Last year, I was invited onto local radio to talk about a new category introduced to the Queensland Literary Awards: the QUT Digital Literature Award. I had been invited in my capacity as chair of the judging panel alongside two of the shortlistees: Mez Breeze and Jason Nelson. The first interview question was directed to me and—I must admit—I braced myself, knowing exactly what was coming.

‘So, Simon, what is digital literature?’

Ah yes. There we were in 2017, still futzing around with definitions. This can be a source of frustration, especially when you consider it appears to be a problem peculiar to this category. The chair of the children’s book panel, for example, does not need to clarify what a book is, or for that matter what a child is.

For the record, my response to the question tends to hew closely to the awards’ stated intention: to ‘showcase innovation and creativity in storytelling for digital media and new directions in contemporary literary practice informed by technology’. The Digital Literature Award is the second of its kind in Australia’s premier literary awards space, after the Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards established its Digital Narrative category way back in 2010.

So why does this question refuse to go away? Why is it that, for lay audiences who haven’t spent the past ten years or more immersed in digital literature, the term remains opaque?

The first problem of definition is a problem that applies to all definitions: the placement of boundaries. The boundaries for digital literature are wide, much wider than for any other category in these particular awards. There is no uniform approach to digital literature: no form, no medium, no genre, not even a consistent means for navigating through a story. This can be a strength (wow, digital literature can be almost anything) or a weakness (ugh, digital literature can be almost anything), depending on the tone of your voice.

Another related problem points to the continued lack of a single work or body of works that stands a as a singular example of digital literature. Why should such a singular breakthrough be required for digital literature when no such ‘definitive’ work exists for other categories? For one thing, the other award categories under consideration are not solely defined by the technology of their container: indeed, almost all other categories represent variations of the same print technology. But the norms for all those forms—novel, long-form non-fiction, short story collection, picture book, poetry collection—coalesced at some point in their history around seminal, defining works. Though the identity of such works can be argued over ad infinitum, they certainly exist.

In digital literature, we have seen a dazzling array of wildly inventive work (even a brief survey of Breeze’s or Nelson’s oeuvre, for example, confirms this), but the breakthrough, the work that everybody knows about even if it’s not exactly representative, continues to elude even the finest practitioners and, while not absolutely necessary, presents a barrier to establishing an idea of digital literature in the popular imagination. Indeed, this is one of the major goals for the QUT Digital Literature Award and others like it. But, for the foreseeable future at least, we will continue to be asked to explain exactly what this stuff is all about.

Screenshot from Nine Billion Branches by Jason Nelson.

But beyond determining boundaries and promoting the idea of digital literature in the wider reading public comes, for the judging panel, the difficult task of determining its quality. Specifically, how does one weigh up the wildly different works that fall within those boundaries against each other to determine a winning entry?

Personally, I like to keep things simple. The title tells you everything you need to know.

The first consideration for me is examining how text is used as an integral part of the narrative. Video, animation, graphics, and audio can all of course be combined variously to create inventive narratives, but an entry where text does not form a significant part of the storytelling, for me, would fall too far outside the scope of a literary award. But even works that are clearly worthy in this regard bring challenges for judges. How does one judge, for example, non-linear poetry against remix works against linear prose augmented by multimedia elements? Subjectivity does come into this, but the task requires judges to consider the purpose of narrative. For me that means thinking about the quality of the connection between writer and reader and the clarity of the communication between.

The other consideration for the judging panel is around the technology. What does it mean for a literary work to be ‘digital’? For many people, this automatically means ‘screen’, which to some extent is fair enough. The rules of the award at the moment specifically refer to the screen as an essential medium of delivery. But thinking more broadly, ‘digital’ literature uses technology as an essential part of its design. A great digital narrative tells a story that relies on its underlying technology: stories that make use of the fluidity of digital media, either in their construction or their delivery.

All the shortlisted entries from last year exemplified these ideas in various ways. Looking through the list offers some indication of the complexity of the panel’s task.

After much deliberation, though, the panel granted the inaugural award to Jason Nelson. His winning entry, Nine Billion Branches, finds a unique way to represent fragmented and non-linear narrative. It grasps at meaning in a way that is thoroughly contemporary, reminiscent of grappling with social media threads mid-conversation. It requires its readers to actively negotiate their way through a conceptually three-dimensional space (up and down, left and right, in and out). Its structure recalls the manic pace of today’s online rhetoric, but the narrative reveals itself only when the reader, by choice, slows down to reflect on each fragment of text as a piece within a complete picture. In Nine Billion Branches, Nelson makes a pointed critique of Australian culture, the commercialisation of public spaces, and the politicisation of private spaces. It is a piece that could only exist in a digital environment, but maintains a handmade aesthetic, finding beauty in mundane space of everyday life.

In other words, this is a challenging, but beautifully written work with an urgent message, told in a way that could only be constructed and experienced via digital media, published to the web.

But, while I see in Nine Billion Branches a work deeply immersed in digital culture, I am aware some (perhaps many) readers simply see a screen-based work. This is what I think will be a challenge to the future of literary categories built around technology. A myopic focus on the screen as the defining characteristic of digital literature could eventually lead to a cul-de-sac. Our society and technologies might be screen obsessed today, but the fluidity of digital media has been influencing storytelling long before we carried screens everywhere with us and will continue long after the next interface innovation comes along.

Does that mean I just blurred another defining boundary of digital literature? I should really stop doing that.

The 2018 Queensland Literary Awards are open for nominations until 31 May.

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.

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 second guide explains how to create characters.

Characters – Goals, Obstacles, Communities and Points-of-View

It is somewhat stating the obvious to suggest that character is crucial to storytelling. Yet the idea of character is more complex than it might appear. And in the case of writing immersive interactive and multi-platform storyworlds, the notion of how to construct characters is extended with new considerations.

A story may be described in terms of its plot (this happens, then that happens then this happens…. etc) but it’s characters that provide us with point-of-view, empathy, metaphor, subtext and drama within that plot chain of events. More specifically, it is characters that give us a reason to care about the plot and make the plot events meaningful.

Writing a storyworld, as opposed to a singular narrative, requires some broader ideas about characters, what they represent, how they work and how they relate to each other in ongoing ways. We’ll break this down into 4 useful elements as a tool kit for thinking about the characters in your storyworld.

– Goals and Obstacles

– Role-Play

– Communities

– Points of view

Goals and Obstacles

In the previous guide we looked at the dramatic pressures of your storyworld, asking what forces in opposition pressurise and make dramatic (or comedic) your world? This is to say, what macro-level problems effect every character in your world? This is the central energy source that will both generate and motivate your characters who will not only struggle against or with these problems, but who will also be a product of them. Characters born in a particular world are a direct result of the world; their attitudes, behaviours, personality and – in particular – their goals and objectives, are a response to the problems of the world.

In the TV series Breaking Bad for example, the storyworld is one where there are two big problems; the first is a broken and dysfunctional health system that doesn’t cover peoples medical bills and the second is a huge demand for the drug crystal meth. These two big problems – health care and drugs – are the forces that beset every character in the Storyworld and which every character is responding to in some way. Characters are then made interesting, dramatic and compelling when they have specific goals and obstacles that are in opposition to the problem. Hence the storyworld of Breaking Bad naturally generates the character of an under-insured school teacher who has the goal of selling crystal meth to make enough money for his family before he dies and the obstacle of avoiding both the police and the other drug dealers. The problems of health care and drugs are so big they are unsolvable and so the dramatic pressure is sustainable over a very long-form narrative.

These same principles of a character’s goals and obstacles being a direct result of the problems of the storyworld are as applicable in an interactive multi-platform experience as they are in a TV series. The question is how do those storyworld pressures and problems manifest characters with clear goals and obstacles across different platforms and also how the audience can be compelled to respond interactively to the same goals and obstacles. What is crucial for the writing of your storyworld bible is to ensure that the very specific, personal, individual goals and obstacles of your characters are intrinsically linked to the problems of the world. In this way any character dropped into your world should be immediately pressurised and compelled to respond or act.

Role-Play

The idea of a motivated character with clear goals and defined obstacles is as applicable to interactive storytelling as it is with film, TV and books. In traditional narrative media we call such a motivated character an active protagonist with the idea that watching a character actively doing things is better than watching a passive character having things happen to them. In an interactive narrative experience the audience or user is most often asked to be the active protagonist – to play the role of a character with goals and obstacles.

Sometimes the audience will be asked to play the role of a pre-defined character, where the story tells the user who they are and the type of character they represent. In other cases the audience ‘plays themselves’, a tabula rasa onto which the audience are free to assign their own behaviours. In either case creating an active role-playing experience requires an extended idea of a character’s goals and obstacles.

The first is to clearly define the role for the audience in active terms; does an interactive narrative in your storyworld ask the user to be the fighter, finder, solver, rescuer, detective, strategist, organiser, chaser, escapee, etc…. What active roles does your storyworld naturally embody? By understanding the active verbs that describe what the user will ‘do’ in your storyworld you can define the three core things that make for a satisfying interactive experience: motivation, action and reward.

It’s a mistake to expect or assume your audience will or even want to interact. It’s your job – the job of your storyworld – to motivate them to do so. Ask yourself ‘what compels my audience to interact’? What is at stake? What is at risk? What will be lost or gained by their actions?

Once motivated the audience will then have specific actions and tasks to perform. What are those actions? Be specific not abstract. What are you asking them to do and how will they do it? These actions come directly out of the role you have asked them to play and the actions should be a direct consequence of the storyworld’s pressures. The audience’s actions should be specific to achieving a clear goal and be made dramatic by the obstacles that prevent them from achieving those goals.

The last crucial element for engaging interactive story experiences is reward. If you’re going to ask your audience to take part in your storyworld, to role play and take action, then you will need to reward them for doing so and thus motivate them to continue to interact and role play. How are your audience rewarded? is the story advanced? New knowledge unlocked? New spaces opened to explore? New mysteries revealed or questions answered? Of course reward systems can also involve traditional ‘game’ ideas of points, leveling-up, or any combination of the above.

Communities

The dominant mistake writers often make when developing and submitting their storyworld project is to focus on a single character with a single goal and subsequently a singular plot. But we’re not looking for ‘a’ story, we’re looking for a whole world of stories. In terms of character this often means shifting the emphasis away from an individual character and onto communities of characters.

Any storyworld – whether it’s real-world, intimate and contained, or other-worldly, fantastical and huge – will be home to groups of character that share common goals and obstacles; in other words communities.

Communities of characters can often be described and articulated in much the same terms we might use to describe an individual. What are the goals of that group of characters? What are the obstacles they face together? Communities will even share a personality, an attitude and a perspective. The group will collectively believe certain things and be in opposition to others.

This goes the same for antagonists as much as for protagonists in your world. Storyworld antagonists are often institutions, collective entities or forces that may comprise numerous individual characters but who all reflect a consistent set of traits. Take the much loved ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ – a project spanning TV, video games, comic books and more. The Buffy storyworld is rich and full of near countless demons, ghosts, monsters and vampires. Yet the antagonist is a singular entity – the Hell Mouth that spawns an ongoing ‘community’ of antagonistic characters for Buffy and her own ‘community’ of friends, family and comrades to face, fight and overcome. The Hell Mouth has collective goals, obstacles and perspective that is opposition the collective goals, obstacles and perspectives of the Slayers.

Within such communities of characters there are of course tensions, disputes and a mix of character archetypes. But identifying the collected traits of the different groups that exist in your storyworld is a crucial step in being able to define a world with the potential for numerous, varying and ongoing storylines and characters that can be experienced across platforms and technologies.

Points of View

The last element of points-of-view is about the different perspectives that exist for the characters and the audience in your world. Where a feature film generally offers just one point-of-view, the vibrancy of a storyworld can often be measured by the range of possible points-of-view that may be experienced. This speaks to the different platforms the world may be presented on, the different paths audiences may take through the world, the ability for the storyworld to generate multiple points of entry and audience revisitation.

Compelling points-of-view stem from compelling characters and this should prompt you to ask questions of your storyworld – What different points of view exist in your storyworld? Are they balanced and equally compelling? Does each POV effect the experience of the world and change audiences perceptions of it? Do different POV’s challenge, contradict or confound each other? Do certain points of view lend themselves more to one platform or another? Are certain points of view more conducive to being experienced interactively?

Summary

A storyworld may be full of great conceptual ideas, intrigues and fascinations, it may be visually beautiful, terrible or sublime, but it will often fail to be compelling for an audience until it is richly populated characters; characters we can care about, empathise with, cheer for or be in fear of.

Doing this of course aint easy! But the ideas here should help guide you towards the particular demands of characters in a storyworld as opposed to a character in a plot.

Goals & Obstacles

Audience Role-Play

Motivation Action and Reward

Communities

Points of View

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For further reading please see Mike’s Immersive Writing Guides to:

#1 How To Create A Storyworld here
#3 How to Create Plot, here.
#4 Audience – User Journeys. Paths of how an audience could enter your world – highly involved and reluectant users
#5 Memories, Rituals and Emotional States – what memories will the audience take away from the storyworld and how will it make them feel?

Photo © Christopher Hauke

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

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

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

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

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

Date: 15 -17 July 2013

Location: Corsham, England

BOOKING NOW here.

Ah, tools. Such a seductive word, with that tactile, workmanlike ring. And such seductive implications. Accumulating tools feels like the very opposite of time wasting. Tools promise to transform us into humble, brine-browed word-carpenters, conscientiously whittling our masterpieces in brain-workshops full of sunshine and space, while topless, and grunting. In short, tools rule.

Of course, as a writer, any tools other than your mind, your fingers or voice, and a basic recording device, are entirely superfluous. Browsing the app store, watching little download circles rotate and fiddling with complicated settings are all byways, not highways, to becoming a laser-focused sentence-whore. In fact, reading articles about good online productivity tools for writers is one of the best ways to feel productive without achieving a damn thing. Close this tab! Go! Write!

Still here? Okay, I have to admit that from deep within the towering dung-heap of procrastination-friendly digital shiny things, I have managed to uncover a few gems that consistently make me write more, and very possibly better. Enjoy, argue, pass them on, and don’t be shy about suggesting a few of your own.

Scrivener

From the first day I tried Scrivener, “the first and only word processing program designed specifically for the messy, non-linear way writers really work”, I knew I could never go back to the plodding constraints of Word or even the sensual pleasures of paper and pen. Like many who grew up with screens, I write in a highly architectural way, and Scrivener brilliantly anticipates exactly what my chaotic brain needs.

An independent piece of software developed by an aspiring writer who couldn’t find a way to order his research and his notes, Scrivener has won numerous awards for its ingenious system of folders, corkboards, notes and composing windows, which allow you to keep all your references, drafts, notes and inspirations in one place and instantly navigate between them; tag, categorise and search for super-specific elements; track character arcs or themes; and eventually, download the whole manuscript in the auto-format of your choice, from Kindle eBook to screenplay. Normally a manual hater, I strongly recommend completing the on-screen walkthrough, which will help you understand all sorts of clever shortcuts, details and customisations to get the most from the software. In practice, I spend most of my time in the simple ‘blackout’ composing screen, which focuses your text in the middle of clean, distraction-free black page. But I would be lost without the ‘snapshot’ function, which allows you to capture and store the current version of your document at any time, and the synopsis panes, which force me to summarise each chapter succinctly as I go. A no-brainer. Download it now.

Evernote

Inspiration usually strikes in places where it is difficult to whip out a notebook – on the tube, on the toilet, in a work meeting, at the gym. I always loved the idea of carrying a beautiful personalised Moleskine and fountain pen wherever I went, but in practice I would forget, or spill coffee on it, or run out of ink, and when I returned to my scribblings they were not only illegible but impossible to organize into a coherent structure.

Evernote is the best digital note-taker I’ve come across. This free, simple app allows you to capture notes on your phone via text, audio, video and photo, then synchs them across all your devices, such as your laptop and tablet. You can search by tag, keyword or even text within an image, and easily transfer notes to another application such as Scrivener. Using your online Evernote account, you can also access them from anywhere in the world, safe in the knowledge that they are always floating in the cloud, and that you need never again lose that perfect opening sentence that you scribbled on a paper napkin with eyeliner. Oh, that sentence. You still mourn for that sentence, don’t you?

Shareist 

Fresh out of beta, Shareist is the quickest and easiest tool I’ve found for capturing and organising the research and inspiration I find on the web. An evolution of the old bookmarking platforms, Shareist provides you with a button for your browser which will capture any webpage, blog, video or image; allow you to title, tag and comment on it; and then turn it into an entry in a private ‘notebook’, which you can edit, format and even export as a book or a blog post.

The key feature here for me is the privacy. Online bookmarking has traditionally been seen as a social facilitator, whereby you display, share and discuss cool stuff you’ve found. Shareist, on the other hand, is geared towards helping you create and curate your own personal treasure trove. It allows you to move more quickly through the glittering mines of the web without getting distracted by individual nuggets; just chuck ‘em in your Shareist bucket, and return to them when you have more leisure for Gollum-like fingering. The free version only allows you to create one notebook, which can be a pain if you’re working with multiple projects or themes, but it’s definitely worth a try. 

Lulu 

You’ve finally finished your first draft. First, you need a drink or twenty; then, you need some perspective. After months spent nose to laptop, it’s hard to read your story with fresh eyes, so take a week off, sign up to Lulu.com and turn your draft into a proper book. I have heard more good word of mouth about Lulu than any other self-printing platform. It is clear, easy and quick to use, offers competitive pricing and allows you to order just one copy. A 300 page black and white paperback will set you back around eight quid, and will be shipped within 3-5 days from whichever global print operation is nearest your address, so with a good wind you could have your embryonic darling on your doormat within a week.

This is not an encouragement to consider your first slew of brain diarrhoea as a finished product – nor an excuse to spend hours mocking up cover art complete with ‘Booker Shortlist 2013’ sticker (don’t pretend you haven’t); but it will help to de-familiarise your work. Your Lulu book should be approached as a single working copy to scribble all over, not a mass order to share. Read it through once without making notes to experience the overall flow and only then pick up your red pen. You won’t want to print off a full new copy after every draft, but after the marathon of the first, it really helps.

Quit

We don’t need scientific research to know that the Internet is turning us into goldfish. When I finally, properly committed to writing my novel eighteen months ago, I found myself having to entirely rewire my behaviour. At first I could only manage a few sentences before I cast around for a link to click. I was sure that I could physically feel my brain fluttering like a moth trapped in a jar. With practice, it has calmed considerably, but a ‘quick email check’ still has the ability to turn me into the writer’s equivalent of Jennifer Connelly in Labyrinth, dashing breathlessly from Pinterest oubliette to Facebook bog while the great social media Bowie-god in the sky waves a hardback in front of me with a mockingly raised eyebrow.

I’m not a big believer in online ‘nanny tools’ such as Cold Turkey or Chrome Nanny, which forcibly shut down timewasting applications or restrict your web access.  I am, however, a big fan of the rewarding sensation of self-control. So acquaint yourself with that unfortunately Americanised little menu-option called Quit. Yes, turn shit off. Close your email application. Shut down your browser. Deactivate Skype and MSN. Don’t just put your phone face down on the desk, tuck it in your bag and do up the zip. Promise yourself a ‘check-in session’ every ninety minutes. I still sometimes find this really difficult; I recommend meditation as an effective accompaniment to keep your focus muscles lean and mean.

This glossary of key digital terms has been pulled together by The Curved House based on frequently asked questions from authors they’ve worked with in recent years. Our aim is to grow this glossary over the coming months and keep it updated following developments and changes. If you have a suggestion for a term you’d like to see added to this list please do email hello(at)thewritingplatform(dot)com. Our aim is to try and serve as wide a group of authors so any ideas welcome.

Access
The right or ability to log onto a computer system or use a computer programme.

Alt tag
A text description of an image that will display with or without the image. Important for web accessibility.

Audio conversion programme
A computer programme that converts audio files (see Audio file below) into different formats. A recorded talk does not need as much depth as a musical score, so compressing (see below) into low-capacity audio format is useful to maintain usability of your site.

Audio file
A sound recording that can be listened to on a computer or mobile device.

Blog
Short for weblog, a diary on the web. Usually populated by an individual with text and/or multimedia. Entries are generally displayed in reverse chronological order (most recent at the top).

Bookmark
To bookmark a website is to save its URL electronically into a registry in your browser for easy access. Usually done with favourite or useful sites.

Broadband
A signalling method capable of transferring large amounts of data at high speed. The preferable access type and speed for web use; current industry standard in industrialised countries.

Chat room
A facility for participants, generally on the Internet, to exchange typed comments or information in real time.

Compression
The reduction in size of a data file, usually desirable with multimedia files on the Internet in order for them to load and become visible/audible as quickly as possible.

CMS (Content Management System)
A web content management system is designed to simplify the publication of web content to websites, in particular, allowing content creators to submit content without requiring technical knowledge of HTML or the uploading of files (see FTP below). A CMS provides the user with an understandable user surface that has entry masks for different media, allowing ease of access and quick edits.

CSS (cascading style sheets)
A type of web language that determines the formatting, style and design of web pages through programming code. Normally a web developer expert would be needed to develop
CSS that is custom-made to your needs.

Dial-up
A slow, low data-rate form of access to the Internet using telephone lines. Current data amounts online have made dial-up an extremely time consuming method of access to the internet.

Discussion forum
An online discussion site, usually focusing on a particular topic or group of topics. Participants usually post content that is longer in form than chat conversations. Once posted, replies remain visible to all participants and retain their position on the discussion time-line. Forum archives can go back years.

Domain name
The name (words, phrases or characters) by which a website is known and which serves as its address – usually preceded by www. and ending in a suffix (see below).

DPI
Dots per inch, a measurement of image density. DPI describes how many image dots are used within an inch-long line to make up an image. The standard pixel (see below) resolution used on the web is 72 DPI, whereas the standard resolution for print is 300DPI.

E-newsletter
A regularly distributed publication about a particular topic of interest to its subscribers and sent electronically in an email. Usually includes links to websites for further information.

FTP
File Transfer Protocol, the means by which information is uploaded onto (published on) the web. FTPs can be accessed via management programmes, “FTP clients”.

GIF
An image file format, up to now, the most commonly used graphic file type on the web. It limits the number of colors in an image so the file can download faster. Particularly good for text, art, cartoons, and line drawings. Vastly popular as a means to loop short animations.

Hardware
Computers, printers, computer screens etc. The equipment and devices used in computing (rather than the programmes used on it – see Software below).

Homepage
The main page of a website, often used as a welcome and/or introduction. Sometimes indicated by a URL (see below) ending in /index.

Host/Hosting
Holding a website on a web server (see Server below) in such a way that it can be seen by other computers. Hosting providers are service providing companies who do this in exchange for payment and are also known as ISPs.

HTML
The coding language used to build websites.

ISPs
Internet Service Providers (see Hosting above)

JPEG/JPG
An image file format, generally used on the web for photos and complex full colour images.

Link
A piece of text on a webpage which, when clicked on, leads to another webpage on either the same or a different website. An internal link leads to a piece of information on the same page.

Mac
One of the two main computer platforms (types, the other is PC, see below), created by Apple. Traditionally popular with designers and web developers.

Mailing list
A list of names and email addresses held for sending the same piece of information in one go to all those included in it. Vital for e-newsletters.

Moderation
Reading the contributions to a discussion forum with the power and responsibility for responding/dealing with/commenting on contributions when necessary.

Mouse-click
The method by which a web user moves from one web page to another.

Multimedia
This includes images, video, audio and podcasts, used to provide an engaging content experience on a website.

Navigation
The process created to help a user move around a website. Well-designed websites have consistent main navigation, found in the same position on every page. This makes movement around the site as easy as possible for the user.

Open source
Usually used to describe software (see below) developed for sharing and without charging. Often developed over time through collaboration.

PC
Personal computer. The other main computer model apart from the Mac (see above).

PDF
Portable Document Format. A document format that is light on data and capable of maintaining a document’s design and layout on different computers, therefore used extensively on the web.

Pixel
An individual dot of light, the basic unit from which images on a computer or television screen are made. Used as a measurement of screen dimensions for the computer (eg 800 x 600, which means 800 pixels wide by 600 pixels high) and to measure the size of web content such as images. Important for image preparation for the web.

PNG
An image file format, developed as an open source (see above) alternative to GIF. Considered an improvement on GIF.

Podcast
A series of digital media (audio or video) files offered for download by web syndication.

Proprietary
Created by or owned by an individual or company and sold for money. For example, a proprietary CMS is a Content Management System (see above) sold for money. The alternative is open source (see above).

Registrar (Domain name registrar)
A company that will register a domain name on your behalf for a fee.

Resolution
The level of reproduction of detail offered by a computer screen or an image.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Carrying out the necessary work to ensure that a website ranks as highly as possible in search engines (e.g. Google, Yahoo).

Server
A computer that stores application programmes and data files accessed by other computers. A web server is used to store the data accessed on a website.

Social network
Or social network service. Builds online communities of people who share interests and/or activities. Usually web based and provide a variety of ways for users to interact, such as email, forums, and instant messaging. Has become a very popular method of communication in recent years, used by millions of people all over the world.

Software
A computer programme or application.

Spamming (spam)
Sending an unsolicited message or spam (email) over the Internet as a mass mailing to a large number of recipients.

Suffix
The final part of a domain name (see above) that indicates either the country where a website is based (e.g. .uk, .ca, .us) or the type of company or organisation that has created the site (e.g. .com for commercial companies, .org for non-profits, .edu or .ac.uk for higher education).

Unique visitor
One individual who visits a website and an important gauge of web activity. The number of unique visitors in a given period is used as a key measure of a site’s success.

URL
Uniform Resource Locator, another name for a web address (similar to a Domain name, see above). Generally starts http:// (or https:// for a secure site).

Web stats
Web statistics, metrics used to gauge the success of a website.

Wizard
An automatic tool for guiding a user through a web programme or application.

You may also be interested in:

A Quick Guide To Facebook

A Writer’s Guide To Online Discussion Forums

Website Or Social Media: The Modern Writer’s Conundrum

What the hell happened with social media? We were told that the fierce publishing-industry lion wouldst lay down with the fragile disenfranchised-author lamb and share the cool bounty of the literary watering hole. They promised that we’d be able to get all warm and snuggly with readers across the world while just happening to shift millions of copies of our noir circus thriller on the side. We were assured that from now on, becoming a global writing success would be easier, quicker, cheaper, and much more amenable to the uninterrupted wearing of Marmite-stained pyjamas.

So how did our glorious peer-to-peer revolution turn into a riot of BDSM fan fiction trilogies, ‘15% OFF MY NEW SCIFI EBOOK @GREATDISMAL LOVES IT BUY NOW’ tweets, and £250 workshops from seven year olds offering to gift us the secrets of social self-promotion success?

The truth is, it’s our fault. Most writers persist in labouring under a series of illusions about what social media is and isn’t, can and can’t do; illusions that generate huge frustration and anxiety. Weeding out these pervasive myths can be painful at first, but the sooner you identify exactly if, and how, these channels fit with your skills and aims, the sooner you can get back to that draft. So let’s go.

1.     Social media is a great marketing tool

Social media is a rubbish marketing tool. This set of technologies was designed to help us build relationships and share passions, not become the delighted recipients of targeted messages from strangers trying to steal our attention and our money. Attempting to establish yourself online once you have completed your manuscript, for the sole purpose of flogging said manuscript, will feel like bashing your head against a brick wall. Wrong hammer, crooked nail.

Example: Frankie Sachs outs the book spammers in fabulous style.

2. It’s the perfect place to talk about you and your book

Ah yes! Just like how people love it when you corner them at a party and bend their ear about your brilliant opus, right? Wrong. If you focus on connecting with likeminded people on their own terms, garnering inspiration, reading others’ work and having interesting debates, your online community probably will develop curiosity about your own work and evolve into readers somewhere along the line. But you need to give in order to receive.

Example: @chuckpalahniuk and @neilhimself are generous, witty, eclectic and useful tweeters.

3. It’s quick

Getting someone who likes expressing themselves in 140 characters to commit to 80,000 words – let alone Vols II and III of your Downton/alien trilogy – requires a reader relationship more akin to a marriage than a one night stand. Building large-scale engagement in social media that really will drive sales takes serious man-hours, and requires a hefty emotional investment, too.

Example: Self-epublishing specialists Joanna Penn and Louise Voss both recommend spending 20% of your time writing and 80% of your time networking through social media to get results. That’s as quick as treacle.

4. It’s cheap

See above. Your time is money. It may well be better spent making your book really good. This is historically the reason why authors have preferred to pay agents and publishers to have ego-stroking lunches with influential people in Soho House, so you can have Marmite on toast and write, instead.

Example: Rob Eager writes eloquently on the hidden costs of social networking.

5. You can keep your personal and professional selves separate

Because we all love getting close and personal with Author: The Brand? You can’t treat social as a PR project.  You have to find what you love about this way of communicating, and bring an authentic sense of your own self to the playground. If you really hate that idea, if you think it’s all so much timewasting, you simply shouldn’t be there. We can tell.

Example: @lindasgrant is a self-confessed one-time sceptic who learned to love the Twitter beast – and Twitter loves her back.

6. You just need to be yourself

This doesn’t mean, however, that you can’t don a sexy and efficient business hat. Be strategic. Understand what you want to achieve. What proportion of your time will you spend talking about yourself, versus asking others questions or sharing their content? Figure out who your target audience is, where they are talking, and be as helpful, interesting and relevant as you can. Sure, look at shoes on Pinterest, but don’t pretend it’s work.

Example: Michael Hyatt used social media to get his book on the New York Times, USA Today and Wall Street Journal best-seller lists, but it took some serious tactical planning.

7. You need to be on every new platform

Whether it’s Path or Soci or MySpace (again), there will always be a box-fresh platform promising to be the next best thing, so you need to keep your head and choose the tools that most suit your personality and target audience. A witty satirist who loves peddling opinions about breaking news? Twitter’s your tool. A lengthy pontificator penning an epic historical drama? You may do better with a blog. Your protagonist is a photographer? May I suggest Instagram?

Example: Dennis Cass used video to brilliant effect with his ‘Book Launch 2.0’.

8. Facebook is the holy grail

It is very difficult to gain any kind of meaningful professional traction on Facebook. Liking a page or post involves minimal effort, but also minimal passion. Facebook a good place to spread the word amongst your family and friends, but they’re probably in your corner already; and self-promotional messages grate in the midst of the intimate chat and photos. Sure, use Facebook, but don’t depend on it.

Example: Some sobering examples of the meaninglessness of Facebook Likes.

9. You can always pay someone else to do it for you

It might seem easier, but this is a big fat waste of time. The whole joy of social media is that it cuts out the middle man between you and your readers. Why on earth would you put the middle man back in? Again, if you really hate this stuff, don’t do it. There are more than one way to skin a cat. If this blade doesn’t fit your hand snugly, go back to the drawer.

Example: If the thought of this doesn’t make you die a little inside, you’re already a corpse.

10. It’s the best place to generate word of mouth

No, it’s the best place to easily see word of mouth. US researchers Keller Fay consistently report that 90% of WOM still occurs face to face. So if you’re only thinking about how to be conversational online, you’re ignoring the iceberg beneath the tip. Team up with local bookshops, cafes and reading groups. Seed some copies on trains and planes with personalised notes. Focus less on the venues for where the conversation will happen; focus more on creating the sparks that will ignite it.

Example: Keller Fay’s The Face To Face Book is mandatory further reading.

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