After months of preparation, All’s Fair in Love and War, Texas is finally live. Check it out, tell your friends, tell your friends’ tweens and teens!
I realize it might not look like it to the untrained eye, but this website was a lot of work. (Work which, I have to admit, I mostly enjoyed.) It’s built on Wordpress, but it was my first attempt at building a WP theme from scratch. So I had that learning curve to tackle, which was respectable. (If I had it all to do over again, I would probably start out with the Thematic theme and build a child theme from there. I discovered Thematic when building a website for my husband’s job, and it’s wonderful.)
So I built the theme myself. And then I ran into some coding problems. See, from the beginning I knew I did not want to create just anther blog-based serialized novel. There are TONS of those on the net. Given my penchant for the web and “new media” in general, I wanted to create something that, as far as I was aware, hadn’t really been done elsewhere. Building upon some basic beliefs I have about how web users assimilate information and knowledge (about which I have an article coming out on A List Apart some time this fall) I knew I wanted to create a narrative that had many points of entry and exit. I wanted my readers to choose for themselves which narratives to follow. And moreover, I wanted to take all the work out of it. I wanted choosing a narrative to be intuitive and easy.
So the first thing I needed to do was create metadata for each story. Which characters are involved? Where does this story take place? Which story line does it fall into? And I needed to display this metadata in a way that would make sense to the reader, yet wouldn’t be overwhelming.
Turns out, there’s not a way built into Wordpress to do this. You can tell Wordpress to show you the children of certain categories, but you can’t ask Wordpress to show you the children of X category ONLY if this post belongs to the parent category (an subsequently, only if it belongs to the children categories!) This was a fundamental navigational aspect I needed for this site. I needed to say, “Okay, Wordpress, show me the children of the Characters category that this post belongs to, and then show me the children of the Places category this belongs to, and then show me the children of the Events category this post belongs to.”
I tried to make Wordpress do this. I really did. But Wordpress just stuck its tongue out at me. Real mature.
So I cried. (Yeah, neither mature nor productive, I know, but I’m prone to breakdowns when code fails. This is after the cursing has ended.) I cried because I couldn’t get it to work, and because if I couldn’t get it to work, the entire project was going to fail. Without this aspect, the website would be just like tons of other web novels out there.
Then I posted about my troubles on Twitter where a very kind English bloke offered to help me. And to make a long story short, he fixed my problem. And he’s awesome.
Then I ran into another problem. Each story potentially belongs to several different narratives – certain characters, certain places, certain storylines. I wanted my readers to choose how they read the story, but how was I going to make it possible for them to continue in their narrative seamlessly? I mean, when they got to the end of the story, the “next” button would always point to the next chronological post, but not necessarily the next post in the narrative my reader had chosen. So if they only wanted to read posts featuring the Prime of Darkness, they’d have to locate the POD archive, select a post, read, then go back to the archive, find the next post, read it, and so on.
Unacceptable.
I needed to provide navigation that suited the narrative. But how could I know which narrative they were on? How could I know how to help them get to the next post in their chosen narrative?
I considered a lot of options. I thought about adding navigation for every possible exit point. But even with a healthy dose of Ajax, that seemed clunky (and it wasn’t easy to code, as it turned out.)
Then I stumbled upon a plugin that allowed me to do exactly what I wanted. When you choose a link from an archive, the next/previous navigation remembers what archive you came from, and lets you navigate only that archive. So if you’re looking at the Prime of Darkness archive and you click a post, you will navigate only that story line.
Not only acceptable, but awesome.
And after that, the site took off running.
I ran into other, less technical, problems, too. The fact that I can’t draw was a huge obstacle, so I decided to just include illustrations where I could create something that looked halfway decent. I worked hard on the character avatars, and while certain avatars that I made early on could stand to be redrawn, I am mostly very happy with them.
All in all, I count this project a huge success. It works as intended. (There is one small bug that I still don’t know how to fix, but it’s a bug I can live with for now.) It’s different from the other hundreds of digital narratives out there. I’m proud of the voice, and the character, and what I’ve managed to accomplish, more or less by myself.
“They laugh alike
They walk alike
Sometimes they even talk alike!
You can lose your mind…” *
…but “users” and “readers” aren’t the same people.
Except when they are.
That’s why writing good web content is harder than you’d think. Because site visitors are shifters, changing from user to reader and back again in the blink of an eye (or the click of a link.)
We talk a lot in the web industry about users. What users want, what they need, what they’re trying to do and how they want to feel. From a content standpoint, we talk about how users consume content, how they read (or scan) and how they expect their content delivered to them.
As a result, we’ve spent a lot of time talking about ways to deliver our users the content they want as efficiently as possible. We talk a lot about chunking, bullets, and front-loading. And for the most part these are all very useful suggestions when we’re talking about creating content for users.
But what about when we’re creating content for readers?
I’m guilty of the long form – though perhaps guilty isn’t the right words as I feel no shame or remorse in that. I publish online but I write specifically for readers – people who sit down to read, not just scan. My “ideal reader”, to borrow a phrase from Stephen King, isn’t necessarily looking for specific information. He isn’t trying to get a quick tip out of me. He’s here for the journey. He’s here for the experience. And because I know this about him, I can write to his passions, to his interests, and to his heart.
But I have the privilege of knowing my readers are readers for as long as they’re with me. Not everyone has that luxury. Because most of the time, our readers alternate between reading and using.
Imagine a typical visit to Amazon.com. I come as a user – I want to find a product. I need to be able to navigate the interface to find what I need amidst thousands of like products. But once I find what I’m looking for, I want to learn more about the product and verify that it’s what I want. I read product descriptions. I read reviews. I want to absorbed – I’m not looking for instant gratification. I turn from user to reader, and suddenly the type of content that I both want and expect changes. But once I am done reading and learning, having made my decision, I want to click “buy” and zoom through the checkout process. I, once again, am a user.
So when we think about what our visitors want, we have to consider their role at the moment they encounter our content. There are no hard and fast rules about what constitutes good or even appropriate “web writing”. The rules change based on the circumstance.
If your shopping cart content is rich and prosaic, you’re probably doing something wrong. On the other hand, if your article on caring for a dying loved one is little more than a list of bullet points, you probably deserve to be punched in the face.
Writing good content means writing to the circumstance. It means writing what your visitor needs and expects. It means being flexible enough to change your style with as much ease as visitors change roles. Readers and users have different needs – even when they’re the same person. Treat different things differently.
*When cousins are two of a kind! (Thanks, Patty Duke Show!)
As part of an ongoing project, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how to make the web better for learning.
Yesterday, I was nostalgically flipping through an old copy of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature, a booklet I’ve had since high school. The summer after our senior year, three friends and I purchased a copy of The Portable Emerson, cut out the Nature chapter with an Xacto knife, and had it bound. A group of amateur philosophers, writers, and artists, our goal was to create something beautiful out of something that had so inspired us. We wanted to collect our disparate views and emotions of this work and share them with each other in an artistic fashion. So we spent the summer passing the booklet around, reading, adding notes in the margins and the white pages we had cleverly added. The artist among us added illustrations; our philosopher included favorite quotes by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche (which often had nothing, specifically, to do with the text, but was obviously inspired by something she saw in the pages.) At the end of the summer, the booklet was well loved and worn, and filled not only with margin notes but also with art, tangential thoughts, and the personalities of the four girls who had given pieces of themselves to the work.
Even though I’ve read Nature several times since that summer, I found my friends’ notes inspiring, and not merely because they brought back memories. Their insights did not always mirror my own, and having immediate access to another person’s perceptions, thoughts, and reactions is a valuable part of the learning process. This is why class discussions are so beneficial. Talking things out is helpful.
Blogs make conversation about a piece of online writing possible: readers can leave messages, ask questions, share information about the work. But in reading deeper, more complex works, I always find this commenting system very limiting. Reading user comments at the end of a work feels tacked on; it doesn’t feel organic the way reading margin notes in a library book does.
When I’m engaged in an online reading, I want to see relevant user notes contextually. I want to see their thoughts, questions, and links in the place where they make the most sense. Post-reading conversation in the comments is still good and necessary, but as I’m reading, inline margin notes would do wonders for my ability as a learner to absorb, recontextualize, and integrate these other thoughts.
This morning, I stumbled across Clive Thompson’s article on Wired about the future of reading (specifically reading books), and from there found The Golden Notebook Project which attempts to do something similar to what I dreamed up. Seven women read a single book and included their notes on the page – as a reader, I can see the notes immediately instead of having to read them all at once at the end.
I like the approach, but it doesn’t quite go far enough. I want to be able to read someone else’s article, highlight a particular sentence, and link that sentence to another piece of relevant information elsewhere – whether that’s an image, an article, or a video. But unlike a Wiki, I want personalities preserved. I want to see who is making the notes, who is thinking the thoughts. I want my reading of this document both to inform me but also to allow me to explore new relationships.
It would get messy. For popular reads, it would be impossible. But I still like the idea. I like the possibility.
But what I would like even more would be a central repository where works could be published specifically for collaborative notation and hyperlinking. I want to see works that are creative commons (or which the author has granted permission) to be republished on another website – a virtual library of sorts – where registered users can comment and link. Reader comments and annotations can be rated by other users such that certain comments can be filtered out when they become overwhelming. I think I’d prefer to see comments on mouseover or on-hover rather than on the side of the page – I find that format distracting. But I do think there’s possibility here for learning, for exploration, and for discovering new relationships and resources.
Of course, as with all user generated content, a huge problem would be separating chaff from the wheat, combatting ego monsters, dealing with trolls, and the various other methods people employ to ruin online experiences. So I recognize this pie-in-the-sky collaborative annotation and hyperlinking could be too fantastic for reality. Still, it’s what I want. And maybe if I put it out there, someone can make it happen in a way that works. Who knows? I have faith.
He watched the family on the mall with a detached joy, a rare bubble of melancholic desire that welled up from someplace within him he’d forgotten existed. He watched as the father placed a hand on the small of his wife’s back, her upturned face smiling and aglow as the children frolicked beneath them, their shrill laughter floating up to the balcony where he stood in silence. He noted the way the gentleman’s head bent to speak to his wife, their conversation hushed and earnest, the way the wife’s smile was for him and him alone. They had fallen into that rhythm he had once known so well, in step with the march only long married couples could hear. Theirs was an easy interaction, punctuated by unaffected expressions of interest and contentment.
Had he stood on that same mall not so long ago, in a world not so very different from this, and been looked down upon by another balcony dweller lost in his own reverie? Had he once, in a moment of unadulterated completion, looked on his wife with eyes that saw only her good? Was there ever a time for him as whole as the moment he now witnessed? And did the man he watched know at all how lucky, how undeservedly, goddamned lucky, he truly was?
He never realized he’d been rubbing the place on his finger where his wedding band used to be.
You don’t need a degree in literature to notice a current trend in web writing. You can’t surf the web without running into articles, blog posts, and even interface copy that is sarcastic, self-righteous, question-talky and overly sincere. You’ll find myriad articles with advice about “how not to suck at…” or admonishing you that your blog (or your résumé, or your handshake) sucks. You’ll find bloggers and copywriters oozing disdain and annoyance all over their keyboards. (Try to read a couple posts from any popular mommyblog and you’ll see what I mean.)
At the other extreme we have websites that are trying too hard to be your friend. Twalala.com tells me they “pinky-swear” not to divulge my password information. Moo.com wants “to change the world. No, really.”
The tone of currently fashionable web writing is awful. It’s embarrassing. It makes me want to scratch my ears out. It’s too much — too sarcastic, too friendly, too unreal. And it’s unnecessary. If your web team has done its job adequately, the entire site should lend itself to openness and trustworthiness. If your site works, is aesthetically pleasing, and I can find my way around, there’s no need to overdo the language. I don’t want to be friends with your website. I just want to do whatever I came there to do.
But the worst offender, the most egregious trend in current web writing, is the question talking. You’ve all read it, and you’ve probably even heard it in real life. It’s the bizarre new phenomenon where we break statements into questions for emphasis.
That? Is awesome!
I’m guilty of having done it. Which gives me even more reason to hate it.
In the old days when I learned English grammar and punctuation, we used question marks for one thing: questions.
Is that awesome?
Will it be awesome?
Could it be awesome?
Should it have been awesome?
Must it had to have been awesome?
These are questions.
“That? Is awesome!” isn’t. (Either awesome or a question.) I assume that that the real effect we’re going for here is emphasis. But we already have a wonderful tool for indicating emphasis.
Italics.
“That is awesome!” gets the point across and allows the reader to hear what she wants to hear. If, like me, your reader is so tired of the ubiquitous question-for-emphasis that she simply can’t bear to read it anymore, she’ll be so thankful that you left her to own devises. By resorting to the simple, non-trendy emphasis that is both timeless and culturally universal (or at the very least, more universal than the weird question thing we’ve been up to for a few years now) you’ve given your reader the freedom to interpret that emphasis for herself. You’ve given her the freedom to hear:
or
Or whatever. You get the point.
And while that might seem trivial, letting your reader dictate the tone she hears actually establishes a better relationship than forcing her to hear things your way.
If I were any more egocentric, I might be tempted to believe that the phrase about “best laid plans” and mice and all that rot was about me.
My intention was for “A Timely Raven” to be wrapped up just before Halloween. I wanted it to be a period piece, of sorts. But when life got busy (and I fell tragically behind on my prop-making), I resigned myself to the fact that there was only one of me, and I had to prioritize.
Halloween comes but once a year. Trick-or-treaters would not wait for me to finish my story. Hence, the story got pushed to the end of my to-do list.
Setbacks aside, not only is the final vignette of A Timely Raven published, I have begun building a platform for the other spin offs, and for the growth of the central project. It has always been my intention for “A Timely Raven” to grow into more than a singe Halloween tale; I have always intended for it to be an ongoing journal of a raven living in Austin, his adventures, the people he meets, their lives, and ultimately, their deaths.
Those of you following Tatum’s storyline will be pleased to learn that in the next few days, her story will pick up again on the new platform and be carried through to the end. I’ve enjoyed doing this; it has given me something to look forward to.
And those of you reading Emily & Lily–you’ve not been forgotten. Their story picks up again this week as well.
As for the rest of it, we’ll have to see how it goes. We’ll have to see what Raven has in store for the rest of the year. It might be a while in coming – the website has not yet been built and I have other projects eating away my time. But I hope that you will find it all worth the wait. I hope this project will prove a real contribution to the genre of online fiction.
The last few weeks have been a dizzying but wonderful storm of story writing and Halloween prop building, and now that there are no props left to build (not for this year, anyway!) I can return to the writing without distractions.
One of my favorite aspects of writing A Timely Raven has been exploring different ways to use the web as a medium for storytelling. Lots of people publish online fiction; not a lot of people are willing to tell their stories in a non-linear, interactive, multimedia fashion. Perhaps there’s good reason for this; we all know how to read books, and if we mimic books online, our readers know what to expect and how to tackle what we’ve given them.
But what’s the fun in that?
Don’t get me wrong — I have a deep and abiding love for the printed word, and my adoration for books and libraries and tangible, sniffable reading materials is nigh unbounded. Yet, if storytellers are going to publish on the web, shouldn’t we use it to its fullest its capacity? Shouldn’t we explore the various methods it provides for shaping an enthralling, consuming story?
And to that end, why should storytellers and novelists have all the fun? Why shouldn’t web content writers use the web to the fullest as well?
Although I’ve long wanted to write an online story, the real reason I began writing A Timely Raven was because I wanted to explore different ways of using web apps and social media to develop and integrate online content. I wanted to see if a solid content strategy could be developed using traditional storytelling methods and online media. I wanted to explore how multiple narratives could spring from a single point of entry, allowing users and readers to “choose their own adventure”, turning a website into a mere starting point for a guided, useful treasure hunt that resulted in accumulated information that could then be transformed into knowledge.
Last year, I took some time off as a web designer to work as a graphic designer in an instructional design setting. This taught me two important lessons: 1) I love web design, not graphic design, and 2) instructional design can be extremely useful for developing content strategy, as it considers the various ways people learn, and integrates different approaches to learning (visual, aural, kinesthetic, etc.) into curriculum development, much the way a good website uses multimedia to reach its various audiences.
My approach to content strategy has always centered around education, information sharing, and learning — I was never interested in trying to sell anybody anything as a primary goal. Working in instructional design gave me the tools to do my job as an educator better, and once I was able to take what I learned about learning models to the web, the rest seemed to fall into place.
One thing was clear: a solid content strategy includes creating an integrated, holistic web experience that extends beyond a client’s primary website. A good content strategy has to incorporate all online presences: social media apps such as Twitter and Facebook, community sites such as Yelp, and even location-awareness-building tools such as Google Maps and CommunityWalk. Wherever an organization has a presence, that presence needs to be integrated unobtrusively and naturally into the main storyline to build a total user experience. And in instances where those tools aren’t being utilized, a strategist has to know how and which tools to use to develop the multi-faceted online persona that every organization needs.
So, to that end, the exercise of writing A Timely Raven has been profoundly useful. What I’ve published here is just the tip of the iceberg (and not yet complete; there is one vignette left still to publish) — what I have planned for A Timely Raven should end up being quite an undertaking. (Hell, I figure if I’m going to tackle a project, I’m going to throw all the awesome at it that I can.) But before I can rock that project, I need y’all’s input.
Question: What are you favorite web apps or social media tools that might be appropriate for use in online storytelling? What do you know about how a web app can be used that other people might not know? (You might be surprised to discover, for instance, how many people wrote to tell me they had no idea Google Maps could be used the way Raven uses it in the story.) What tools and media should organizations be taking advantage of to extend their online presence?
Sometimes I would come up with outrageous plot twists, like the time I was feeling ornery and told Grandma Flatley that I thought Hazel and Bigwig would be captured and turned into rabbit soup and that would be the end of them. I didn’t like Watership Down because I don’t care for rabbits. I thought Grandma Flatley would get mad, but she hooted and howled and slapped her knee. And she held a finger to her mouth and whispered, “You can’t tell anyone I told you, Benjy, but when I was your age and my brother would make me mad, I would lie in bed at night and imagine that I skinned his cat and fed it to the neighbor’s dog.” And she hooted and howled some more, but I thought that was gross and mean because I like cats, so I never said things like that at story time again.
For several years I have wanted to write a massive, sprawling story that unfolds over time like a good television drama. I wanted to tell many stories, some which intersect, but all of which sprung from a single focal or entry point. I wanted to tell a tale whose disparate stories were human but also otherworldly, and I wanted to tell it in a way that was engrossing and beautiful.
As the days begin to shrink in earnest and the temperature drops below what my California-reared skin can comfortably lounge about in, monsters begin to claw their way out of my subconscious and into the foreground. They whisper, they cajole, they bark and they howl. Sometimes this is haunting. Mostly, it’s extremely liberating.
Even as a child I knew exactly what kind of writer I was going to be. I would tell anyone who would listen that I was going to be a horror novelist. Eventually I had to stop saying this, however, as more than a few people heard “whore novelist” and would blush and guffaw. Eventually I started telling people that I wanted to be Stephen King.
That was only partially correct, however. What I really wanted was dark mythology, a universe were people were constantly tormented by evils they could neither see nor hear, but which were incontrovertible and inexorable.
What draws me to the horrific and the fantastic are rarely physical monsters. While I can appreciate the beauty of Frankenstein’s monster and the wickedness of Dracula and Mr. Hyde, these characters never moved me the way monsters I would invent later in life would. The stories are captivating and tragic, and I’ve always been jealous that Mary Shelley penned Frankenstein when she was only 18 years old. Yet while the merit of the stories is doubtless the monsters themselves failed to sway me. They did not inspire fear.
When I was little, my father was something of a budding occultist, though I doubt he would have termed himself that. A songwriter by trade, he decided to try his hand at a novel about the anti-Christ, and as part of his research delved into the worlds of demonology, scripture, magic and the arcane. I would creep into his office and find books like The Magus and The History of Witchcraft and Demonology on the floor. Naturally, I flipped through them, both scared and fascinated. I was familiar with the Devil, of course. And while my Christian upbringing taught me that the books my father was reading were evil and not to be trifled with, I couldn’t help but be drawn to them. They contained something within their pages that stirred in me real fear and transfixion, and the magnetism of being verboten twisted me into a kind of secret, demon-loving freak.
Oh, to be sure, I was terrified of my father’s books. I knew that their power could turn Jesus-loving little girls into drug addicts, psychotics, and heathens. I knew that to show too much interest was to invite the Beast into my world. I’d seen The Exorcist. I had no intention of being Linda Blair.
And yet…they were just so wonderful, in their way. Too wonderful to resist. These were actual monsters. These were the objects of my most primal fear. The demons and devils that filled my head in those early days were beings of hate, woe, evil, and lust, and if you weren’t careful they had the power and privilege to posses your soul and take over your life. They could destroy your body and rend your soul from its shell and carry you straight off to Hell.
I admit that I have not spend too much time reading modern monster literature, but what I have read disappoints, because authors seem to enjoy stripping monsters of their monstrosity. They want us to understand their monster. They want us to be sympathetic. They want us to see their monster from another point of view, to put ourselves in its shoes.
Real monsters don’t have motivations. They aren’t subject to human morals or guidelines – that’s what makes them monsters! They must be identifiable – if they are too different from us, they’re not monsters, they are animals. Monsters are necessarily born in the uncanny valley – they bear enough resemblance to something we know that we expect a certain personality or interaction. But upon closer inspection we see that something is horribly, revoltingly wrong.
Monsters don’t care about us. They don’t care about our world. They don’t care about fitting in. They merely are what they are – incarnations of the very things we fear most.
One of my favorite “horror” movies is Shaun of the Dead. One of the things I love about it is that no attempt is made to explain the appearance of the zombies, nor their nature. We’re allowed to just accept that the zombies are the walking dead, gruesome, somewhat comical, and creepy. We can sit back and just appreciate the joyride they take us on. (Night of the Living Dead is of course wonderful also, but there’s something about the dialogue and blend of horror and comedy in Shaun that is just brilliant.)
Another favorite monster takes the form of something else near and dear to us – our homes. The houses in both The Dionaea House (one of my all-time favorite Halloween tales) and in House of Leaves are ideal monsters because they are reminiscent of something we know, something that should be comforting and grounding but which are in fact horrific and inexplicable.
Contrast these monsters, which are not explained away but simply allowed to just be, with the house in Zemeckis/Spielberg’s Monster House, which begins in much the same way as the house in Dionaea House (if a watered down, though very entertaining, children’s version) but by the end of the film is explained as being possessed by the soul of the tormented woman who once lived there. Once the explanation settles we have little to truly fear, because now we understand. And while that understanding makes for a good children’s flick, it makes for a lousy monster.
A demo of the floating head illusion we’ll use this year to enchant some lucky trick-or-treaters.
When I took up fiction writing, I at first did so with the intention of spinning biographies of wonderful monsters. After all, my childhood was shaped by Lewis Carroll and Stephen King – I was doomed early on to have a penchant for the strange and unnatural. But as I began to develop my characters and my plots I realized that the more I dealt with the monsters, the less scary they became. It became clear that the only way to deal with monsters and keep them monstrous was to write around them, to tell the story from the points of view of those whose lives were being ransacked by their interactions with the monsters. I could show as much about these characters as I wanted, but the monsters had to remain largely in the background. They could not be seen. They could not be known.
Harkening back to my childhood, then, my monsters were primarily incorporeal – demons, devils, succubi, incubi, and imps. Enough was already written about these monster to give them substance, but they were unique enough that I could weave them into the lives of various characters under myriad different circumstances and then sit back and watch as all Hell broke loose. It was wonderful! Eventually I ventured further into my imagination to concoct other evil spirits completely my own. I was able to spin entire pantheons and mythologies from the interactions of the monsters that dwelled in my head.
And yet, for all that I invented them, I cannot tell you much about them, because I do not know them. I keep them at arm’s length even from myself, because if I’m not scared of them, how can I present them in all their fearsome glory to others?
I enjoy seeing other people’s monsters. I enjoy the yard haunts I see both online and in my own neighborhood, with corpses clawing their way out from the ground, ghosts swinging from bare tree branches, jack-o-lanterns twinkling their wicked smiles. I enjoy the children dressed as vampires, ghouls, goblins and witches. I enjoy the way we embrace the darkness and our fears and celebrate them full force, even if just for one night. For one night, all these monsters are beautiful, and my love for them is reflected and shared all around me. For one night, my monsters take a back seat so that the other monsters can dance center stage.
But only for a night. In the morning, my own monsters will return, demanding to be reckoned with.
