the narrative spell

You bring up an important point about the challenge of maintaining a coherent narrative through multiple media. We are all getting pretty good at doing this as readers, clicking our little trails through the web -- from article, to video clip, to photo gallery, to email, to article -- piecing things together into meaningful strings from the mass of media surrounding us.

It's harder to write in this way. A lot of texts I've seen do a poor job of integration. Resources tend to get dumped in. They say you learn to write from reading...

re: the narrative spell

Non-linear narrative writing skills have to evolve over time. I can see non-linear narrative emerging as its own discipline for writing, just as rhetoric or creative nonfiction have been formalized into their own genre. As often seen with other new forms, they emerge first and understanding and best practices come later.

re: the narrative spell

Check out Internet Invention by Gregory Ulmer for an approach to teaching non-linear writing, or as he terms it, mystory. The specifics may be less interesting than the concept, which is developing frameworks for relating experiences.

I would relate this to Wurman's LATCH-list of organizational schemes - Location, Alphabet, Time, Category, Heirarchy. I propose that a writing tool which enables an author to compose and arrange media in these schemata would have greater utility even than one that simplifies multi-media authoring.

As an example, the program Final Draft is used to compose movie scripts - a very lucrative field for some. In spite of the end product being visual, Final Draft embodies many screenwriting conventions carried over from the days of manual typewriters. The standard font, from which you deviate at your peril, is still Courier monospace, and the visual metaphor used is 3x5 index cards.

Interestingly, the vendor has built in text-to-speech technology so the script can be 'performed' by the computer, even assigning different voices to the characters. Also, there is now an intriguing feature called tagging, which is conceptually equivalent to the meaning of the term in the SGML/XML world, but hides any technical overtones from the writer - who is busy with Rocky X or something.

So you see, the tool shapes the product - constraints matter more than 'features'. The great literature we honor today was written patiently, with tools that slowed the process down, which greatly benefitted the final product. Great literature of the future, if literature will still be the word, will spring from the same ability to focus, concentrate, review and revise, but in the world of networked information. I have not seen anything promising that potential yet, but this may be the place it shows up.

Eureka moment

The companion to the linear narrative is the table of contents, which is a misnomer, since its not really a table but an ordered list.

Non-linear narratives will need a better type of navigational system - jumping links to get somewhere gets old, fast (we are talking about adults, not kids, right?). What will this look like?

This is where the action is, I believe. Look at hand-held media players. They are all small, but some are much easier to use than others, as in finding what you want and categorizing what you have. There is a 3-dimensional element in the best navigational systems.

So I sugggest anyone serious about new writing should look at new navigation. The best systems will engage all the senses, with backups for those that may want to or have to use an alternate mode.

- bob m.