves about the Making Day.

It’s here. Naomi Alderman sparks us off on a multiply-authored story, to whose four chapters we all added a single word, written (on paper) on the wall…

Surreal in its tangents and tangles, it showed me we were making through play – and we all know how to play. Sophie Rochester’s  talk turned bad news into good: most writers have been ‘impoverished’, from Dostoevsky to me – but since paper has made us poor, why worry if silicon does no better? It’s the profession most Britons would like to belong to, apparently. Art will out regardless when so many of us want to make it.

11.30am. How to choose my workshop? For me, Donna Hancox’s on digital creativity and political activism vied with Stand and Stare’s offer to send us away with a finished digital poem/story magically linked to an object – but I went with David Varela’s on improvised, multiple-authored story-telling. Novelists are control freaks: could I cope?

Turned out I loved that feeling of lightness, of being free from the burden of expectation. We sped up as the afternoon went on, first dividing into pairs and shuttling letters between two of us, then circulating  (on paper) a running series of stories to which we each added a sentence or more. It’s liberating: story arrived from person on left, I added my piece and handed it on gratefully to person on right. Because I didn’t choose the premise, I didn’t feel a need to control the end.

Interestingly, the only time I rebelled was when I did, by chance, choose the premise, because we happened to have 4 story-beginnings and 5 people – and that time I wanted the end (which I also wrote) to be better than it was; I felt possessive. Every other time, I played as fast, and as well, as I could – but about the end product I felt only detached curiosity.

Why, I asked David, were we doing all this on paper? He was surprised by the question – and I realised that for him, the essential skills for writing for games or digital fiction were not technological or digital but to do with telling stories: skills you could then simply translate on to screen. That was the most reassuring thing of all. Yes, we need computer skills – but lots of the people who specialise in those were at the conference, and they seemed to like, and need, prelapsarian story-tellers too.

So we too can MIX it up, with a little help from our friends. We can crest the wave, play these games – and even write them. Oh, and paper – that’s still useful stuff, it seems.

I have set myself a challenge: I am giving myself precisely three-quarters-of-an-hour to write this piece, after which I will post it. I will not ‘sit on it’, or ‘sleep on it’ and – save for major factual error or (unintended) offense – I will not ‘tweak’ it after it has gone up, which is what I would typically do.

As part of the Making Day we programmed for Bath Spa University’s MIX 2013 conference, I had the pleasure of attending Leila Johnston’s workshop Making Things Fast: How to Stay Creative and Motivated. In three hours four of us – who had never met – devised, wrote and a performed a show for her.  We made a comic, wrote a song, made props out of card and pipe-cleaners and used Vine to make videos. Leila’s gentle encouragement to ditch the end goal, and to stick two fingers up to perfection, opting instead to give into the journey and enjoy the process of making, was incredibly invigorating.

Boat prop from the Making Things Fast Workshop

By the end of it I felt like weeping at all the three hours I’ve lost procrastinating, tweaking, or being held back by some imagined fear of criticism or judgement. So, in the spirit of that workshop, and without further todo, here are some of the key themes that emerged from two very enjoyable days at MIX 2013:

Motivation and success

In the writers’ survey we carried out prior to launching The Writing Platform, ‘finding readers for their work’ trumped ‘making money from their work’ as the key motivation for writers. In her keynote my colleague, Sophie Rochester, explored definitions of success. Using Dostoyevsky’s tumultuous writing and publishing career – an endless cycle of critical and financial ups and downs – as her starting point, she argued that whilst repetition and scalability in projects might be a suitable goal for publishers, they might not be suitable ones for writers, especially those who thrive on creating anew each time.

From binary thinking to pluralism

As humans we seem to struggle with non-binary concepts. We find it easier to get a handle on works – and the people who create them – if they fit into boxes: this-or-that rather than this-and-that. In her talk and reading on Tuesday evening Naomi Alderman shared her experience of creating such diverse works as the bestselling running app Zombies! Run and novel The Liars Gospel, drawing an interesting parallel between the frame-of-mind and environment she is in when gets an idea for a story, with the frame-of-mind and environment the audience will be in when they eventually experience the finished project.

This plurality was also something we noticed in the applications for our The Writing Platform Bursary. Our categories of ‘Writer’ and ‘Creative Technologist’, whilst helpful for administrative purposes, did not cover the rich and diverse skillsets of many of the individuals who applied. Which brings me onto …

The inadequacy of our language 

Who is the writer? who is the audience?

Our language hasn’t caught up when it comes to describing the new types of work or the new types of people creating them. This is a topic that came up at the Futurebook Innovation workshop earlier this year: if you can’t define something adequately, how can you connect it, or sell it, to an audience? Indeed the word ‘audience’ itself is no longer adequate for many types of storytelling. Naomi shared an anecdote receiving a ticking off for referring to ‘audience’ in a participatory story-telling project she worked on.

Responding to Naomi’s anecdote someone in the MIX 2013 audience (?) suggested the word ‘authience’ – whilst that particular word might not take off, as word-lovers, there is plenty of fun to be had!

You can get a full digest of Making Day at MIX 2013 at Epilogger and we’ll be posting further thoughts and work created on Making Day on the site soon.