Today, I’ve been thinking about social networking as it’s unfolding within the concept of Web 2.0. See, when I think of Web 2.0, I think of things like open source software, wikis, blogs, creative commons and free, tweakable content — a bunch of people working together and contributing their unique talents and insights to make projects better because they can, not necessarily because they want a piece of the monetary pie. I like this idea.
What I’m not always sure about is the execution.
I was digging around over at if:book (Institute for the Future of the Book) today, and started to notice a trend.
Scholar McKenzie Wark, working with the Institute (see the project here), recently used a comment system set up by if:book on initial drafts of his book GAM3R 7H30RY. (See this article from the Chronicle of Higher Education for details.) The idea behind the collaborative effort was, essentially, to improve the work as a whole by opening it up to review during the drafting process. Think of it as a massively expanded Wikipedia entry.
A couple of quotes I want to tease out from the Chronicle article:
One of Mr. Wark’s inspirations for the e-book form is Wikipedia.
“That is the literary work of our time,” he said. “It’s the Shakespeare of 2006. It took a traditional form, which is an encyclopedia, and completely rethought it. It rethought what authorship is. It rethought what collaboration is. It rethought textual form.”
And from Ben Vershbow, a researcher for the Institute:
“This is not a proposition that every book should be written in this way,” he said. But the networked e-book is ideal for scholarly books, or any work dealing with big ideas that might be difficult for a lone author to tackle, he argued.
In a way, he said, the institute seeks to apply the model of open-source software development to scholarship. Open-source software, in which a distributed group of volunteer programmers contribute to large software projects, was also the inspiration for Wikipedia.
I think this is a fine idea, provided that the person heading up the project has a firm grip on what he or she is trying to say in the first place. The bigger an idea, the more skittery it tends to become, but being able to beta test the presentation and logic against real-time users (i.e., readers) seems like a good idea to me. Hell, it’s worked pretty well for Wikipedia, which is, as the folks at if:book repeatedly state, the whole point.
And then I come to a post like this one where an Institute researcher starts deconstructing the entire concept of “authority” (which can be okay, but which can also be a pitfall of the sorts of hyper-individualistic fantasies to which Americans are all too prone), and my head starts to spin a bit.
[P]erhaps the future of the book is not a future of books. Or at least it’s not one of authorship, but of writing. … I feel deeply that the print industry is out of step with the contemporary cultural landscape, and will not produce the principal agents in the future of that landscape. And I’m not sure that ebooks will, either. My hunch is that things are going two ways: writers as orchestrators of mass creativity, or writers as wielders of a new rhetoric.
As a fiction writer, here’s my problem: I don’t think stories are designed to be “orchestrations of mass creativity”. Scholarship needs a ton of voices hashing out the logical bits. Narrative is one voice telling one story. Too many cooks spoil the broth and all that. Or when you try to please too many people, you end up pleasing no one. I’m sure I can come up with a dozen different cliches here if you give me time. The bottom line is that anyone who’s ever workshopped a short story knows what I’m talking about — when you let ten or fifteen other people get their grubby little hands all over your draft, frequently what comes out is a jumbled and unfocused mess that tries to do too many things and manages to fail at all of them.
Which leads me to another if:books post pimping a project called Flight Paths. Flight Paths describes itself as a “networked novel” collaboration between authors Kate Pullinger and Chris Joseph. It’s actually a pretty interesting idea at the core: the collision of two distinctly different lives told from different perspectives in one overarching narrative.
But the vision is larger than just two collaborating writers.
The first stage of the project will include a web iteration with, at its heart, this blog, opening up the research process to the outside world, inviting discussion of the large array of issues the project touches on. As well as this, Chris Joseph and Kate Pullinger will create a series of multimedia elements that will illuminate various aspects of the story. This will allow us to invite and encourage user-generated content on this website and any associated sites; we would like to open the project up to allow other writers and artists to contribute texts – both multimedia and more traditional – as well as images, sounds, memories, ideas.
Which gives us something like this, where serious debate goes into consider what the female protagonists name should be. I can only imagine how many more suggestions there would have been if Flight Paths had owned a larger audience at its inception.
What this means is that a ton of bits get spilled either making or defending a particular choice, when it would have been just as simple, direct and satisfying for the reader if the author had just made a choice and left it at that.
To me, that’s what narrative is. It’s the author making choices. As a reader, what I want to know is “What is the outcome of these choices?”, not “Why did you choose this story and not that one?”
(Which is not to say that I’m going all Murky Dismal on Flight Plans. The work is still early enough in its process that I’m not sure what final form it will take, and it’s only fair to reserve judgment until that happens. I wish Chris and Kate all the luck in the world.)
And lest you think they’re alone, note that Charles Leadbetter is doing the same sort of thing with We-Think and Daniel Oran, a former Microsoft programmer, has released a “beta” version of his newest novel to leverage Kindle’s technology for reader input. (Which may or may not be a pretty clever idea. Writers are used to making money on the final draft. Now there’s the possibility we can make coin on the penultimate and final drafts. Who knows?)
I see this type of reader/writer collaboration as fundamentally different than blogging fiction, or at least the way that I’ve chosen to blog it. The novels I’m giving you have already been written. I’ve told the story I wanted to tell, and I welcome your comments as you read to tell me what may or may not have worked for you (or even better, just to spout your undying devotion to my authorial awesomeness).
Maybe collaboration is the future of fiction. It could be that I’m just too Web 1.0 to see it. Is that what readers really want? Do they want to be part of the creative process, to help decide where the story is going, to render, in effect, every work a piece of “fan fiction” written by their favorite brand author?
As always, your thoughts are welcome.
D.
Filed under: Blooks and Blognovel Analysis Tagged: | blog novels, blook, blook analysis
