The Literary Platform has an essay by Richard Beard, Director of the National Academy of Writing, on how writers can help create a new narrative form. The form in question seems to be the appbook—Beard discusses how adding multimedia and clever organization methods for the digital form can turn printed books into something “new” on the tablet. (One example he brings up is myFry, the app edition of Stephen Fry’s latest autobiography (which I covered last year).

Beard thinks such apps are a good starting point, though he is careful to differentiate this from run-of-the-mill “enhanced” e-books that are plain e-books with a few paltry DVD-like “extras”.

Which takes us to the most interesting version of what new digital platforms can achieve for reading and for writers. In time, apps may enable the creation of entirely new work that explores the narrative boundaries of the technology. This is likely to involve a combustion of soundtrack, images (still and moving) with text.

Why is it that ideas for creating new narrative forms around print media inevitably involve adding sound and video to it? It’s like print is some kind of backward child who needs remedial education, or a bicyclist who should instead be driving a race car.

Surely there are ample possibilities for new digital narrative forms that just involve print. Collaborative storytelling, for example, as posited by projects such as Runes of Gallidon, Elizabeth Bear’s Shadow Unit, or Neal Stephenson and Greg Bear’s Mongoliad. Even the MIT Media Lab is looking into collaboration and interactivity as a means of storytelling. The social rewards that come from participation and collaboration can be a very powerful incentive indeed for their participants.

So far, most experiments in commercializing en masse collaborative storytelling (as opposed to the projects I mentioned above that mostly tend to rely on a handful of “professional” writers interacting with their fans) seem to have largely gone under the radar. Projects like Ficly, Neovella, and Figment seem to have their own self-contained userbases, but none of them has exactly set the world on fire yet.

On the other hand, another sort of (somewhat) collaborative settings has set the world on fire: MMOs are attracting hundreds of thousands or even millions of players who do nothing more than traipse around inside virtual worlds, experiencing game designers’ stories from the inside. (Though the stories do tend to get a bit repetitive, given that characters tend to end up doing them over and over and over again…) Perhaps the current generation needs more stimulation than simple text can provide—and perhaps most are content to be story consumers rather than creators.

At least one MMO, City of Heroes, has given its players tools they can use to create their own stories for other players to play through. Some have speculated that this sort of toolkit could be used to create a new method of conveying journalism in the future.

Unfortunately it turns out that, rather than experiencing a renaissance of storytelling and story playing, most CoH players have been content to create story-free missions full of lucrative minions to fight in order to powerlevel themselves or earn in-game money. I suppose the tragedy of the commons will always be with us.

Maybe someday there will be some sort of MMO that perfectly satisfies the creative impulse. Or perhaps someone will come up with a way to make creativity in text more attractive to a larger audience. Either way, I think we should be trying to break out of the cognitive rut of thinking that the only, or even the best, way to create a new narrative form is just to mash up the book with a movie.

6 COMMENTS

  1. Maybe there’s a market for books with dancing bears in them, but it’s not me, and I suspect there’s a great portion of the reading public that loves ebooks but doesn’t want to be pestered with sounds and extra sights when reading. I not only wouldn’t pay more for such a thing, I wouldn’t pay anything for it.

  2. It’s very had to write well using text alone – even harder when using still images is an option — harder yet with audio and video. The evidence for this can be seen everywhere on the web. Web authoring is getting better at this but there is still a long, long way to go before coherent stories told with text, sound and static or moving images are common.

    The eBook bears a strong resemblance to the web page. Their DNA is largely the same so studying the web is highly predictive for eBooks. Although that picture today is not all that encouraging, that assessment doesn’t preclude a brighter future.

    There are some exciting prospects that have emerged recently. For example, Apple’s extensions of the EPUB standard, particularly fixed layout and read aloud with ambient audio, could significantly enrich poetry eBooks. Even old techniques such as soft subtitles (text) for video could find new applications in eBooks.

    What’s needed are more writers who are able and willing to experiment and innovate. Indies who have nothing to loose and established writers who can afford the investment will likely lead here.

  3. It’s very had to write well using text alone – even harder when using still images is an option — harder yet with audio and video. The evidence for this can be seen everywhere on the web. Web authoring is getting better at this but there is still a long, long way to go before coherent stories told with text, sound and static or moving images are common.

    The eBook bears a strong resemblance to the web page. Their DNA is largely the same so studying the web is highly predictive for eBooks. Although that picture today is not all that encouraging, that assessment doesn’t preclude a brighter future.

  4. …. continuing:

    There are some exciting prospects that have emerged recently. For example, Apple’s extensions of the EPUB standard, particularly fixed layout and read aloud with ambient audio, could significantly enrich poetry eBooks. Even old techniques such as soft subtitles (text) for video could find new applications in eBooks.

    What’s needed are more writers who are able and willing to experiment and innovate. Indies who have nothing to loose and established writers who can afford the investment will likely lead here.

  5. ” I think we should be trying to break out of the cognitive rut of thinking that the only, or even the best, way to create a new narrative form is just to mash up the book with a movie.”

    Actually, nobody claimed that. Fact is people tend to be more interested in this form of “enhanced books” and just ignore collaborative storytelling for the time being. To be honest, I think people are not ready to accept a piece of work that is not conveying the artist’s point of view. As if a story intertwining various points of view made no sense.

    That being said, a wild bunch of writers finds it natural to mix words and tracks and videos because they are not really writers but artists who happen to write. Think of Erich Kästner who wrote screenplays (Baron Munchhausen) and books. Think of Ray Bradbury who wrote Fahrenheit 451 (in which television destroys interest in reading literature) but also wrote screenplays for the Twilight Zone and even had his own cable television show. Think of Jim Morrison who wrote songs and then quit music to become a poet. Think of Dalton Trumbo who adapted his own book into an incredible movie… and we could carry on like this for months.

    In fact, text is the ultimate core of movies and music. May I utter the words “scenario” (meaning synoptical collage of an event or series of actions and events) and “songwriting” ? That is to say you actually write songs and movies. Hence a video can be seen as a possible “vision of some text” and a song may be considered a poem sung.
    Truth is major writers have always bred a desire to use more than text since books have boundaries and those writers are more than authors, they are artists.

    Now, I truly believe this form of enhanced books mustn’t be a book in which you put some videos and tracks. In fact, this form is all about John Dos Passos’ legacy. Remember U.S.A. Dos Passos used 4 narrative modes : camera eye, newsreels, fictional narratives, biographies. In other words, that’s not collage, it’s a new storytelling. As a consequence, if a writer chooses to go with video and audio, he has to create a new storytelling, not to add those pieces in his book. Adding something in a book is the biggest mistake you can make if you want to enhance it.

    And I must say that, as a writer, if I didn’t want to embrace the challenge of text + video + audio as new storytelling, I would ask myself whether it’s really worth writing. We writers have one huge opportunity and it’s up to us to create something which has never been done. It’s not about commercial success or web authoring gone bad, it’s about being an artist, experimenting as a storyteller, pushing our limits and fulfilling unexpected desires.

    That being said, I understand why Beard said that. He knows a lot of creative writers feel trapped in books someday and soundtracks, pictures and movies have been their creative shelters for centuries. So his opinion is kind of manufactured with historical facts.

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