Here is some correspondence between Rory Ewins and myself, sparked by an essay I did on 23 April 00. It's pretty much unedited because I am lazy, because I might cut out the good bits through ignorance, and because it might be my ticket to staying in the nice lodge where everyone speaks to you softly and sharp objects are not allowed.
This may grow as we continue to talk, and others might join in the conversation, so if you enjoy it, check back again. Just email me to contribute, but don't have any delusion that I won't decide you dress funny and refuse your post; this ain't a democratic event, it's a personal web site. I'm doing this for fun.
>Quoted passages are in italics.
30/05/00
To: bigstripes
Subject: Stay Awake: PUBLIC SELF / PRIVATE SELF
>Why is it, on the Web of all places, I cannot find Things For People Who Look Too Close? You know. A secret link to a little note that someone might or might not ever find. Deliberately secret places that are meant to be found, but only by those who are looking for a secret. I don't mean hacking. I mean finding a bookshelf that is actually a door, a door into a catherdral, a cathedral which is filled with photo albums of a fictitious land, and it all has been hidden, in order to make it more special when they are found.
When I first put my novel online, I scattered hundreds of hidden links through it (using CSS to make inactive links the same style as plain text). You'd wave your mouse over the text and strike a link behind some phrase or word, and zip off to a relevant (or amusingly irrelevant) site... for example, when one of the characters swears 'Jesus Christ!', a link took you to a jpeg of a Catholic portrait of same. That sort of thing.
Then the links started to break... and then I started getting doubts, because of reading all the Slashdot fascist attitudes towards playing with links (the sort of thing JZ has been getting lately)... and then a friend told me he never got far into the novel, because he kept following all the hidden links and wanderign off, which was definitely not what I wanted to happen.
So after about 9 months I took them all out.
Still, your comment inspires me. I might have to do something like that again.
Cheers,
Rory.
To: Rory Ewins
Subject: Re: Stay Awake: PUBLIC SELF / PRIVATE SELF
How 'bout this: instead of making them links as you did, make them mouseovers. So a cursor slid over "Jesus Christ" would trigger some image of the dead carpenter sliding out from somewhere unlikely but viewable. [Gives a bit of a Terry Gilliam Python animation feel in my mind, but I'm sure many flavors are possible.]
Butts with another idea I keep rolling around: on our way to full digital paper, I would like to see an active paper where something like say a date or time would begin counting the moment you read it. I keep getting lost imagining how this affects the story telling and how authors would use this new device. Forgot to think I could try it on the web. But that's different... It means something entirely different to have my personal copy of, say, Round The Bend, quitely changing internally since I first read it. It becomes something uniquely meaningful to the reader... Oh cripes. I think I have to go have a long smoke and think on the porch now. Guess we know what tomorrow's column will be about. ;)
To: bigstripes
Subject: Re: Stay Awake: PUBLIC SELF / PRIVATE SELF
>Butts with another idea I keep rolling around: on our way to full digital paper, I would like to see an active paper where something like say a date or time would begin counting the moment you read it. I keep getting lost imagining how this affects the story telling and how authors would use this new device.
How about a choose-your-own-adventure approach with a time aspect... depending on how long you take to respond to a particular situation, you get a different result, so that your real-time world influences the story-time of whatever you're reading.
So if you take 6 months to read Lord of the Rings or War and Peace, you miss all the action. :)
>Guess we know what tomorrow's column will be about. ;)
Looking forward to that.
Cheers,
The column I wrote, "NEW WORDS":
I've been chatting with Rory Ewins about different ways of presenting stories on the web, and it's relit something I've been wondering about for a long time.
On our way to full digital paper, I would like to see a side trip to 'reactive paper', where a passage in a book, like a date or a time, would begin counting the moment you read it, and then keep counting. I get lost trying to imagine the ways this affects the story-telling, and how authors could use this new device.
I could make something like this for the web, but it wouldn't be the same. It means something entirely different to have my personal copy of, say, Round The Bend, quietly changing internally since I first read it. A story becomes something more personal. The story wouldn't just be changing as I age and understand more, but it would also be changing physically from when I first met the words. Like returning to a favorite playground to find the season is different.
Eno has said perhaps soon we won't buy an album by him; we will buy an Eno "box" that will produce new music in the moment, but based on his programming, so all the songs will have a musical relationship. And it will be possible to combine boxes of different artists, so I can listen to a Bjork / Music For Airports "mix" that is fresh each time.
I'm just going in a slightly different direction with this. The book with the changing passages is not "interactive" like a video game, but is something where those passages, once read, act like seeds becoming trees. The writing style I am imagining to go with this would create a story that can take these changes, yet remain whole and recognizably the same, in the same way that I am not now who I was in 1990, but it is also clear that I am the same person.
It's the change in writing style that is the thing. Technology is always doable -- what's important is playing with it to discover new ways of story telling. That's what's central. The ideas one can have are limited by one's vocabulary. I want to extend vocabulary.
Rory's post on his site:
I like Owen Briggs's ideas about using new technologies to create new ways of telling stories. A book that changes its stories subtly as time passes in the real world would be a fascinating read. Something like Neal Stephenson's A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, without the didactic overtones.
The hard part, of course, would be writing it. It takes long enough to write one version of a novel - how much longer to write dozens, all carefully extrapolating from the base version? And unless the story was science fiction or fantasy, the author would have to do that updating in real-time, if his or her fictional world was to remain a believable reflection of the real world. It would be a lifetime's work.
Perhaps such a task could only properly be handled by a team of writers; it could become an ongoing group effort, like a long-running television series.
I'm put in mind, once again, of David Gelernter's wonderful analogy between building the elements of cyberspace in the 21st century and building cathedrals in the middle ages. These things - the Internet, the Web, operating systems, software - are much bigger than any one person. Individuals can still make their own unique contributions, but the things that attract the most attention will usually be collaborative efforts.
I guess it was ever thus, but in the creative arts we've liked to pretend that an individual can do it all on their own and still end up bigger than Jesus. After all, Vincent Van Gogh painted alone, Leo Tolstoy wrote alone, and Bob Dylan wrote and played his early music alone. The romantic image of the artist starving in a garret still holds its sway.
But Van Gogh would have remained an unknown without the efforts of others - first his brother, then galleries and the wider art world. Tolstoy would be unknown without publishers, reviewers, librarians. Similarly Dylan and the music industry.
More to the point, many of the most prominent artistic works of today would be unthinkable without a large collaborative effort. Whose movie is 'Being John Malkovich'? The director's, the scriptwriter's, or the actors'? (The producers'? The studio's?)
Pace my earlier comments about self-publishing, the Web is no different. Individuals can get their work up there, but it takes others to get the word out there. That's why we all race off to portals to submit our sites. That's why we indulge in shameless reciprocal-linking.
But again, the sites that attract the most attention are almost always collaborative efforts. It's surely no coincidence that one of the most popular weblogs is MetaFilter.
To: rory
Subject: thinking
>re: "The hard part, of course, would be writing it. It takes long enough to write one version of a novel - how much longer to write dozens, all carefully extrapolating from the base version? And unless the story was science fiction or fantasy, the author would have to do that updating in real-time, if his or her fictional world was to remain a believable reflection of the real world. It would be a lifetime's work."
I'm taking a step farther back than that in my mind. I'm thinking one would start with very simple short stories. We wrote for a long time before Cervantes' Don Quiote came along, possibly the first novel. The idea as a literary device is not fully formed, and it will take quite a bit of experimenting to finalize. I suppose if it made utter sense already, then it wouldn't be much of a innovation, would it?
I also think the place to start is children's tales. Not because I misguidedly think writing for children is simple, but because that form tends towards simple presentation of only a few ideas, and is very open to imagination. And is without shallowness, when done correctly.
Poetry might be a place to start, too.
I think I'd start with a very simple story with three to five of these changes. [With two or one, the device becomes a gimmick which overshadows the story.] The author would have to understand what Gibson said: "You know how to make a rubber band ball? The first few bands have to be wound *really* tight." And it has to be a story that requires the device in order to be told.
My mind is trying to get me to remember Idries Shah's Caravan Of Dreams. Perhaps because these stories sometimes use different structures than Western ones.
Two other notes:
In the Snow White illustrated by Trina Schart Hyman, the carved frame of the witch's mirror changes as the story progresses. This is tied to the forward motion of the story, but I'm thinking the active paper device would be a similar change. although it would not radically alter plot, it would affect atmosphere, and possibly theme.
I also don't want to make it sound like the only use for the item is to have its change reflect time. Perhaps I shouldn't have used the clock example. Time might actually be a dead end. Perhaps having the season changing is a better example, but I couldn't think of how to get the initial idea across with that. ..Time does come into play inseparably in this much: The device begins the moment the reader sees it the first time. It is the personalizing aspect that I think is important. Otherwise the device is just cheap illustration, like a changing scene outside a window. So I guess what I am saying is the meaning and worth of the device is the personalization that somehow occurs with the reader. It is a device for the author to touch individual readers? I at least do not mean it is a device for growing epics. It is more an aging of the tale, like the patina of a few favorite books I have that are decades old. Only the difference is that instead of growing more dog-eared they might at times be shimmering rainbows beckoning from my bookshelf. And this would somehow be tied to the story.
Bother... A writer is anyone who will pound on the table over the placement of a comma.
I'm thinking I might put our back-and-forth on the web site at some point. It might be helpful for others to play with the idea. I hope that would be agreeable to you?
To: bigstripes
Subject: Re: thinking
>I suppose if it made utter sense already, then it wouldn't be much of a innovation, would it?
If it made utter sense, it probably wouldn't be literature. :)
>I'm taking a step farther back than that in my mind. I'm thinking one would start with very simple short stories...
Hmm; yes and no. Yes, I probably was thinking too large in terms of scope, but I don't think you'd want to have it too small, either... 10,000 to 30,000 words might work best (for the base story, and then maybe two or three times as much again for the extra permutations). That would allow you room to develop enough depth in the story to make the variations sufficiently involving. If the story is too simple and the characters aren't three-dimensional enough, the reader might not feel particularly curious about how the story could be if certain factors were different (time, seasons, locations). In that case they may find a shifting-story book nothing more than mildly diverting, and they'd focus on the gimmick rather than the story itself.
Still, those aren't problems with the shifting-story concept - just potential problems with some of the stories that might be told that way, if their authors aren't on top of the form.
>I also think the place to start is children's tales.
I think you're right. After all, the choose-your-own-adventure stories emerged as children's tales. The thing I like about your concept, though (if I've interpreted you correctly), is that this isn't really a CYOA idea. In CYOA, go to page 18 and you defeat the dragon; go to page 31 and it eats you. The lesson of CYOA is of the power of contingency; all very postmodern, but not particularly satisfying as story-telling, because there is no 'core story', only story-elements that can combine in totally different ways to tell a lot of different stories.
With the 'timer-book' idea, you could instead have a big story that has a lot of elements, all of them consistent with each other. The book could then serve as a frame through which you see a selection of those elements, all of which combine to make up a coherent story. But the timer dictates which selection of elements you get, so that each time you go back the story is a little different.
I guess there *is* a touch of CYOA to this, if you incorporate your ideas about affecting the atmosphere and theme, but I think I prefer it nonetheless, because CYOA is so abrupt: choose! Now! Left or right? Fight or flight? And the story then takes a different path depending on your choice. With a timer-book, though, the different paths and stories would emerge more subtly, with not much personal choice in the matter. True, you could choose not to pick up the book for a week to see what might happen to the story; but you might also find that other things mean you don't have time to read it for a while, and when you come back the story will have changed whether you wanted it to or not. A bit like what happens when you're away from a favourite mailing list for a while.
It's getting late, so I'll skip to the end...
>I also don't want to make it sound like the only use for the item is to have its change reflect time.
No, you're right. You could have shifts in perspective from one character to another, for example. But you can reflect changes in time in more than one way, too. Say you have a story about a character who is 20 years old living in 1990. Leave the book for 5 years, and when you pick it up they're 25 living in 1995; they're like real people, growing old along with you. Or they're 20 living in 1995 - they stay the same (like comic strip characters) while the story-world changes at the same rate as the real world. Or they're 25 (or 30, 40, 50) living in 1990 - they age while their world stays constant. Or go backwards - they're 20, living in 1980.
Or have variations of the same story set during different parts of the day - morning, afternoon, evening, night - and have it so that you only see the variant that matches the time of day when you're reading it. (A bit too much like the changing scene outside a window, that one.)
>It is more an aging of the tale, like the patina of a few favorite books I have that are decades old. Only the difference is that instead of growing more dog-eared they might at times be shimmering rainbows beckoning from my bookshelf. And this would somehow be tied to the story.
Yes... would it be fair to say that the key notion is that the story changes irreversibly? So that you read it once in its core form, but whenever you go back to it, it's changed, and can't be changed back to the way it was?
The interesting thing is that as soon as I wrote that I thought, 'But that's how all books are anyway.' If I went back today to read my favourite novels of 10 or 20 years ago, they would seem to have changed, because *I* have changed. My reading of them today wouldn't match my memories of how they read back then. 'The Catcher in the Rye', for example, means something quite different to a 16-year-old than to a 32-year-old.
>Bother... A writer is anyone who will pound on the table over the placement of a comma.
Or who will stay up past midnight pondering over it!
>I'm thinking I might put our back-and-forth on the web site at some point. It might be helpful for others to play with the idea. I hope that would be agreeable to you?
Sure, fine by me. I'd be curious to see what others might make of it too.
Cheers,
Rory.
31/05/00
To: bigstripes
Subject: Re: thinking
Hi Owen,
When I look at what I wrote last night and re-read your earlier comments I see that I was repeating some of what you said in different ways -
>A story becomes something more personal. The story wouldn't just be changing as I age and understand more, but it would also be changing physically from when I first met the words.
- although when I made my comment about a book meaning something different at age 16 vs 32, I didn't mean that one necessarily understands more as one gets older; just that one understands differently. 'Catcher' is a perfect example of a book that one 'understands' (or empathises or identifies with) more during adolescence than in later life.
Just thought I'd mention that.
You've now got me wanting one of these shifting-story books to play with! Have you read Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age, btw? The 'Young Lady's Illustrated Primer' featured in it is definitely akin to the sort of book you're postulating, although it's more an AI device than a time-governed device. As I mentioned in my blog, it has a didactic purpose: the reader asks it questions, and those questions then shape the direction of the story; over time the book learns more about its reader, and changes the direction of its story to steer the reader into different ways of thinking, to improve her (supposedly) both intellectually and morally.
You've also got me thinking again about my yet-to-be-written second novel. For a couple of years I've been turning over some core characters and a range of different story elements, but they don't fit together in a linear way... this alternative approach to story-telling might suit them better. (Damn - now how can I write it without an electronic-paper book to play it on? :)
I agree that a book of this kind would mean something entirely different to doing the same thing on the web, but it would be fairly easy to do this on the web, at least at the level of a short story with 3-5 variations. A cookie, a bit of javascript, and there you are. I wonder if anyone out there has already done something of the kind?
Cheers,
Rory.
To: Rory Ewins
Subject: Re: thinking
>- although when I made my comment about a book meaning something different at age 16 vs 32, I didn't mean that one necessarily understands more as one gets older; just that one understands differently. 'Catcher' is a perfect example of a book that one 'understands' (or empathises or identifies with) more during adolescence than in later life.
True. Hesse also ran into this when Steppenwolf found an adolescent audience he hadn't considered, and who were reading for reasons he didn't mean.
I got off more lightly with my own fictions; for some reason I'm able to see them as independent. I feel it's just some fluke they came from my fingers rather than a library shelf, so I don't feel the same responsibility that I feel for my non-fiction. Pleasant bit of luck, that.
>You've now got me wanting one of these shifting-story books to play with! Have you read Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age, btw? The 'Young Lady's Illustrated Primer' featured in it is definitely akin to the sort of book you're postulating, although it's more an AI device than a time-governed device. As I mentioned in my blog, it has a didactic purpose: the reader asks it questions, and those questions then shape the direction of the story; over time the book learns more about its reader, and changes the direction of its story to steer the reader into different ways of thinking, to improve her (supposedly) both intellectually and morally.
The other thing that got my attention with the Primer, is it is a type of Myst MUD. The fact that it was also populated by all those girls in the Army Of Mice really set my brain on fire.
The didactic element we are going to see first, probably, in Furby. I can't imagine some fundamentalist outfit won't make a bible-buddy teddy that will mold a kid 'right', and snitch on him as high tech surveillance gear.
>You've also got me thinking again about my yet-to-be-written second novel. For a couple of years I've been turning over some core characters and a range of different story elements, but they don't fit together in a linear way... this alternative approach to story-telling might suit them better. (Damn - now how can I write it without an electronic-paper book to play it on? :)
Bingo! It has to be a story that requires such a device. Very cool. I'm glad the hot potato seems to be landing in your lap. :)
I think perhaps another reason this idea is occurring to me is I think with the net and information overload, we are starting to need to tell stories that don't fit into linear time to express something that is peculiarly now. There's something about the last ten years where we seem to be choosing our pasts in a way we've never done before. [I'm not going to be much help if you ask me to explain that one, sorry. Still working on it. I get sniffs of it in Coupland's work sometimes. About the only thing I'm getting sure about is hypertext is NOT the literary device for whatever it is I'm thinking of. [I'm presuming you've read plenty about experimenting with hypertext as a device, mostly early 90's till about 96 and then it falls off the map for lack of interest. Possibly because we finally got images?]]
>I agree that a book of this kind would mean something entirely different to doing the same thing on the web, but it would be fairly easy to do this on the web, at least at the level of a short story with 3-5 variations. A cookie, a bit of javascript, and there you are. I wonder if anyone out there has already done something of the kind?
Seems to be lots but they're always experimental for the sake of experiment; university papers. I haven't seen one that is simply a good story, instead of a science project. Seems the cart is before the horse if you approach it that way; you need a story that requires a new device first.
This reminds me of a parallel truth I was lucky to learn young: A change of genre is a change of subject. Which also means the story will tell you what form it has: it's not your choice as to whether it's a poem or a short story or a novel or a screenplay. I've got one story I've been carrying around since 1985 looking for a form, and it looks like it's medium is Flash. I'm going to try it to find out anyway.
Oh dear, now I've strayed into Deeply Held Beliefs of Writers, and everyone knows you cannot have a theological debate without beer.
01/06/00
To: bigstripes
Subject: Re: thinking
Hi Owen,
>The didactic element we are going to see first, probably, in Furby. I can't imagine some fundamentalist outfit won't make a bible-buddy teddy that will mold a kid right, and snitch on him as high tech surveillance gear.
This is Deeply Disturbing. (So it's probably only a few months until we see the product-launch announced on Slashdot.)
>Bingo! It has to be a story that requires such a device. Very cool. I'm glad the hot potato seems to be landing in your lap. :)
Now I wish that I had a few months of free time for writing stretching out ahead of me, instead of a few months of being incredibly busy.
>with the net and information overload, we are starting to need to tell stories that don't fit into linear time to express something that is peculiarly now.
It's true. I couldn't begin to describe my average day in a linear fashion, and that's been true for a lot of people for a long time - particularly for any kind of knowledge worker. So if we want to tell stories about that kind of life, we either have to bend the truth a lot, or be highly selective in which elements of a character's life that we portray, or else find a new way of story-telling.
>I get sniffs of it in Coupland's work sometimes.
Yes. It's possibly noteworthy (in relation to your comments on hypertext) that he never really went back to the sidebar idea after 'Gen X'.
>About the only thing I'm getting sure about is hypertext is NOT the literary device for whatever it is I'm thinking of.
I agree, and I think it harks back to the problems with CYOA - it's very hard to tell an engaging story when you throw in that randomizing element.
>This reminds me of a parallel truth I was lucky to learn young: A change of genre is a change of subject. Which also means the story will tell you what form it has: it's not your choice as to whether it's a poem or a short story or a novel or a screenplay.
Absolutely. Look at the number of pretty ordinary novels and short stories that have made amazing movies (or vice versa, great books that make crummy films).
>Oh dear, now I've strayed into Deeply Held Beliefs of Writers, and everyone knows you cannot have a theological debate without beer.
Now that you've put our conversation on your site and invited further comment, I hope you have enough beer to go round!
Cheers,
Rory.
To: Rory Ewins
Subject: Re: thinking
>This is Deeply Disturbing. (So it's probably only a few months until we see the product-launch announced on Slashdot.)
Fear not. Years ago I talked of combining boom-box cars and kareoke, but that obvious evil never happened. Nor did anyone drown me, which also would have been sensible.
>Now I wish that I had a few months of free time for writing stretching out ahead of me, instead of a few months of being incredibly busy.
Sorry. Can't let you off that easily. A writer is a soul haunted by an image chewing at his consciousness until he drags it out by force and paper. So for you: One time the character sees a lemur in the yard. The other time she does not. How does having two options mesh with the rest of the tale?
That should be enough... Given where you're headed I'd say we should see a story surface in about six months. ;) And Pyra might have a story telling template by then.
Oh, wait. Oh hell. I think I just launched the little bastard into my own head. If I combine the active paper concept as a device within a Pyra type web app for writing stories via Taylor's good advice about making good tools... Hrm. Okay, time to let that idea simmer. Now I can get back to the work I should be doing.
Wow. What if I did make a software that had literary devices in the way Homesite has HTML tag helpers? Instead of a word processor, a concept processor. Sure, most people would produce dreck, FrontPage style, but that's true with any tool. This could be great for a rapid prototyping of ideas.
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