Kate Pullinger Releases a New Episode of 'Inanimate Alice'

In March 2008 we interviewed Kate Pullinger, who was then creating stories that were innovative and which exploited multimedia and technology. She had embarked on a digital fiction project, ‘Inanimate Alice.’ and after a break of six years has just published a new episode. The project hasn’t stood still, has been taken up by many children around the world and has been translated into Spanish, French, Italian, German, Indonesian, and Japanese. It also remains a multimedia story which is free for all to experience.

We obviously had to remind ourselves of the early episodes before we looked at the new one.

We will all have our own views on the presentation, uses of multimedia and story itself. 

What is interesting is that what appeared just a few years ago as ground breaking and exciting, now appears to lack that same excitement and sparkle it once had. It is often said that a year is often a long time in technology and simply bombarding every sense and incorporating every technology trick isn't perhaps enough today. What once appeared as a ‘chevron clicker’ (a digital page turner) of a story and a fresh multi media experience is now looks somewhat lost. There are still frames when the story and the graphics come together but there are others when you feel it could have been more subtle and better. 

We have huge respect for Kate's previous ground breaking work on ‘Inanimate Alice’ but perhaps, it also shows that sometimes you have to know when to put things to bed and move on and that a six year break is a huge chasm to transverse in today’s technology.

Content to Fit the Digital Container?

We have been brought up to believe that irrespective of the container it is rendered within, content is content. A story is a story and doesn't change and a book is a book and apart from illustrations the content itself remains the same.

It’s often hard to accept that up until 1878, some 135 100 years ago, music was restricted to the live performance, be it in the home, on the streets, in bars and clubs or in concert halls. The original recorded format was restricted in both length and quality. What the likes of Sousa feared, that we would see the recording as the master and the live performance as secondary has largely prevailed over the last century. 

Songs have in the main been restricted and confined by the container either in the recording or in their playing. We now have the three minute song born not out of the composer or artist’s ability, but by the restrictions of the likes of vinyl technology. Recording studios have created perfect timing, rhythm, pitch etc. However, technology has also often taken a ‘it’s good enough’ route, where we end up with formats such as MP3 which give us ubiquitous reach, but at the cost of quality.

As music went digital the technology eventually enabled the content to be freer of its recording constraints, but it was still often restricted by devices and distribution capacity. Ringtones, samplers , MTV and You tube have all helped maintain the three minute song package, whereas the live rendition remains still free to embrace solos and extensions.

Textural content has been restricted by both economics and two pieces of card and a spine. We have as a result created our own 3 minute story, or 75,000 word 256 page book. The content remained in type, with illustrations often restricted to fantasy and children’s content.

So what about textural content, stories and what we loosely refer to as fiction?

The Victorians understood that the masses who had just learnt top read didn’t want the equivalent to our 256 page and often padded out story., They wanted penny fiction and fiction that could be read, as Poe aptly put it, ‘in one sitting’. In 1837 Dickens was selling some 50,000 copies of his Pickwick periodicals at a shilling a time. The pamphleteers ruled and that medium, with its adverts and affordable price ticket, ruled. 

Short form writing continued and the pamphlets became magazines and newsprint. The short form diminished with the paperback and it was economics that forced many writers to drop it in favour of the 256 page economic model. We even stuffed short stories into collections so that they could fit the container. The container ruled or reading habit.

Today we have the opportunity to re think the content. Some will venture into refining it in terms of going beyond text and Kate Pullinger is a good example of writer adapting to this new form of content. Some will see an opportunity to reintroduce the short form text work either as whole works or like Dickens in episodic form. The content now needs to be defined for the new digital containers. We are now going through a new reading revolution which involves smartphone and mobile technology and 256 pages may render into these new containers but is it a case of content overload as we all adapt to mobile technology. Content  also needs to be very mindful that it doesn’t need to displace the physical book and simply pour in yesterday’s content into today’s containers. In some cases digital can be seen as creating a new market and a complimentary one for content.

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We must now rethink storytelling in this new media world. This doesn’t mean we divorce ourselves from the written word, but merely from some of the economics of the 256 page book that could be argued to have straight-jacketed creativity to some 75,000 words and often a fixed text format. We have long supported adaption of the Keitai novel in the West and the multi media work of the likes of Kate Pullinger. After all the serial form was used by the likes of Charles Dickens and illustration litter many classics and bring the text to life.

The Poole Literary Festival, in partnership with The Media School at Bournemouth University, has now launched what they claim is the UK's first prize for New Media Writing.

Entrants are asked to compose an interactive narrative or poem, designed specifically for delivery online or via mobile phone. The creators of the winning entries will win £250, a brand new Apple iPad, and be advised by digital publishing specialist Creative Content, on getting their winning ideas published. The story can be any genre, fiction or non-fiction, poetry, prose or documentary.

We believe this is great initiative and along the lines that every festival should be doing. The sponsor is the bookstore, the publisher, the local University or the corporate. Encouraging works outside of the economic jacket may be a great way of creating a new wave of both writing and reading.

The winner of the Poole award will be announced at a special awards ceremony at Poole's Lighthouse Centre for the Arts on the final day of the festival, 31 October 2010. The competition is free to enter and details can be obtained from http://www.poolelitfest.com/new-media-prize.php

Digital Novels That Break The Spine's Straightjacket

We spent some time with some creative media friends one of which is a film producer and talked about what digital content will look like in this new age. It was interesting that he immediately thought games, books and film went hand in hand but stated that the big problem was getting creaters to work outside their comfort zone.

We showed him kate Pullinger’s ‘Inanimate Alice’ and he was transfixed. Having not seen it for many months we too found the creativity and diversity of its construction even more compelling than we have first seen it and interviewed her.

Anthony Zuiker, the creator of the CSI: Crime Scene Investigation U.S. television series, is to release a multi media ‘digi-novel; to be published by Dutton this month. ‘Level 26: Dark Origins’, is a crime novel that ‘ invites readers to log on to a website about every 20 pages using a special code to watch a "cyber-bridge" — a three-minute film clip tied to the story.’

By combining books, film and the web he is breaking the spine of the book and although it appears not to be as greater step to that taken by Pullinger it still is a significant one. Zuiker wrote an outline for the novel, which was then written by Duane Swierczynski, and then wrote and directed the film clips for the website.

Zuiker say the book can be read by itself but believes that the one dimensional ebook readers fail to offer entertainment choice as they don’t play videos. He believes that people’s attention span is shortening and they need more options on how they consumed entertainment and books. "I wanted to bring all the best in publishing, in a motion picture, in a website and converge all three into one experience and when the book finished and the bridges finished, I wanted the experience to continue online and in a social community."

Both Pullinger and Zuiker are exploding the spine that has straight-jacketed creators and although it may not suit all this new environment is enabling some to express themselves and engage with the reader on many levels.

Kate Pullinger - Multi Media Author

From author Kate Pullinger's impressive and different author web site please visit her digital section and enjoy something different! www.katepullinger.com

A Lesson in Digital Creative Writing

We are now speaking to a number of authors and content creators about the digital opportunities and challenges that they now face. We are looking at how it is affecting them, their relationships, and the processes and activities right across the publishing value chain and life cycle from creation to public domain.

This week we had the pleasure of interviewing an author with a difference perspective, Kate Pullinger. We were drawn to Kate by the article she wrote in the Guardian last month, ‘Writers can learn a lot from the Hollywood strike. We deserve a better deal from digital publishing’. The article raised many valid points and clearly touched a spot, as it generated high number of comments.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/feb/28/bookscomment.digitalmedia
We were interested in her digital experiences not so much from the commercial side but the writing itself. She has authored several novels, writes for radio, film and for digital media and currently teaches on the MA in Creative Writing and New Media at De Montfort University, Leicester. She was also the Research Fellow for TRACE online writing centre from 2002-3.

So Kate not only writes, but teaches writers and has importantly worked with new media. Kate clearly sees the glass half full and the opportunities for all in the New World, but she also recognises that the format often dictates the form. To put it another way, books are books and their size and structure are often fixed to fit the package not necessarily the content itself. Creating multi media works needs to support multi media at the beginning, during the development and at the end. It is not a case of writing the text and adding the ‘effects’ at the end.

We visited Kate’s impressive web site http://www.katepullinger.com and her latest digital work http://www.inanimatealice.com , a multi media graphic novel in episodes. We will all have our own views on whether it works or doesn’t but the one thing it certainly provides is evidence that creativity is not confined to a live in a jacket. Just as MTV enhanced music and YouTube changed video, then digitisation has the potential to change the book.