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Link Rot Postmortem

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Ugh. So here’s what I learned while banishing broken links…

* Broken Link Checker isn’t completely intuitive, but as of this date it’s current and supported. If you have a question you may not get the answer you’re looking for, but you’ll get an answer, and you’ll profit from it.

* Over the past year the BLC plugin reported (via email) in fits and starts for reasons I did not understand. In reading up and poking around, however, I discovered a ‘server load’ setting which seems to act like a throttle. If you set it very low — meaning lower than the reported server load — you effectively idle BLC until the server load drops. Or at least I think that’s what happens. In any case, when I raised the number above the reported load, BLC sprang into action, so if you’re not getting activity when you expect it I would check that setting. (Also, if you’re on shared hosting, consider changing that setting at night when the server load is low. BLC may run much faster.)

* When you’re working on each individual broken link, going slowly and searching for missing pages on the web can be surprisingly fruitful. I fixed quite a few dead links where the missing page’s URL had been altered without a redirect. Once located, copying and pasting the current active link in place of the broken link solved the problem.

* I initially decided to deal with a minimum of twenty-five links each day, but the first day was tough. As it turned out, however, much of the struggle was due to the fact that I had no process or workflow to follow, so what I was really fighting was the learning curve, not the task. On the second day I probably fixed or killed fifty or so links, then the following day I finished off the remaining sixty or so, meaning it took me three days to get through my backlog. (If you’re in the weeds like I was, or worse, just make link-fixing a chore that you come back to again and again until it’s done.)  [ Read more ]

Link Rot

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Whatever my favorite blog post title used to be, it is now a distant second to this one.

So what is link rot? It’s decay that happens to a linked document over time as links become unresponsive. You add links to pages on other sites, some of those pages disappear or are moved, and suddenly your links don’t work any more.

On a case-by-case basis it’s a nuisance. Over time, and over an entire website, it’s a horror. Across an entire discipline, like law, it’s potentially crippling. Speaking of which….

More than a year ago now I found a couple of dead links in an old post, which made me realize I had no way to find such links on a proactive basis. After using a few web-based spiders to search my site and report on dead links, and finding them wanting, I came across a WordPress plugin called — appropriately — Broken Link Checker.

Installing and running BLC was easy, but the results were frightening. At the time I had over 150 reported broken links, although on closer inspection some of those proved to be links that timed out. Still, 150+ bad links was plenty, yet when I earnestly set about trying to solve the problem I realized I didn’t know how.

Yes, I could see that a link pointed to a page that was no longer available, but how to note that in context so the reader would understand? Worse, what if a whole paragraph was written around the presumption of a link?

Just knowing about the problem has allowed me to be a little smarter about writing link text. For example, in the paragraph above, where I mentioned law, the article I linked to is on Gigaom.com, which went belly-up only a few weeks back. At some point that link will probably be reported dead because the content on Gigaom will no longer be available, but that sentence will still be intelligible without it. It won’t be substantiated, but it will still make sense.

Maddeningly, however, as simple as the problem seems — fix dead links — in practice it has repeatedly proved insurmountable. I psych myself up, I dig into BLC, I fix one or two broken links — usually the easiest ones — then flop back, mentally exhausted.

Searching for sage advice on the interweb reveals fraught awareness of the problem, but few good solutions I can put into practice. Or solutions that are overkill. (Oops — that sentence won’t make much sense when that link dies.)

Since I first installed BLC days have turned into weeks, weeks into months, months into a year, and…well, here I am. Still with 150+ dead links reported.

So it’s time to do something about the problem. I don’t know what that’s going to be, and I suspect it’s going to be a fight all the way, but I’ve got a little time now and nothing better to do. And believe me, I tried to find something better to do.

They say the first step in solving a problem is admitting you have a problem. I have a problem. I have link rot.

— Mark Barrett

Character Flaws

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When I started Neil Rorke’s character blog I knew it would be difficult if not impossible to drive reader interest through plotting. Foreshadowing a big plot event, then delivering on that moment, could easily (if not necessarily) lead to a soap-opera/cliffhanger mentality. Not only would that kind of storytelling compel more of the same, it would reveal me as the author-orchestrator of those events and diminish any sense of character I might be able to create. And that would be the exact opposite of the effect I wanted to have on readers.

By sticking with aspects of character, and by sticking with the manner of posting inherent in real-world character blogs, I’m giving readers very little to hang on when they drop by. Whatever it is in plotting that drives a story, I’m not making that available.

That’s a conscious storytelling choice, of course, but it’s also consistent with Neil as a person and with what’s going on in Neil’s life at this moment. So instead of trying to drive Neil toward some particular plot event, or even some revelation of character, I’ve been trying to let Neil be Neil. He gets to post about things that interest him, and he gets to say whatever he wants to say, whenever he wants, as long as it’s in character.  [ Read more ]

Glimmers

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One of the things I’m still learning as a writer is how important it is to start writing so there’s something to react to and refine and revise. I’m not afflicted with perfectionism — at least not the paralyzing kind — and for that I’ll be eternally thankful. At times I do tend to think things through too much, past the point at which I should start implementing or prototyping or laying down a first draft.

In terms of blog fiction and writing a character blog, I had my own conception of what that would be like as a task, and how I could best implement that goal in terms of technique. And so far I can’t say that I’ve been too far off in a material way. What has transpired that I didn’t predict is that from time to time I’ll write something — maybe just a sentence — that suddenly springs to life for me. I can’t predict these moments, I can’t even harness them yet, but I sense them, and that’s making me want to continue the experiment.

If I can say anything useful to other authors it’s that a fiction blog is first and foremost still a fictional work, and there’s no reason not to push that aspect of the work as far as possible. I’m working with a character and a fictional world that relates closely to the real world, and in that there are some constraints. But I can also see now that I’m not pushing hard enough as an author. And that’s something I wouldn’t (and couldn’t) have predicted.

To be clear, I don’t mean that I should be throwing more drama or plot points at my characters or at the reader. I’m not trying to sucker an audience with cliffhanger antics, and I don’t want Neil’s blog to turn into a soap opera. I’m talking about authority and force: the imposition of authorial power on the text itself. I think I should be doing more of that, at least to see if it works or not.

Maintaining Voice on a Character Blog

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What is an author’s voice?* I think a lot of people see voice as synonymous with style, and I can understand why. Many authors one might point to as having a strong voice are also strong stylists. But I’m not a big fan of authors who are stylists, in large part because their manner of writing tends to overshadow whatever story they’re telling. That’s a generalization to be sure, but it’s founded on my belief that nouns and verbs matter more than adjectives and adverbs, that less is usually more, that all (or almost all) darlings should be killed, and that unless the author’s presence is critical to the story the author ought to get out of the way. But that’s just me.

Coming at the question from a direction both more illuminating and a great deal less cranky, think for a moment about any writer you love, and ask yourself what it is that is irreducibly distinct about the way that writer writes. What is it that makes Dickens different from Tolstoy or Jackie Collins, as well as readily identifiable in his own right? Whatever that is — however you might describe it with examples or rules — that’s what I think of as voice.

I don’t think any author’s voice is so distinct that it can be identified in every word or turn of phrase. When Tom Clancy or William Faulkner or Flannery O’Conner has a character say, “Hello!”, I don’t think you can conclude a whole lot about the author’s voice from that one-word sentence. Pull back far enough, however — taking into account the surrounding sentences and paragraphs, as well as the narrative context — and at some point you’ll be able to distinguish between the three authors. And I think that’s probably the most important point thing I can say about the subject of voice: it’s more easily identified by considering the whole of an author’s work rather than looking for specific markers.

One thing I can say with absolute certainty is that I myself do not think about my own voice at all, ever. To do so would be quantum authorship, in which identification of my voice would necessarily change it. I write the way I write, and I encourage other authors to adopt this same hands-off attitude. As far as I’m concerned, nothing good can come of attempts to manage your own authorial voice.

Which is why I’m now quite consternated by the fix I’m in.

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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 ]