February 27th, 2008
Start In The Middle & Let Your Eyes Drift.
Yes, yes, we’re still UNDER CONSTRUCTION, as the big sign says, but this was too important to not post. Penguin, responsible for the much-maligned Million Penguins experiment of last year – which, you may recall, went hideously wrong (or right, depending on what side of the “Can Collaborative Fiction work?” fence you sit) under the need for control and editing, and proved that mass collaborative fiction without real rules can only end up a mess – are trying another experiment, a team-up with the good ARG-minded people at the unfiction forums into non-linear, internet-ready writing. Which is right up my alley.
It’s quite risky, I think, when a publisher takes hold of an experiment like this. We cannot forget that they are a publisher, and that they are, ultimately trying to sell books and find new ways to market them – they have an agreement with the Hon brothers, creators of Perplexcity, to do research into ARGs for those very purposes - and if the experiment fails it’ll be all too easy to write whatever it is that they actually come up with (link-heavy fiction? wiki-fiction? open ended choose-your-own-adventure style fiction? something that ultimately just resembles BS Johnson’s The Unfortunates?) as a fad when the preparation can be being done for authors right now.
I’ll write more about this another day – it was the topic of my thesis – but there’s so much that can be done to texts now, when they are being written, to future-proof them for a time when we do all walk around with the Kindle (insert arbitrary number here that isn’t 1) in our pockets: they can be making indices for self-textual hyperlinking, thinking about how to open up the form of a structure to allow the text to breathe more under the auspices of the internet, thinking about how it can be presented if it were to be read, say, through RSS feeds… All that stuff is natural to forget, but, if we’re all walking around with super-novels of the future in 20 years time, don’t you think it would be useful to have planned for it rather than have extra features shoehorned in, have your texts remediated to seem up-to-date?
And, for what it’s worth, I don’t think that this means that the novel has to take an odd form: there’s no need to force poetics or fragmented microfictions or epistolary fiction on a reader if what the author wants to do is tell a straightforward story: there are ways to do it; for my PhD I had to write a novel to back up the Critical component, and I wrote a traditional print novel, with a traditional beginning, middle and a nearly-traditional end, and I wrote it all whilst being utterly aware of the technology of the day and including hundreds of hidden formatting options that the reader will never notice, but which would make its transition to the internet easy as pie. But I will talk about that another time. {Edit: Also, I can’t get this new layout to do anything I want (display more posts, archive, even paragraph), so I’ll be changing it again, which is a shame, as it looks really nice.}
