For a good proportion of this year I’ve been working with Kate Pullinger and Sue Thomas on building a new resource, an archive of all the Guest Lectures given during the four years of the online MA in Creative Writing and New Media at De Montfort University:  www.creativewritingandnewmedia.com.  And now the archive has been selected for inclusion by Intute, the primary UK web resource for academic researchers. See the entry here.

The archive contains lectures from theorists and practitioners as varied as Christy Dena, Rita Raley, Alan Sondheim, Caitlin Fisher, and John Cayley… oh, and me too.  This resource, which is under the aegis of the Transliteracy Research Group, will be of value to practitioners, students and academics with an interest in transliteracy, digital fiction, digital art, e-poetry, and cross-media.  Please feel free to use this archive and discuss it at our Transliteracy Notes Ning community.

Being Creatively Autobiographical in New Media

My lecture takes the form of a micro-site that explores the creative process of writing, designing and building my interactive memoir, Fitting the Pattern: or being a dressmaker’s daughter, in Flash.

I offer the lecture here as a kind of sneak preview of the forthcoming Creative Writing and New Media Archive of Online Guest Lectures, which is a project of the new Transliteracy Research Group based at DMU. But more on that later.

In the meantime, I was thrilled to learn recently that Rita Raley, Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of California Santa Barbara, is teaching Fitting the Pattern in her course on Electronic Literature in the section on Cybertext: interactivity & playable texts. It’s quite an honour to be included amongst “some of the most technically and intellectually compelling works on the web”, to quote the Course Overview. I’d love to hear what the students make of it.

Indeed, I’d love to hear any feedback about my creative work so please feel free to email me (crissxross at crissxross dot net) or leave a comment.

Conference of the Postgraduate Contemporary Women's Writing Network, 11-12 Sept 2009, at University of Oxford

A couple of days ago I presented, Underbelly, my most recent work of digital fiction (an almost finished work-in-progress) at the Writing Bodies/Reading Bodies conference in Oxford. Underbelly is about a woman sculptor carving a figure on the site of a former Yorkshire colliery now landscaped into a country park, but it also includes stories of the women miners who used to work underground in the 19th Century. As I said in my introduction, there’s a long association of the female body with the land, e.g. Mother Earth, but it’s perhaps little known that women used to work underground, hauling coal like beasts of burden. This history is largely forgotten, almost erased apart from a few websites (see below), and now the colliery sites themselves have been erased from the landscape too.

National Coal Board Collection: Portrait of a Miner 2 disc set from BFI

So it’s with great interest that, on my return from the Writing Bodies conference, I read in the Guardian that the British Film Institute is launching a ‘major restrospective of its extraordinary archive of mining films.’ In his article, Pitmen at the pictures, playwright Lee Hall makes a similar point about the effacement of our working class history:

As soon as the pits started closing all evidence of their existence was erased. I remember driving around the Durham coalfield trying to find locations for the movie of Billy Elliot, desperate to get a glimpse of an archetypal winding gear, and shocked to find they’d all been knocked down. Similarly the industry seems to have been Photoshopped out of the national imagination as if the working classes didn’t exist any more – as if all that labour history was an embarrassment to the consensus of all the major parties, who now see us as consumers rather than producers.

Thankfully Photoshop is just as good for montage as it is for airbrushing out and I have used it for Underbelly to put women miners back into the picture in an interactive collage of imagery and voices from my imagination and historical sources. I’ll be publishing the piece, created in Flash, on crissxross.net fairly soon.

For more about the history of pitwomen see A Web of English History: The Peel Web or A Modern History Sourcebook: Women Miners in the English Coal Pits or Women in World History Curriculum: The Coal Mines, Industrial Revolution

Above are thumbnails of the R3/\/\1X\/\/0RX set I presented at ePoetry 2009 in Barcelona. A combination of still images and animations accompanied by a playlist (see below) of music, ambient sound and spoken word pieces from the remix, plus a live reading of two poems from reVamp to end reUser.

I was on a great panel with Brian Kim Stefans, Serge Bouchardon and Jody Zellen, who all gave impressive presentations – very enjoyable too! Chris Funkhouser chaired the session, which was particularly fitting as far as I was concerned because later he presented a stimulating paper about ‘Creative Cannibalism’ – the way many electronic poems, remixes and mash-ups eat other texts and/or digital data. This kind of cultural anthropophagy (cannibalism) was first practiced by Brazilian artists nearly a century ago and for 50 years has been a feature of much computer-generated poetry. Funkhouser maintains that:

in recent years the potential content and media of such cannibalistic approaches to creativity has expanded wildly with the growth and capabilities of the Web.

Since R3/\/\1X\/\/0RX is a particularly cannibalistic beast, I hunted down his paper from the previous ePoetry 2007 symposium, where he first put forward these ideas, Le(s) Mange Texte(s): Creative Cannibalism and Digital Poetry (download). Here’s a brief section from it:

Transformative expression appropriates given data then warps or reconfigures it to new ends. Such a method certainly corresponds, or perhaps responds, to Dadaist techniques of appropriation, and also corresponds to the type of cannibalism seen in examples of digital poetry. An anthropophagic text, in which the author or authors engage with multiple languages or idioms, devours other texts, icons, and is free to remix discrepant methods and philosophical approaches. Discovery and re-discovery of meaning is reached through the cannibalization of texts, which may then establish alternative perspectives on cultural or personal subjects taken up by authors in textual composition, re-composition, and composting. Through anthropophagy, artists are free to reshape external influences. This open acknowledgment of plurality is what makes the concept still relevant today, as an active principle for the creation of “difference.”

That certainly gives me a lot of food for remixing thought! As I said a year ago in my article about the R3/\/\1X\/\/0RX experience:

the remix machine, of which we are all part, devours whatever is given and regurgitates it in wonderfully unexpected ways.

ePoetry remix audio playlist:
verb
codecs mash
screw
GlassOnBotReverb
Falling
Look Inside
outpost msg
binnorie_babel_beetle
IntraMusicPulse
ambientDigestion
dragonbath2
SwirlBotXXclips
dragobaC-1

Here’s an interesting, if somewhat absurd, possibility by artist and book cover designer, Stefanie Posavec. Writing Without Words ‘is a project that explores methods of visually representing text and visualises the differences in writing styles of various authors.’

Literary Organism - the structure of Part One of 'On the Road' by Jack Kerouac

It’s absurd – and I don’t use the term pejoratively – because it’s a visualization that obscures meaning, therefore it’s paradoxical printed matter (you can buy prints), a visual oxymoron or an oxymoronic visualization, since the usual aim of information visualization is ‘to help people understand and analyze data.’ According to Wikipedia:

Visual representations and interaction techniques take advantage of the human eye’s broad bandwidth pathway into the mind to allow users to see, explore, and understand large amounts of information at once.

Which is the exact opposite of what a novel is about. Of course,  Writing Without Words is art so it shouldn’t have to make literal sense. But could this be a future way of navigating a digital book? Or, since information visualization is designed to ‘provide some means to see what lies within’, could this be a future way of judging a book, not by its cover, but by its data visualization? Intriguing questions.

Reminds me of a recent discussion stimulated by Kate Pullinger’s article, My Digital Evolution in Fiction for Internet Evolution. Kate said:

But I can imagine a time when books become more like art objects for people who like books, as opposed to people who like to read – the idea of being a big reader might not go hand in hand with being a lover of books, as it still does currently.

I agreed:

I look forward to doing most of my reading in future on a lovely e-reader… I also think the digital reading future may be liberating for the paper fabric book, turning book objects into wonderful works of art – interactive sculptural objects with stories to tell! Most objects will probably be RFID tagged anyway, so everything will be linked up to the web in one or another. All manner of things will be possible. Convergence will go many ways.

Sentence Drawings in the book version explain an approach to analysing 'On the Road'

Writing Without Words is a fascinating fetishization of the book as both object and container of information, which speaks to me about the absurdity of venerating the printed book as the only true and worthy carrier of literature and ideas.

IntraVenus

Female Icons: it’s not the gaze but the looks is a fascinating project by De Geuzen: a foundation for multi-visual research, that explores what makes a woman an icon through a rich variety of means, including workshops, streaming lectures, online data collecting and new media works on view such as She… by Renee Turner and my own IntraVenus.

In December 2007 Renee interviewed me about IntraVenus for the Female Icons archive. I reproduce it here:

The Interview

Renee Turner: Can you give me a little background on IntraVenus, meaning what your impetus was to make the work?

Christine Wilks: I created the images some time ago when I was a young art student. At the time I felt somewhat overwhelmed by the predominance of the female nude throughout art history and felt the pressure of this archetypal image (exacerbated by being taught by an almost entirely male staff) was interfering with my ability to visualise myself as a practising artist. I wanted to explore this, to get inside the image and challenge it directly with my own body. I was quite surprised when the images turned out to look so violent, the way my body looked so battered and bruised. It was disturbing, but all the more fitting since my self-image as an artist was bruised.

from IntraVenus

I ended up with a whole load of 35mm transparencies which I filmed on a 16mm rostrum camera and added a kind of abstract sound track – but I was never entirely happy with this version. I’d reduced myself to an image and hadn’t even given myself a voice. So after showing the work a few times on tour with some other women film-makers, the work languished unseen – or to quote the work itself, IntraVenus laid fallow for many years.

Then in 2004, thanks to getting involved with the trAce online writing centre, I started to create rich media for the web. After many years of going down creative cul-de-sacs or veering off on detours, this finally felt like the perfect arena for me as an artist. Rooting around in some boxes one day, I found the 35mm slides and decided to scan them into my computer. I realised I was finally ready and able to write the soundtrack/voice-over that the images needed.

RT: As a projection, you chose Titian’s Venus of Urbino, why that particular Venus above all others from art history?

Titian's Venus

CW: I was attracted to her – her fishlike softness, her gaze, the way her hand rests in her crotch, the two women in the background looking in the chest (what are they looking for?). Plus, on a practical level, I found I could fit my body into hers the best. I tried many other images – Manet’s Olympia, Ingre’s Grande Odalisque, Boucher’s Nude on a Sofa, etc. – but Titian’s Venus was the best fit…!

RT: The Muse is on the one hand passive, a classical female nude who is the recipient of the gaze and on the other, without the muse, creativity cannot take place.   In myth and art history, she is actually the one who ignites the creative process.   Can you talk about the some of the contradictions of the Muse as an archetypal female figure within the creative arts?     (I imagine this question will bring up the fact that you’re a woman making art…  and yet art historically, women could inspire but not create.)

CW: Personally, I don’t know whether the idea of the muse is very helpful. Usually I don’t feel the need to personify the source of my creativity, but in this instance, with the repurposing of the images for IntraVenus, it helped me out of an impasse. I wanted to address my situation as a female artist who, in the past, felt she had lost her way and succumbed to unproductive periods, times when it would seem her muse had deserted her… if you believe in that kind of thing… Well, I certainly didn’t then and I didn’t spend my time hanging around, waiting for the muse to strike. But, crucially, I didn’t believe in myself as an artist either. I neglected that vital core of my being. Ironically, it was by tackling head-on the archetypal idea of the female muse that restored me as an artist.

IntraVenus is about taking creative responsibility. As an artist, one must choose one’s own muse. If you choose a damaging muse, a muse that silences you, that batters your creative ego, then it’s going to be a long and difficult struggle – which it was for me… until now. Now I feel free of the dodgy muse that wants to silence me.

Whether your muse, if you need one, is male or female, depends on how the fancy takes you.

RT: Can you discuss the use of projection in the piece and how that works symbolically?

CW: ‘According to Corey Mixon, projection is a psychological defense mechanism whereby one “projects” one’s own undesirable thoughts, motivations, desires, and feelings onto someone else.’ [quote from: Psychological Projection, wikipedia.org]

There’s a strong connection between projecting an image and the concept of psychological projection. I project the object of art, in this case the female nude, the object of the male gaze, onto myself, the subject, the artist. I become both subject and object. It’s my subjective view but  it’s complicated because I’ve internalised the objectification of the female body in art and it projects back onto me, doing me visual ‘damage’, interfering with my ability as a female artist to picture myself – both to represent myself visually as unequivocally and sexually female, and to psychologically picture myself as an artist. My internal self-image as an artist becomes distorted and damaged, which inhibits my creativity. For me, psychologically, the only way out of this is to face it and struggle with it, to challenge it, to do battle with the demons. So I project onto myself what I most fear – passivity, being unable to act, being unable to create as an artist – and in the act of doing this, I am creating. It’s the way out.

Research Questions

Most writing tools and story development processes are designed for writing linear narratives, whether fiction or non-fiction. To develop non-linear interactive narratives, what kinds of tools and processes does the writer ideally need? Unlike, for example, with film/tv screenwriting, there is no established modus operandi for new media writing, other than using flow charts. So do the kinds of linear tools and processes that are commonly available to writers inhibit the development of non-linear stories? Are there any near ideal tools available and if not, how can I adapt what is available to meet my story development needs?

To answer these questions I decided to process the same story idea through a variety computer applications and non-digital methods to see what effect they have on the story’s development. The primary aim of this research is to find answers to my personal needs as a writer (so for example, as an Apple Mac user, I concentrate on software for the Mac) but hopefully my findings will be of wider interest.

During the course of my investigations additional research questions emerged. Because I am presenting this critical study chronologically, I will introduce the new research questions as they occurred to me.

Stage 1: choose the story idea to develop

Tailspin (working title) is the story idea I chose to develop for my experimental research because it seemed relatively short and uncomplicated, but with a mystery at its heart, and rich with multimedia potential.

The story is about an old man, his wartime memories, and his relationship with his adult daughter and grandchildren. The central mystery is why does the old man refuse a hearing aid and treatment for his Tinnitus when it causes him such loneliness and frustration, which he takes out on his family? The solution for the reader to uncover is summed up by this statement: He hangs onto deafness for dear life.

Stage 2: research and select a range of useful software applications and other tools for non-linear writing

From my own previous writing and story development experience in other media I had an idea of what I might find useful, which helped guide my research on the internet. To support and broaden my choices I drew on my discussions with guest lecturers (particularly Margie Luesebrink and games writer, Maurice Suckling) and from my reading (see Literature Survey).

Here are the tools I selected:

Scrivener – a writing tool developed by a writer ‘to really help me get a grip on my writing, notes and research, to organise it and start putting it all together like a jigsaw.’ (Blount 2007)

VoodooPad Pro – essentially a wiki – ‘a garden for your thoughts. Plant ideas, images, lists and anything else you need to keep track of.’ (Flying Meat Inc. 2006)

OmniGraffle 4 Pro – for creating flowcharts and mindmaps – ‘produce amazing-looking diagrams that communicate information far better than words…’ (The Omni Group 2007)

Whiteboard and Post-it notes – non-digital tools, useful for brainstorming and mind mapping.

Stage 3: develop the story using the different tools

Ideally, I wanted to test the potential of each software application or method as a standalone development tool, but it would be impossible to wipe my memory clean of any story development I’d done using one tool when it came to using the next. I had to accept the inevitable cross-pollination of the development process of one tool or method on another. While attempting as much as possible to keep the processes mentally separate, I decided to look out for what’s easily done in one software or method and not in another, or how a particular feature of a tool leads me into a particular story direction.

With all this in mind I embarked on my experimental research and began the work of developing my Tailspin non-linear story.

Using the whiteboard and post-it notes

whiteboard mind-map (click to enlarge)

With only a broad brush idea of my Tailspin story, I decided to use the mind-mapping technique on the whiteboard to start developing it further.

I started in the centre with ‘Tinnitus – Deaf Old Man – Father/Grandad’ and worked out from there. At first I was a little hesitant – I put down the words: daughter, grandchildren, family, past (which I later erased), WWII, fighter pilots and then spitfire, which brought out ‘anger’ and ‘spits fire’ and then I was on a roll. The rest came relatively easily.

At first I felt constrained by the limited space of the whiteboard, but I soon found it focussed my thoughts and made me concentrate on the key narrative points. I noticed that the things that were leaping into my mind as links and connections were the more poetic elements rather than logical narrative connections, e.g.:

• fighter pilots shot down – family shot down in flames;
• killing sounds, deafening noise – deaden the noise, shouting that silences children…

I found mind-mapping a very productive way to start. It was easy to come up with ideas and associations and I was able to see connections at a glance. The structure seemed fluid and I didn’t have to worry about how to order the material into a narrative. In fact I saw a different kind of structure emerging that reminded me of a tag cloud. Also the way I drew words, lines and outlines began to suggest a rhythm and ways the material could be animated or presented kinetically. It felt good for my imagination to be fed like this at this stage. A good way to start.

Using Scrivener

I created a Scrivener Project Binder for Tailspin and began gathering my story research into it. I also started to develop the story by working with virtual index cards in the Corkboard mode, which is a technique I’m familiar with from scriptwriting (except with real index cards).

“Many writers use index cards… to work out their plot, a technique I highly recommend. You can ‘see’ the entire movie at a glance, and can experiment with various changes and explore the impact they have on the overall structure.” (Rossio 1997)

virtual index cards (click to enlarge)

The index cards encouraged me to start thinking in more detail, especially about the family relationships. This led to some important insights – e.g. the daughter interpreting the father’s rejection of the hearing aid as a rejection of her (he never wanted to listen to her anyway). Although the downside was that I was sometimes tempted to go into more detail than was necessary (a temptation I often found with real index cards for screenwriting), which defeats the object of being able to see the whole story at-a-glance.

The Scrivener set up allows an easy free-flow back and forth between writing and research because it’s all in the same environment. It doesn’t feel like you’re stopping the ‘real’ writing to do more research, and if the research sparks an idea, it’s easy to jot that down on an index card and put it straight into the creative mix. Despite this, at first I found it hard to achieve the smooth flow of ideas and associations that I’d found with the whiteboard mind-map. Because it’s a computer program, the virtual index cards are arranged in an orderly sequence and this inhibited my ability to imagine the non-linear connections between them. The regimented cards seemed to be leading me down single threads, rather than opening up multiple narrative threads. Being of equal size, the cards also seemed to suggest an equal emphasis on story elements and an even pace, in contrast to the tag-cloud-like variations possible with a whiteboard mind-map. Again this inhibited my creative flow because I was continually stopping to think: is this worthy of a card of it’s own or should I add it onto another card? Or alternatively: should I split this subject into 2 or more cards?

The idea of a story-based tag cloud began to take hold and I noted that Scrivener has a keywords feature which allows you to tag index cards or files. I began to wonder if a more appropriate, non-linear way to structure ‘scenes’ or story elements could be guided by the frequency with which a tag crops up. It was an idea I’d touched on in Jess Laccetti’s Laboratory guest lecture live chat:

Christine WILKS: ‘Tagging lets us organize the Net our way.’ Do you think tagging could have a role to play in the creation as well as consumption of web lit/narratives/drama? 27-Mar-2007 14:28:40 BST

Jessica Laccetti: I think tagging might be the next step to be explored in terms of online narratives. Already searching delicious reveals narratives, who’s bookmarking what site with the same word – a story evolves, people employ the same word but mean different things. 27-Mar-2007 14:29:40 BST

New research question

It was at this point that a new research question emerged, which would inform and guide my research project from hereon in.

Can tagging/keywords be used as a guiding principle with which to structure a non-linear narrative?

So I started to explore Scrivener’s keywords feature. Not only can you apply any number of keywords to an index card or file, but you can run searches on any keyword or keyword combination. This doesn’t produce a tag cloud, but it offers a way of analysing how keywords are used, and could be very useful for thinking about a linking structure. You can also add keywords to a saved keyword search – a further way of grouping tags. I began to think of this as developing my own personal story folksonomy – or talesonomy as I decided to call it (enjoying the connection with folktales).

Once I’d developed my talesonomy idea, I felt happier working with the index cards. Their orderly arrangement no longer bothered me because I had keywords making a network of non-linear connections. Although I didn’t have a visual representation of my talesonomy, the amorphous sense of it was enough to dispel the linear straightjacket.

It occurred to me that this would be an ideal time to return to the whiteboard to organise my story elements/fragments, with reference to their keywords, into a ‘string of pearls’ structure.

‘A string of pearls architecture is a linked series of worlds structures connected by plot points or tasks that the player must accomplish to move forward in the narrative.’ (Garrand 2006, p. 290)

However I wanted to pursue my aim of testing each application or method as a standalone story development tool. So I decided to move on to testing VoodooPad next, leaving OmniGraffle until last because it felt like flowcharting would naturally be the final stage of the story development process.

Using VoodooPad Pro

I created a new VoodooPad (wiki) document, but faced with a blank white index page my mind went blank too. I wasn’t sure how to approach working in this new environment, having come straight from Scrivener where I felt very much at home. If I’d referred to my whiteboard mind-map, I may have felt more confident, but that was against my rules.

So I looked at the blank white space and thought about an opening image. It turned into an audio idea:

Deaf old man

Start with some kind of image of the deaf old man in isolation with ringing in his ears – Tinnitus – maybe a sound picture of him – his world as he hears it.

I wondered what to do next. Because VoodooPad is essentially a wiki, I started looking for a word to turn into a link so that I could create a second page. As with the other tools I tested, I wanted to start the story development from scratch each time, so here I wanted to create a rough story outline, I didn’t want to start out writing too much detail. But a blank white space invites you to fill it with text (or something), and the cursor, which sat blinking at the top of the blank page, seemed to be inducing me to start writing in a linear fashion. This was in marked contrast to the mind-map approach, where you can start in the middle and spread out. Scrivener was also better in this respect because the corkboard encouraged me start throwing ideas down onto separate index cards, so I could get moving fairly quickly on the story, which is a good thing.

Then I thought about the idea of an index page and I thought I might as well do what the name suggests and create an index of links on the home-page, which would begin to structure the story. I came up with a satisfactory list of potential navigation links, but I could have come up with such a list of categories using anything – e.g. pen and paper.

This led me to question whether VoodooPad was an appropriate tool for starting to develop a non-linear story from scratch. I decided to abandon it and move on to my next story development tool.

Using OmniGraffle Pro

OmniGraffle flowchart (click to enlarge)

I began an OmniGraffle flowchart on an empty white ‘canvas’ by drawing an object in the middle and inserting some text. It was easy and I didn’t have that feeling of being faced with an empty white expanse which needs filling up with linear text as I did with VoodooPad. It felt more like working on a virtual whiteboard – although not as immediate and intuitive as my actual whiteboard. Ideas didn’t flow quite as quickly and I found myself frequently thinking about what to do next, which story fragment to place where. With the whiteboard I felt much freer to simply write ‘Anger!’ or ‘Shouts’ or ‘WAR’. Somehow the relative formality of the OmniGraffle text boxes made me look for pertinent short phrases, that made sense, and summed up the key point of the scene/fragment. Interestingly, I began to think much more in terms of scenes rather than fragments.

OmniGraffle compared to whiteboard for brainstorming

Although it’s entirely possible to use OmniGraffle for brainstorming ideas, I’d rather use a whiteboard. I prefer the immediacy and also the physicality of it, especially working on a large whiteboard (mine is 120 cm x 150 cm). Having to stretch and bend to write, moving around, using expressive hand writing and expressive body movements too, all this kinetic sensibility helps make connections for me and stimulates ideas. Writing quickly or carefully, scrawling jagged lines or drawing smooth curves, attacking the board or using a gentler touch – all this adds meaning for me, which not only translates into the visuals that build up on the whiteboard, but also into meaning that is somehow imprinted in my sense memory. Looking at the gestural writing and marks on the mind-map brings back those sense memories.

Nevertheless OmniGraffle is an excellent tool for structuring a non-linear project. It’s good for building an overview of the structure, it’s easy to colour-code elements and reposition them by dragging them around, so it’s good for editing and refining the structure as the project develops. You can work on a number of linked ‘canvases’ so you can create complex and large-scale flowcharts, which is a major benefit over a whiteboard. As a diagramming tool, I think OmniGraffle is best used in conjunction with another story development tool that allows for writing in more depth (e.g. Scrivener).

Another research question emerges

None of the individual tools or methods explored so far answered all my non-linear story development needs. It was now clear that I needed a combination of tools – namely, the whiteboard with post-it notes; Scrivener, especially with its virtual index cards and keywords; and OmniGraffle for creating a detailed structural flowchart. So at this stage in my research I decided to explore the potential of this non-linear writing toolbox. Thus a new research question emerged.

Can the following modus operandi produce a readable and engaging interactive non-linear narrative?

• Brainstorm creative story ideas and themes (e.g. mind-map on whiteboard)
• Gather multimedia research materials (Scrivener)
• Arbitrarily develop story elements/fragments in note form on corkboard index cards in Scrivener and tag them with keywords as you go – using as many keywords as you want – don’t worry about a logical taxonomy, what you’ll be developing is a talesonomy.
• Using the keyword search in Scrivener, analyse your pattern of keywords. Where are the significant connections? What main themes are emerging? At this stage, it’s just to gauge an overall sense of the piece – keep things fluid, don’t set anything in stone yet.
• Once you have enough story elements/fragments, start writing them in more detail – this is essentially a first draft of the written piece/script – add more keyword tags if they occur to you.
• Do another keyword search – what patterns are emerging now? What does this tell you about how to structure the piece?
• As a result of your keyword search analysis, edit and/or redraft your story elements, add new ones if necessary.
• Analyse your keyword search results from a structural point of view, and begin to develop a structure in a flowchart (e.g. using OmniGraffle), possibly using groups of keywords.
• Once you have a first draft of the structure, have a look at your written story elements and start to group or present them according to this structure you’ve developed – you might continue to use Scrivener and OmniGraffle for this – or it might be useful to try the story structure out in another hypertext environment, e.g. VoodooPad wiki.
• Carry on writing and restructuring, rewriting and restructuring, until you’re happy with your final draft script/blueprint.
• Construct the non-linear, interactive, multimedia narrative in whatever authoring environment suits best – e.g. Flash and HTML.

Using a combination of tools

virtual index cards (click to enlarge)

I’d already undertaken the first mind-mapping stage of my new modus operandi so I returned to the Scrivener index cards, this time allowing myself to refer to my whiteboard mindmap. This combined approach had a positive effect on my workflow. I seemed to be able to carry over the intuitive style I’d developed while mindmapping to the index cards, ‘throwing’ cards in more spontaneously, generating ideas more freely and with more feeling. Previously I’d been thinking of the index cards as synopses of story elements I would write more fully later, but now it started to feel like the story fragments might remain this brief.

Rethinking: from story to narrative poem?

Considering how I’d been using keywords and post-it notes on the whiteboard, it occurred to me that I could think of the piece more in terms of poetry than story. A multimedia interactive poem – the reader puts the pieces of the puzzle together by navigating through the poem.

I felt expanding the fragments into fuller scenes might fix the picture too much. I wanted the piece to be much more about elisions and slippages through time, because that’s how it is with the old man, the past is always with him impinging on the present.

The other important consideration is how the other multimedia elements will work with the text – the images, animations and sounds. If the fragments are written up as scenes there’s a danger that the visuals and audio become mere illustrations to the story, whereas if the text is more like a poem the multimedia elements will have the same status as the text. It becomes a multimedia poem, rather than a hypertext story with multimedia illustrations. The process of working with virtual index cards, keywords, post-it notes and mind-maps, rather than with straight text, has made it clear how important the multimedia elements are in telling the ‘story’. For instance, a ringing sound of Tinnitus slipping into the ringing alarm of WWII fire engines takes the user/reader straight inside the old man’s head. The user experiences what he experiences. This is the power of multimedia – use it!

Hero Dad index card

Here’s another multimedia example (see left).

My original idea for the Hero father story fragment was to recreate the humour of how the father would’ve related the bedbugs story to amuse his daughter. But as soon as I added a couple of images of bedbugs, for research purposes, to the index card I saw how I could use animated bedbugs for more direct comic effect (as well as the creep-out factor).

Attempting to control hypertext

By this time I’d arrived at 56 index cards carrying between them 46 keywords. This seemed like too many keywords and I wanted to bring them under control, so I started grouping them, using and customising other categorising metadata features of Scrivener (i.e. Labels and Status). I also played around with keywords on post-it notes on the whiteboard.

keywords on post-it notes (click to enlarge)

I spent some time on this and came up with some themed keyword groupings, but on reflection I realised this was probably misguided and was certainly done prematurely. I should’ve done the metadata grouping after doing detailed keyword analysis, not before, because after analysis I saw different connections emerging. Ironically, I think it was the demands of drawing understandable whiteboard/post-it mind-maps that caused me to develop theme groups prematurely.

I realised that, if I’m going to use my talesonomy idea, I should let the keyword patterns (like a tag cloud) guide me, not the demands of drawing a mind-map. I should embrace the feral tendency of hypertext (Walker 2007). However, I identified two functional categories that would be useful in terms of story structuring metadata: character point of view (POV) and the time period of each story element. So I customized Labels and Status to show this information.

Tag Clouds

Due to my interest in using keywords in Scrivener as a method of structuring my non-linear narrative, I began to look into other mentions of tagging and narratives in the blogosphere, and I came across TagCrowd.com. I had tried creating my own visual representation of keyword frequency by inputting the keyword statistics into Excel, but the resulting graphs were unsatisfactory (nothing like a tag cloud). TagCrowd was exactly what I wanted.

At first I created an overall tag cloud based on all my keywords (see above).

tag cloud

Then I thought it would be interesting to test whether I had chosen the right keywords, so I uploaded the titles of all my index cards (unfortunately there was no easy way to use the synopses) into TagCrowd. The resulting tag clouds show some interesting differences when compared to the overall keyword tag cloud (see left).

Next I wanted to analyse my keywords in relation to the character POVs and TIME periods as a way of focussing and finding a structure. So I created a tag cloud for each character POV combined with their appropriate TIME periods. Using print-outs of these tag clouds, I created a rough flow chart on the whiteboard,

whiteboard flowchart with 'string of pearls' (click to enlarge)

applying a ‘string of pearls’ structure to the project. I decided on 6 pearls:

• Present Day 1
• WWII past 1
• 1960s/70s
• Present Day 2
• WWII past 2
• Resolution

My next task was to develop this broad outline flowchart structure into a more detailed flowchart in OmniGraffle. The idea being that this should provide me with a solid blueprint to work from to author the interactive production in rich multimedia.

However, after turning all the story’s index cards from Scrivener into flowchart objects distributed across 6 pearls in OmniGraffle – I stalled. I began to lose faith in my process. I felt I’d done an awful lot of categorising and analysing and assigning keywords, but I was no longer sure to what end. When I looked again at the early stages of my flowchart, I wondered if I could have got to this point much sooner. Perhaps all the work I’d done so far had just been an elaborate displacement activity – a way of avoiding writing the story.

In some ways this was a temporary blip in confidence in my process caused by shifting to another application. This is a downside of using multiple applications, but one that, as I become more accustomed to them, I should be able to overcome. I still trusted the keywords’ ability to reveal how disparate story elements connect to each other and therefore help determine story structure. Whether the ‘string of pearls’ architecture is the most suitable story structure remains to be seen.

Mapping my story

However at this point I conducted my interview by email with Ron Wild, a Canadian cARTographer (see below). I’d been intrigued by the way he used ‘“Non-Geo” Graphical Information Systems’ to map ‘Knowledge Domains’ (Wild 2007, greatmap.blogspot.com) and had wondered if these techniques could be applied to non-linear interactive fictions.

Ron Wild's GreatMap

This was a timely reminder that there could be other ways of approaching my Tailspin story and thinking about the possibilities of a map-like structure renewed my enthusiasm. Here’s what Ron Wild advised:

“Visually try to show as much of the whole picture as you can at once, and let the ‘reader’ decide in what order, and to what level he wants to ‘read your story’. Linear sentence-by-sentence, page-by-page story telling is Gutenberg-era technology. The web affords us interactive drill-down (zooming) functionality that we have only scratched the surface of so far. Visual/spatial (maps) presentation of stories, is a new frontier where considerable contributions can be made by artistic/creative researchers like you.” (Wild 2007, email to author)

I liked the idea of giving the reader an overview map and allowing them to ‘drill-down’ into the narrative, revealing different levels of the visual/spatial map as they go, until the source of the story is mined (or like a 19th C. explorer discovering the source of a river) – which in this case is the ‘deaf = alive’ equation.

Ideas about how to present the story on the web immediately sprang to mind – e.g. a bird’s eye view of the story with some intriguing animation that attracts the reader to specific areas of the story map – or sound that’s activated on mouseover, drawing the reader to investigate further. It would also be important to allow the reader to easily zoom out again to explore other areas of the story map.

It seems particularly fitting for a reader to uncover a story in this roundabout, spiralling, webby kind of way. Life’s mysteries are rarely uncovered by a logical, linear process of deduction. You arrive at answers, ideas, suspicions, intuitions… haphazardly in fragments. Over time you build the picture, piece by piece, until the jigsaw comes together and you start to see the pattern.

I think a map metaphor and structure could really work for my Tailspin story – a map of isolation, of the distances between family members; a map of emotions; a map of memory and the past.

Although I haven’t yet found the definitive structure for my non-linear story – for example, there may be ways of combining a story map with the string of pearls structure – what I have is a range of possibilities for telling the story and a methodology for working on it.

Concluding thoughts on the development process

This whole project has turned into an experiment in developing story structure with less emphasis on word-craft than I’d initially imagined. I’ve been evaluating tools and software in terms of how it can help structure and organise material and ideas – very much about a pre-production process. It’s been more about designing a viable narrative environment with the right conditions for a story to exist and flourish. As Marie-Laure Ryan says, when it comes to interactive narratives ‘engineered might be a better term’ rather than thinking about them as being written (2001, p.46).

Although this particular process is not what I anticipated at the outset, it’s a good thing because it means that the production stage is where the full creative authoring takes place. I’m preparing the ground now for the next creative stage. This is much better than ending up with the equivalent of a final draft script that I must mechanically execute in (for e.g.) Dreamweaver and Flash – a craft-based rather than an authoring process. Now the production stage will be an entirely creative rich media stage, working equally with words, images, audio and animation in an integrated way. I don’t have to stop being the author of the project and start being the director/programmer/animator/editor. It becomes a seamless creative process, which feels right for making an interactive multimedia fiction. Perhaps this is a transliterate way of writing?

Christine Wilks, April 2007
originally written for my MA in Creative Writing & New Media
at De Montfort University

Literature Survey

I began by reading the following book, which gives practical advice for new media writers and a number of useful case studies. From this source I learned that it’s common practice to use flow charts when writing for interactive media:

Garrand, T. (2006) Writing for Multimedia and the Web: A Practical Guide to Content Development for Interactive Media. 3rd ed. Focal Press (an imprint of Elsevier)

From the following sources I gained more information about other idea and story development methods which I thought would be useful for non-linear narratives – e.g. mind-maps, using index cards:

Wild, R.B. (2002) Mind Mapping. CIPS Edmonton Report, April 2002, pp. 6 + 12.

Illumine Limited (undated) MakeaMindMap.pdf [WWW] Available from: http://www.mind-mapping.co.uk/assets/MakeaMindMap.pdf [Accessed: 3/3/07]

Rossio, T. (1997) The Wind-up & the Pitch, Screenwriting Column 11 [WWW] Available from: http://www.wordplayer.com/columns/wp11.Wind-up.and.Pitch.html [Accessed: 1/4/07]

I used the following web sites to research and, where necessary, download the software I used to develop my story:

Blount, K. (2007) Literature and Latte – About Scrivener [WWW] Available from: http://www.literatureandlatte.com/about.html [Accessed: 3/3/07]

Member Forums (2007) Literature and Latte :: View Forum – The Zen of Scrivener – Usage Scenarios [WWW] Available from: http://www.literatureandlatte.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=19&sid=ab7f543ca4db28a9ad548cea1d824516 [Accessed: 19/3/07]

Flying Meat Inc. (2006) Flying Meat: VoodooPad [WWW] Available from: http://www.flyingmeat.com/voodoopad/ [Accessed: 3/3/07]

The Omni Group (2007) The Omni Group – Applications – OmniGraffle – Professional [WWW] Available from: http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnigraffle/pro/ [Accessed: 3/3/07]

Steinbock, D (2007) TagCrowd [WWW] Available from: http://www.tagcrowd.com/ [Accessed: 16/4/07]

To further develop my idea for using keywords/tagging to help create non-linear narratives, I consulted these sources:

Marino, M. (2007) Diigo Fiction: Marginalia in the Library of Babel [WWW] WRT: Writer Response Theory. Available from: http://writerresponsetheory.org/wordpress/2007/02/09/marginalia-in-the-library-of-babel/ [Accessed: 16/4/07]

Laccetti, J. (2007) Jess: [anatomy of a tag cloud] [WWW] Available from: http://www.jesslaccetti.co.uk/2007/01/anatomy-of-tag-cloud.html [Accessed: 16/4/07]

Walker, J. (2007) jill/txt » what is feral hypertext? [WWW] Available from: http://jilltxt.net/?p=1918 [Accessed: 12/3/07]

The following sources inspired me to consider using a map-like structure for my story:

Wild, R.B. (2007) Great Map [WWW] Available from: http://greatmap.blogspot.com/ [Accessed: 14/2/07]

Wild, R.B. (undated) eMail Illustrated [WWW] Available from: http://www.1-900-870-6235.com/eLearning/DiscoveryEmail.htm [Accessed: 14/2/07]

The following provided useful background reading about the practicalities and the poetics of creating non-linear interactive narratives:

Pope, J. (2006) A Future for Hypertext Fiction. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 12 (4), pp.447-465.

Musiyiwa, A (2007) From Video Games to Photocopying Heaven [WWW] OhmyNews International. Available from: http://english.ohmynews.com/articleview/article_view.asp?at_code=396834&no=349345&rel_no=1 [Accessed: 9/3/07]

Ryan, M.L. (2001) Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media. The John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London.

I am rethinking this blog, reassessing my purpose… (this is a bit sticky ;)

Up to this point I’ve been mainly using this blog to post the short Flash pieces I create for  R3//1X//0RX – like the one above remixed from: maschinenmensch – but there seems little point in using my blog for that purpose alone, since that’s what the R3//1X//0RX site is for – and besides, my remixes are best viewed in that context. But it’s always good to see creative works in other contexts too, so I’ll continue to post them here.

From now on I want to use this space for writing, thinking, exploring, sharing… notes, sketches, ideas, tips, research and creative works – mine as well as the works of others – anything really to do with electronic writing, digital art, moving image making and interactive rich media.

So for a while I’m going to re-present here certain articles and essays I’ve written for other spaces and places. Hence, I’m reorganising, spring cleaning, getting my archive in order and giving various writings another airing.

Below: setting up for our live presentation of The Devil’s Rope Journal

I had a great time at Interactive Futures earlier this month. When you spend most of your creative life alone and glued to your computer screen, it’s wonderful to be able to present digital media with your collaborators to a live audience – and so rewarding to hear them laugh in the right places! After collaborating online in the remix for the past year, it was good to spend a couple of intense days, before the conference, working together face-2-face with Randy Adams (runran) and Chris Joseph (babel) for the first time. Considering our improvisational process, it was amazing how everything came together. Presenting live meant that we could incorporate spoken word into our performance too, which was a fascinating experience. I felt we were performers emerging from the virtual world, but not becoming fully present in theatrical reality, preferring to remain creatures of the shadows and to merge our voices with the digital presence.

Here are some more examples of oddly disembodied but very human, real-time, virtual presences at Interactive Futures. It really does feel like you’re interacting in the future when you’re conversing, from North America, with European heads in a digital boxes!

Above left: Julie Andreyev introduces Mirjam Struppek’s keynote: Urban Screens – The Potential of Screens for a Sustainable Urban Society. Above right: Mirjam Struppek presents her keynote remotely, via iChat

Above left: Leena Saarinen talks, via iChat from Finland, about ‘Accidental Lovers’, her interactive musical TV-comedy. Above right: the remote Q and A with Leena Saarinen.

IF07 was a fantastic experience all round. It was fascinating to see a variety of new media and to meet and listen to a range of artists, academics and creative techies. A good end-of-conference party too: The Exploding, Plastic & Inevitable redux! I even got an opportunity, albeit brief, to do a bit of veejaying, when Chris and Randy took a short break from their VJ controls.

For more photos see my IF07 set in Flickr

For more about other presentations at IF07 see my comment

A big thank you to Arts Council England whose support enabled me to travel to Canada and take part in Interactive Futures 2007.

I gained so many useful insights during the day, but one of the things that sticks in my mind is the issue of how to deal with aggressive comments. It’s not something I’ve experienced on my own blog, but I have while contributing to other blogs. Personally it doesn’t bother me too much, in fact I often enjoy the rough and tumble of a heated debate, but I know many women are uncomfortable with it. The keynote speakers (or one of them, at least) pointed out that, generally speaking, men and women tend to have different commenting styles: men like to challenge more, women tend to be more consensual. No one’s denying that there are trolls out there, but it’s important for women to remember that a challenging comment is not necessarily an attack.

I enjoy peaceful discussion and consensus can be good – but I like variety and it’s exciting to get a shake up once in a while too. If women become overly concerned about online aggression, the danger is they abdicate from the discussion, they lose their voice, they silence themselves. It’s important to remember that online men have no real advantage, they are no bigger nor louder than any woman wants to be – and as Jory Des Jardins from BlogHer pointed out, collectively women are a powerful and influential online presence.

There’s nothing to stop individual women making their mark too. If a woman wants to carve out a space for herself, she’s got to be prepared to defend it. In a virtual web 2.0 world the balance of power is different… and still evolving… Don’t take your old assumptions into battle – and don’t assume it’s always a brawl.

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