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Site Seeing: Zoe Winters

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I’m extraordinarily late to the party here. As Zoe Winters seems to be pulling back from the web, I’m suddenly taking appropriate interests in her posts:

In coming back and not wanting the break to end, I’m making some adjustments to how I do things. It’s pointless to take a break like this, then come back and be crazy again. Being crazy sucks. Being stressed and depressed and wanting to quit because you’ve sucked all the fun out of what you’re doing sucks also.

As I said in retweeting this post, almost all relationships require boundaries, and the internet is a relationship. To whatever extent a computer terminal and access to virtual distractions might be a threat to anyone’s productivity, for a writer the seductions can be almost overwhelming.

Zoe’s voice is the voice of a working writer trying to grapple with all of the changes happening in the publishing space. Hers is also a voice devoid of the auto-branded corporate tone that some writers seem to gravitate to with frightening ease.

I don’t know Zoe, but when I read her posts I feel like I do. Enough said.

Update: Zoe seems to have wiped her old WordPress blog/site, which this post originally referred to.

— Mark Barrett

Current Events

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In several of his more recent posts, my eponymous character on NeilRorke.com has been talking about events in the news. The first post or two felt a little odd — almost like an out-of-body experience — but in retrospect the resistance I felt fell away quickly.

One big advantage I have with Neil is that he’s a contemporary character. He lives in the now, alongside events as they happen. I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about how a period character might integrate with the web, but obviously there are some issues. Not only can’t an 18th-century vampire hunter link to contemporary sites without some sort of narrative explanation (time travel?), but linking at all from a walled-off period site might be enough to shatter suspension of disbelief.

I don’t know where the line is with Neil or any contemporary character. Maybe there’s some subject matter that would blow readers out of the fictional world Neil lives in. Maybe he can’t comment on stories that are too real or visceral or traumatic. I can imagine him having something to say about 9/11 on that day, but the very idea of having a fictional character speak to something like that seems either trivializing or exploitative. Then again, if Neil was a well-known character — more like an old friend — that might not be the case.

So far, all I can tell you is that this is interesting stuff. At least to me. 🙂

The CreateSpace Calculator Fail

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After looking at the available print-on-demand (POD) options I decided to go with CreateSpace. This decision was not unqualified, however, and there were certainly things about CreateSpace that gave me pause.

Chief among them: the CreateSpace Royalty Calculator. While it is possible to get a rough sense of the royalty splits for a hypothetical title, the calculator’s utility for the work I want to produce seems dubious, it not utterly useless.

And CreateSpace essentially admits this. The title above the calculator reads as follows:

Royalty Calculator*
Use the royalty calculator to figure out how much you’ll make every time your book is manufactured.

Clear enough, right? You plug in data and the calculator tells you how much you’ll make with every sale. Except…when you follow that nagging asterisk, here’s the text you find immediately below the calculator:

* Figures generated by this tool are for estimation purposes only. Your actual royalty will be calculated when you set up your book.

Okay. So the calculator won’t so much help you “figure out” what you’ll make, but rather give you an “estimation” that is both unreliable and non-binding. I guess I have to give CreateSpace points for being honest about the calculator’s lack of utility — after proclaiming its utility — but the clarifying and contradictory information doesn’t inspire confidence. And it gets worse.  [ Read more ]

Linking the Fiction Blog

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From a craft point of view, dealing with inbound and outbound links on a fiction blog is less problematic than allowing readers to post comments. While concerns about the fourth wall should be paramount in any storyteller’s mind, links are an indirect threat. Between the functionality of modern blog software and the limits of authorial control in an open medium such as the internet, there isn’t a lot of innovating that needs to be done.  [ Read more ]

Update: Blog Fiction and NeilRorke.com

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I’ve got a few posts up about blog fiction and on Neil’s site, and I wanted to follow up with a bit more explanation about what I’m doing. If you’re interested in character blogs or what fiction on the internet might become, check out NeilRorke.com. If you’re interested in how I’m approaching that site from a craft perspective, take a look here..

Neil Rorke is the main character in a novel I wrote, which I hope to publish in e-book and POD versions fairly soon. As such, presenting him in a character blog fits what I think is the evolving definition of transmedia: exploring different facets of a single storyworld through various (if not also appropriate) mediums. But it’s also the case that Neil himself fits the description of someone who would blog, and I think that’s critical. The overarching goal is for both works to explain more about Neil, and to work together to fill out his character.

The intent with Electric Fiction is to explore and document the move away from simply presenting traditional fiction for consumption on the web. A movie may be fiction, but it’s hand-crafted fiction that uses techniques specific to film. Most of the online fiction I’ve seen could also be a book, or a story in a magazine. Yes, they’re all text, but to omit the connectivity and pacing and structure of blogs or comments in internet fiction seems to me a mistake — in part because reading long works on a computer screen is difficult. (I’m not denying the utility of using the internet as a pipeline to deliver fiction to dedicated e-readers. I’m doing the same thing, and plan to do more.)

As I continue to grow Neil’s site I’ll comment on the craft problems I encounter. I’m conscious of the fact that talking about Neil’s site blows the fourth wall to smithereens, but I don’t see any way around that. My hope is that Neil’s site will be enjoyed by readers, while comments about Electric Fiction here will be of interest to writers.

— Mark Barrett

The Comment Question

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Because the internet delivers sound and imagine it can be used not only to distribute content, but to present it: video clips, streaming movies, novel-length text, music — virtually every kind of content imaginable can be experienced on a computer of any size. Turning the internet to the end of storytelling is something else entirely, even as the end product will also be communicated through sound and image.

Imagine a single story told through these mediums: stage, screen, novel. While the characters and plot would be the same in all instances, the techniques used to dramatize the story — to convey the narrative to an audience in a way that supports suspension of disbelief in each medium — would necessarily be different. It’s also possible, if not likely, that for any particular story one medium might be better than the others, because the strengths of that medium aid the cause of dramatization. Novels are excellent at putting you in the mind of a character, and lend themselves wonderfully to narrated tales. Movies excel at the visceral and the visual, at replicating reality, and now, through CGI, bringing fantasies to life. Theater excels at intimacy and at communicating the reality and complexity of human emotion.

The strength of the internet is communication and conversation. To approach the internet as a storytelling medium without acknowledging and embracing that aspect of the medium would be like using motion picture technology to film theater productions — which, oddly enough, is exactly what was done in the early days of film. The techniques that defined film as a medium came later, and only as a result of experimentation with the technology and form.

While many people have presented fiction on the web, and some people have tried writing dedicated character blogs, my survey over the past year suggests that many of these efforts replicate craft techniques from other mediums, rather than emphasizing techniques unique to the internet itself. In my own character blog at NeilRorke.com, I’m particularly interested in embracing and leveraging the strengths of the internet to the greatest possible extent.  [ Read more ]

Blog Fiction and the Fourth Wall

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If you’re not familiar with the fourth wall as a concept integral to storytelling, here’s the gist of it:

The fourth wall is the imaginary “wall” at the front of the stage in a traditional three-walled box set in a proscenium theatre, through which the audience sees the action in the world of the play.

The central idea of the fourth wall is that the characters inside the fictional world remain unaware of the audience, even as the audience sits only feet away. If the audience breaks into thunderous applause, or begins to throw rotting fruit, the actors continue to attempt to exist in their own fictional space, apart from the physical reality of the theater.  [ Read more ]

Transparency as a Critical Goal in Blog Fiction

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When you pick up a book you know you only have to turn a few pages in order to begin to enjoy the contents.  You don’t even have to engage the contents of those pages if you don’t want to: you can simply look for Chapter 1 and dig in.

If the contents are fiction, you know once you immerse yourself in the story that you will not be interrupted by authorial asides or editor’s footnotes.  You will be allowed to forget about the book as a mechanism and as you embrace the contents.

When you watch a movie you expect the movie to believe in itself — unless it’s an art film whose raison d’etre is disrupting the audience’s “easy relationship with the cinema”.*  Scenes play out without commentary from the director or actors, allowing the audience to believe in the world of the story.  Editing, a musical score — everything is aimed at supporting the audience’s suspension of disbelief while making the medium itself transparent.

Even bonus commentary on DVD’s can do damage to an audience’s ability to suspend disbelief.  While it’s interesting to hear how a movie is made — at least once — it’s also a bit of a letdown to learn that a gripping scene was the result of accident.  “We only had one copy of the Magna Carta on the shoot.  When the AD fell off the crane and split his head open, somebody grabbed it and used it to stanch the blood.  What you see the dying wife holding in this scene is actually a place mat from a diner down the street.”  [ Read more ]

Blog Fiction and NeilRorke.com

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I’ve been thinking about publishing and fiction and the internet for over a year now, in a dedicated way. I’ve been thinking about storytelling my entire life.

How do stories take hold in the mind of the audience? How is any story changed by the medium of expression? What are the necessary ingredients of a story? What is the craft knowledge any storyteller should have?

I don’t have all the answers. I can get fifty pages into a work and be as lost as anyone who ever wrote. But I also think I understand the basics, and after fifteen years of thinking about interactive storytelling I think I know where the limits are as well.

In time the internet will become a storytelling medium itself. It’s not there yet, but the potential is considerable. To further that goal I’ve put up a site that I hope to grow over time. It’s a storytelling experiment in low-tech transmedia, aimed at entertaining an audience while also discovering and advancing useful internet-based storytelling techniques.

I’ll be discussing NeilRorke.comin greater detail, but for now I wanted to let you know that it’s up and ask for feedback. What do you think?

— Mark Barrett

Blog Fiction: An Introduction

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Blog fiction sees the internet not as a distribution pipeline or as a means of presenting stories, but as a storytelling medium itself.  Text, sound, image and movement have all been used to create and embrace fictional characters, events and places in other mediums, and the internet will be no different.

Blog fiction attempts to advance the cause in two ways.   First, by being honest, open and upapologetic in this aim.   Second, by calling attention to ways in which internet storytelling might move toward mature  craft techniques similar to those in print, film, television and theater.

The first step on the journey to realizing the potential of blog fiction is clarifying the medium for the intended audience.  Just as a book has its cover, a movie its opening credits, and the stage its rising curtain, blog fiction requires demarcation.  Without such a portal the audience may be confused about the intent of the experience, or distracted by authorial intrusions.

To see version 0.1 of a proposed technical and craft solution, click here.