Interactive Fiction

Interactive fiction has already caught on in the video gaming world. Anyone who has played any of the Final Fantasy games can attest to this. And maybe my video game playing past has clouded (sorry, couldn’t resist — and if you get this, you are totally my hero) my objectivity here, but I do think that the most successful interactive fiction will be more visual in nature vs. primarily text-based. Incorporating text, pictures, and sound is probably the most efficient way to create interactive fiction, and making it truly interactive requires “readers” to make lots of choices throughout their consumption of the material. As everyone else who has already posted has also written, I too recall the Choose Your Own Adventure book series from the 1980s and early 90s. What else are RPGs but more complicated audiovisual versions of the Choose Your Own Adventure books?

Despite my enthusiasm for multimodal interactive fiction, I seriously doubt that interactive text-based fiction will catch on, particularly text-based fiction that mostly relies on hypertext as its primary interactive component. On the other hand, where hypertext is more appropriate is in nonfiction. Honestly, hypertext should probably be more of a requirement than just an ideal when creating informational texts to be posted in a digital format. I think that a lot of readers will benefit from not having to pursue the material in the exact way that the writer expects them to. After all, not everyone experiences, organizes, or learns information in the same way. Hypertext in nonfiction ultimately allows readers to either experience a text in the way that the writer originally intended, or to take matters into their own hands and to choose their own hypertextual nonfiction adventures.

And hey, at least making inadequate hypertext choices when reading interactive nonfiction won’t result in immediate death and destruction like it did in the Choose Your Own Adventures series. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I still get stressed out just thinking about those books!

(Cross-posted to our class discussion board on VISTA)

Is the Internet a Valid Research Tool?

The internet has already become the primary resource for general knowledge. Even though Wikipedia is routinely maligned by scholars, I don’t think that many of us can say that we haven’t run a quick fact check by referencing Wikipedia or other similar websites (IMDB and Snopes are two other favorites).

Scholarly research, on the other hand, obviously cannot always be completely conducted on the internet — yet. I think that eventually, we’ll have online access to every possible article or book that is written. I don’t think that physical resources will become obsolete, but they will become less important. After all, it’s much easier to pull up information at home than it is to seek out specific books or journals in libraries.

Because of the nature of the information age, it’s crucial for educators to take the time to teach their students how to determine whether resources are credible or not. Of course, there are levels of credibility, and each level is specific to the type of research that is being conducted. Scholarly research demands a higher level of reliability, and informal personal research is up to the discretion of the individual. But students MUST learn how to figure out how reliable their resources are — and what types of resources are appropriate to the different genres they are likely to write in.

And this education has to start as early as possible. My boyfriend’s son, for example, already has online homework — and he’s in first grade. Education in resource credibility has to start as soon as students begin accessing the internet for research purposes, or we’re going to continue dealing with college freshmen who think that an online blog entry written by a 15 year-old high school student with no credentials on the topic he is writing about is just as reliable as a peer-reviewed study in a reputable scientific journal.

(Cross-posted to our class discussion board on VISTA)

Book ATMs? Really?

Something that struck me while I was reading both Betsy Lerner’s The Forest for the Treesand Jason Epstein’s Book Business: Publishing Past, Present, and Future is that both writers make the prediction that automated book machines that are similar to ATMs but dispense copies of books on demand will be part of publishing’s future. Epstein even goes as far as to predict that everyone will have home machines that print and bind makeshift copies of books as readers demand them. While the two writers both also describe electronic readers as potential directions for book publishing, they seem to focus more time on the proposed physical book kiosks that would be either out in public or in the homes of readers than they do on electronic readers and the ability to download books anywhere a reader has internet access — and the latter is of course where publishing is ultimately headed with the growing popularity of Kindles and Nooks.

While both of Lerner’s and Epstein’s books have been immensely enjoyable to read, particularly in terms of learning about the history of the publishing industry and the authors’ experiences with publishing, I am also somewhat amused by the fact that these two are so entrenched in the culture of the physical book that they have difficulty imagining a system in which the text of books are stored in intangible files on a computer and accessed electronically from the comfort of readers’ own homes on computers or hand-held devices, rather than accessed at machines (not unlike stores) outside of the home or accessed in the home but printed in tangible form.

I guess those of us who grew up with the internet are not at all surprised at the addition of electronic readers as alternatives to bookstores and physical books. After all, online fandom communities have made it easy for fans to post and access fanfiction online for years now, so reading electronically is almost second nature to those of us who have regularly participated in internet fandom. But for those who grew up in an age when texts were always a physical medium, the reconception of books as files rather than as individual tangible objects is surely a paradigm-shattering experience.

Not the Typical Writer, Apparently

As I read through the descriptions of the typical writers that Betsy Lerner outlines in her book The Forest for the Trees: An Editor’s Advice to Writers, I was struck by the fact that I don’t really fall into any of the categories she discusses. Also, her sweeping characterization of writers as lacking in social graces and personal style only serves to further alienate me from identifying with her conception of the typical writer.

Then I got to the section of her book that discusses the relationship between editors and writers, the publishing industry as a whole, and the necessity of having an agent. And while once again I found that I don’t possess the personal traits that Lerner associates with editors any more than I do the traits that she associates with writers, I actually found my personality in one of the publishing industry characters she describes: THE AGENT!

Before this semester, I was blissfully unaware of the process that a writer must go through in order to be published. I had vaguely heard one of my professors talk about how his agent was trying to find the right publishing company for the young adult novel he was working on, but I didn’t dwell any longer on the topic than the brief mention it received in class one day. But the more I learn about what agents do, the more it sounds like a good fit for me. I mean, everyone I know has always told me that I make them feel at ease, and that I’m a good advocate for others. Throughout the course of my adulthood, I’ve gotten multiple friends jobs simply by knowing the right people and persuading them that the friends who were applying for the jobs were truly made of awesome. Also, two sets of couples that I convinced to date each other are now married, and two friends that I introduced during a time of crisis for both of them are now inseparable best friends and roommates.

I get people — and more specifically, I get what people want and need from each other. I also feel warm and fuzzy when I help people succeed. And I know that other people quickly grok all of this about me by the number of times others have requested me to be their advocate. As a recent example, one of the waitresses at a restaurant that I go to frequently ending up talking to me for a good half hour the last time I picked up food. She plans to attend the university where I go to school and wanted advice on the admissions process, FAFSA, and pretty much everything else involved with attending college. I gave her my number in case she has any more questions, and I received a text message from her yesterday saying that she felt overwhelmed and that she isn’t getting encouragement from her parents about attending school (she’s 19 and a second generation immigrant). After talking to her on the phone for another half hour, she asked me if she could entice me with a latte to meet her at Starbucks this week and help walk her through the FAFSA application and the university application. More than anything, I think she just wants someone to share her frustrations with and to tell her that she is making the right decision. I have only talked to this girl at the restaurant where she works, but she felt comfortable enough to ask me to help her without really knowing me otherwise. And this is only the most recent of a long string of instances where I’ve been asked to be a helper and advocate for others.

Of course, I still want to write. And I need to find out more about the responsibilities of agents and how to break into the business to begin with. Would I have to first start in publishing, or are there internships available for people directly interested in becoming literary agents or working with literary agencies? Do agents hire assistants, who then can work their way up to being agents themselves? I definitely need to do more research on this. But I think that my persistence, social skills, willingness to advocate for others, negotiation abilities, and understanding of what people are thinking (I would slaughter the competition on Family Feud!) would put me at an advantage in this area of publishing.

Thinking back to Lerner, I don’t know if I would have had the same reaction as the agent who weeped when he finally found a publisher for his client’s book, but if I were in a similar position, you’d better believe I’d be jumping up and down screaming and fist pumping Jersey Shore-style like I’d just won the freakin’ lottery — and I’ll do the same every time I find out that any of my writer friends in this program are being published. Just call me your personal cheerleader, fellow writers: GO, FIGHT, WIN, TEAM MAPW!!!!!

The Writer’s Ego

Something that Betsy Lerner discussed in The Forest for the Trees: An Editor’s Advice to Writers has been bugging me. In her experience, successful writers need to have the utmost confidence in their writing abilities. The word she keeps using is “ego.” She does concede that a certain type of writer, the ambivalent writer, experiences both bouts of egoism and bouts of extreme self doubt. But how these ambivalent writers can optimize their success, from the standpoint of an editor, is to have more pride in their work than doubts about it. In other words, the writer’s ego needs to be pumped up a bit before the writer can experience true success.

While I definitely don’t fall into the ambivalent writer category, I also don’t fall into the egoistic writer category either. I know I can write, and I know that I can sometimes write well, but I don’t think I’m the greatest writer known to humankind. But, I also don’t have horrible insecurities that prevent me from writing; in fact, as I discussed in a previous post, my schedule is the biggest obstacle to my success as a writer, not crippling self-doubt.

And honestly, I don’t think that the ambivalent writer and the egoistic writer are really that different. I think that the egoistic writer is probably better at hiding his or her insecurities than the ambivalent writer is. Perhaps the egoistic writer began as the ambivalent writer but learned quickly that it is more beneficial in terms of career advancement to display astounding self-confidence in his or her writing abilities. While I do think that there are a few rare individuals who are true egoists, those who have overwhelming delusions of grandeur in terms of their writing probably have unhealthy egomaniacal tendencies in all areas of their lives that merit serious evaluation. For most of the population, the occasional worry about not being able to exceed expectations in every circumstance is unavoidable. That’s just part of being human. And in my experience, those who outwardly display the most confidence are usually those who are hiding the most insecurities underneath the surface. It’s compensatory narcissism at its finest.

The point is, I’m not sure I’ll ever be prone to vacillating between self-confidence and self-doubt, nor would I want to. I also don’t see myself being ecstatic about every piece I produce. For one, extremes of emotion don’t exactly correspond to my personality, and two, I’m not certain how conducive egoism is to good writing, no matter what Betsy Lerner says. For me, part of being an effective writer is finding it difficult to be completely satisfied with what I write; in fact, some of my biggest successes as a writer have surprisingly been with pieces I didn’t even necessarily like all that much. And almost all of my other writing successes have been with pieces that I liked but didn’t love. I can be mostly satisfied with what I write, sure, but not perfectly satisfied. After all, even something that is “perfect” can be improved, in my experience.

The bottom line is that I’ll probably never be the egoistic writer, nor will I ever be the ambivalent writer. If my unwillingness to feign egoism hinders my success as a writer, so be it. But in the mean time, I’ll be enjoying myself while participating in the writing process, whether I think my writing is the best thing since pumpkin spice lattes or is simply mostly good.

How Do You Convince a Butterfly to Hunker Down?

The majority of the essays in the “Hunkering Down” section of Marie Arana’s The Writing Life focused on, as Ray Bradbury so eloquently put it, “stuffing our eyeballs” in order to write more effectively. In other words, part of the life of a writer is taking in the world like a kid might gulp down a giant blue raspberry Icee. Writers consume books, movies, interactions, and events, chew on them for awhile, swirl the mixture around, and then spit back out these technicolor masterpieces that contain little splashes of the jigsaw pieces that the writer took in but ultimately reinterpreted and reinvented to create a coherent whole. The pieces are out there waiting to be found, but the writer doesn’t have a map or key. The job the writer is to create the final picture of the puzzle with all those pieces that he or she experiences. Experiencing is indeed a large component of the life of a writer.

I think part of the point of the “Hunkering Down” section is to dispel the myth of the writer as a hermit. And it’s good advice for a writer to focus more on the external world in order to write more compelling texts, especially because a lot of writers do tend to be more on the introverted side. But what about those of us who are already social butterflies and spend the majority of our time interacting with and observing others as it is? Where is the sage advice for us? I understand that one line of advice is implicit in the title of the section — that we need to somehow figure out how to “hunker down” — but how do we actually go about truly finding the time in our hectic lives to convert all of these meaningful experiences into polished products?

Despite the title of the section, I never got a clear sense of how the writers are able to hunker down from their essays. It’s kind of a cop-out to tell someone to “just write,” because if it was that simple, we wouldn’t be reading these essays or in a graduate writing program to begin with. I don’t know about the rest of you with active social lives, but for me, the most difficult part of writing, bar none, is actually being disciplined enough to leave spaces open on my social calendar for writing to take place. Yes, I love writing, but I also love the people in my life and having fun outside of myself. And while I do manage to make some time to write, I still don’t write as much or as often as I would like. After all, when you’re downing those Icees, it’s inevitable that sometimes you’ll get brain freeze.

According to the wise and wonderful Bart Simpson, “no one ever suspects the butterfly.” This is definitely the case when it comes to stereotypes about writers. If Marie Arana feels that writers need an entire section to be convinced to go out and experience the world, even amidst supposedly “hunkering down” and committing words to paper, the assumption is that writers are mostly solitary in nature and will only leave their secluded abodes (and abodes here could mean both physical dwellings and their own minds) if they’re beaten over the head repeatedly. But for those of us who already spend the majority of our time observing and analyzing every action and inaction that we experience out there in the big exciting world and want a little more concrete advice about the hunkering down part of hunkering down, this part of the essay collection, though otherwise entertaining, feels a bit like having to spend an afternoon listening to Legolas of Lord of the Rings fame. In other words, despite its promising title, the “Hunkering Down” section feels like a big fat dose of obviousness.

Reading to Write

According to Francine Prose in Reading Like a Writer and a number of the writers who contributed to Maria Arana’s The Writing Life, the most effective writers are also effective readers. Stephen King in On Writing also expresses a similar sentiment when he states that “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.” Not only should writing students practice writing as much as possible, but they should also read as much as possible.

This philosophy of writing makes a lot of sense — and is clearly advocated by a number of successful writers — but some beginning writers still have reservations about the idea of reading to write, whether they are worried about becoming subconsciously influenced by the writers they read or they think that actively practicing writing is more beneficial than passively soaking up information by reading.

The idea of non-readers or scant-readers becoming writers is oddly comical to me. I imagine a surgeon who says that he doesn’t like learning about the human body. Rather than spending years in medical school becoming knowledgeable about the practice of medicine, he jumps right into making incisions on patients. For him, the more he engages in performing the mechanical aspects of an operation, the better he will be at surgery. And while he may in fact end up becoming a top-notch cutter and stitcher, he’s probably not going to be successful at actually fixing patients’ organs. Moreover, if something unexpected happens during a surgical procedure, odds are that with a surgeon who doesn’t have a strong background in human biological systems, the patient is going to die on the table.

Writers who choose not to read are setting themselves up for failure. They may become proficient at some of the more mechanical aspects of writing but will lack the style and context that writers need to truly become successful in any genre. I see it as the difference between writing as a craft and writing as an art. Good writers see writing as both a craft and an art. Bad writers see writing as either fulfilling a necessary set of rules (craft-based writing) or only evoking an emotional or aesthetic response (art-based writing). Reading mostly informs the latter while task-focused writing practice creates the former. Neglecting either component is akin to the surgeon who either has no practical experience making and closing incisions, or no theoretical knowledge on biological systems and medicine. Writers who don’t read, or conversely, readers who fancy themselves to be writers but don’t write on a consistent basis, risk writing that is dead on arrival.

The New York Times recently published an essay on the value of reading in their Sunday Book Review section. The concept of reading for experience and idea-building rather than to remember detailed information not only applies to readers but also to writers. We read not to understand prescriptive writing rules but to create neural networks that preserve the gestalt of all that we read, learn, and experience. Perhaps, as Wolf says in the article, all that we have read really “is in some way working on [us] even though [we] aren’t thinking about it.” And perhaps our writing really is “the sum of it all.”

Interviewing a Professional Writer

Here are the questions that I created for my interview with technical writer and web content developer Jennifer Eden Hayes:

1. Did you always want to be a writer, and if so, what type of writing did you envision yourself doing? If not, what career did you originally aspire to and what changed your mind?

2. How did you land your first writing job? What exactly does technical writing entail in a software development company?

3. Since you were an English major in college, was it difficult making the transition from writing literary criticism to technical writing? What role has your education played in your jobs as a technical writer, and how do you familiarize yourself with the software, applications, and processes that companies want you to write about?

4. How have your coworkers treated you when you have questions about the more technical aspects of the job? Have you experienced any communication gaps, and if so, how have you resolved them?

5. What are some of the projects you have worked on now that you are employed with Fuji Film?

6. How did acquire your part-time positions with Southern Living Plants and Encore Azalea, and how many hours a week do you typically spend writing articles for them?

7. Which genre do you prefer, technical writing or web content development, and why?

8. How do you get inspiration for you articles? Do the magazines tell you to write about a particular topic or do you get to choose?

9. What is your writing process, and do you approach each genre with a different process?

10. Are you pursuing writing opportunities outside of technical writing and magazine writing, and what do you hope to accomplish next?

11. What advice do you have for people who are beginning to pursue writing as a career?

12. Who are your favorite writers, and why do you find them to be inspirational?

Using Classic Literature to Improve Writing

In Reading Like a Writer, Francine Prose admits that when she has writer’s block, she turns to classic literature for inspiration. She especially enjoys reading Chekhov, among many other classic authors, when she is trying to figure out how to write a specific scene or exchange between characters. While reading the classics does have value for writers who want to see how the “masters” use language to achieve specific purposes in their writing, I’m not sure how I feel about consulting classic literature every time I have a writing dilemma. I also don’t know how effective it would be for writing students to primarily study classic models in the way that Francine Prose seems to advocate in her book.

What I do think is helpful about the “modeling” approach to writing is that students can learn, understand, and evaluate the different strategies that authors use for characterization or plot development, for instance. But what writing students need to remember is that mimicry is not the ultimate goal, and the strategies they are learning are not steadfast rules or something that they should try to emulate every time they write. Classic literature contains examples of good writing but does not directly instruct the reader on how to achieve the effects of the examples within, particularly in the context of a student’s writing style and the specific aims of the piece that the student is currently constructing.

Writing students who study classic literature in order to improve their writing should realize that close reading is valuable, particularly where individual word choice is concerned. However, the strategies that writers discover through reading the work of other writers are simply tools that can be used and combined with other tools to achieve an effect, not the only ways to write a scene or character.

The Truth in Fiction

In my younger days I primarily wrote fiction, particularly short stories and fanfiction of the Harry/Hermione variety. Within the past couple of years, however, the majority of my writing has been geared toward academia, law, and creative nonfiction about my childhood. I’ve relegated fiction to the back burner in favor of the authenticity of reality, and most of the time I am content with this choice.

Note, however, that I say most of the time and not all of the time, because as much as I enjoy keeping my feet on the ground, when I have any down time at all, my head naturally flies up into the clouds and concocts these spectacular fantastical stories that I become utterly engrossed in and excited about, even going as far as crafting character sketches and diagramming the trajectory of the plots I’ve devised. I have half a dozen notebooks devoted to rough story plans and a good fifty or so text files on my computer that contain story beginnings, endings, and sample chapters in between. I even have an entire young adult action-adventure series planned out about a group of college freshmen who become super-heroes.

I say I’m not a fiction writer, but when the guards in the tower of practicality fall asleep, they even dream in a carefully calculated plot arc. I can’t even begin to enumerate the number of dreams I’ve had in which I’ve saved an entire school building of children from killer sentient alligators of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles proportions, or found myself lost at sea with a band of seemingly drunken swashbucklers that in actuality were government agents seconds away from making me walk the plank because they determined that I was a danger to national security (little did they know that I was actually a spy for a shadowy government agency that only officials at the highest level of clearance knew about!).

Sure, I may profess to be solely a nonfiction writer, but that in itself is a work of fiction.

As someone who does enjoy writing fiction (there, I said it), I am fascinated by the idea of character. The entertainment that I have always gravitated towards always employs a multitude of colorful, dynamic characters. One of the best examples of a fictional world ripe with vivid characters that the audience feels like they know is the television show LOST. The writers devote about half of each episode to flashbacks or flashforwards that further define the seemingly endless supply of intriguing characters that populate the landscape of the show.

In Reading Like a Writer, Francine Prose discusses narration, character, and dialogue. Along with plot, these three components of fictional stories make up the quartet of the significant areas that fiction writers need to develop. To me, character is perhaps the most important of the three that Francine Prose describes, as narration and dialogue can be contributing factors to characterization. While developing strong characters and choosing the type of narration that I want to employ is usually easy, striking a balance between the right amount of dialogue and the right amount of exposition has always been a little more difficult. I have definitely relied more on dialogue for characterization and narration for plot development, and after reading Francine Prose, I have decided that one of my fiction writing heuristics is going to be to accomplish the opposite, just to see if I can do it. I’m not sure how the exercise is going to turn out, but I hope that I can successfully pull off something out of my comfort zone for the sake of growing as a writer.

After all, as Prose herself indicates by including some of the most brilliant examples of dialogue by other writers (I’m thinking of the beach scene from Henry Green’s Loving here) in her book, fiction is indeed a type of truth. The subtle ways we manipulate conversations, the tendency to omit certain events in the stories we tell, and even the looks we exchange with each other all give insight into our psyches. A good fiction writer will be able to insert these subtle truths in his or her writing so artfully that the reader won’t even be cognizant of them until giving the passage a closer reading.

Just because a writer creates stories doesn’t mean that he or she is a liar. Fiction is just as valuable is nonfiction because it too can shake us up with truths that cut to the bone. And maybe because of its placement in a world that is not our own, the visceral truth often found in fiction is one of the most effective ways to make us understand truths that we have been too scared to face on our own in this world.