Imagine snow falling on the page. It’s an early trick, one found at the beginning of the Web, but the application of such tricks for fiction have been, up to now, ignored. How might snow change the meaning of a scene where two people discuss the chores or duties they face back in New York City while on vacation in more tropical climates? How often do we carry and impose removed physical settings on our current physical settings? Could the appearance of snowfall draw the reader’s attention to a character’s past? Was the vacation planned during cold winter months? Perhaps, the snowfall might show a connection to place that the characters have abandoned yet failed to leave behind. The reader, in his or her quest to understand text, engages in multiple problem solving activities with each turning page. Sometimes, these musings create tension, sometimes they help us to understand the character’s situation, past, and problematic future. Allowing the reader an opportunity to embolden their deconstructive tendencies through interactive content, made more meaningful than simple footnotes or (as in the case above) more interesting than simultaneous narrative descriptions of weather (how does separating text into text and image change the message and the experience) because it represents a new method of information delivery, will help usher in a new type of content not only related to fiction of the past but also representative of the ways it has already changed our media experiences.
These tricks aren’t “advanced,” nor do they have to appear so. Instead, they’re tools, like punctuation or even words, that allow the writer to explore new potentials for fiction by creating an interactive reading experience that utilizes tools already developed for other media forms like journalism, gaming, and even social frameworks like Twitter and Facebook.
Perhaps new media will enable writers to explore the subconscious of characters who are, themselves, unwilling to allow certain thoughts to surface, allowing the reader to make connections that characters can’t. How does the craft of the novel compare to the crafting of New Media Fiction? We forgive the impossibility of narrators writing in the first person present tense, knowing full well that the ability to write in the present tense while also act in the present tense is impossible. Can New Media, say Twitter or Facebook with their status updates, find a way into fiction? Can the time line of a narrative benefit from feeds? Are the tools developed for Hyperfiction ready now to find their way into mainstream fiction? Can they help to make New Media Fiction mainstream at all?
New Media has made information more accessible. Search engine algorithms combined with platforms that allow users to suggest interesting media to friends, family, and strangers, has produced an, arguably, new form of intelligence. The Internet is up for the Nobel Peace Prize. To award it would infer that we believe, somehow, that it is sentient. It is, but its brain is the collective consciousness of millions, billions of people. Like all people, we aren’t always trustworthy. The information we receive comes from a source either motivated by commerce, entertainment, or self promotion. Its flaws, these possibilities, they are what makes the Web so rich. The potential is endless. The Internet is already filled with unreliable narrators, and users recognize this even more concretely than they have in the past. We are, because we most sift through more information, much better readers, much better thinkers when it comes to recognizing the motivations and intentions of others.
Would the unreliable narrator know that the reader has access to such information? Would they use this in the same way that politicians use information to lie with the truth? The power of excluding the thought, the power to change the weather “spiritually” rather than physically might lead to any number of interesting possibilities for the reader, writer, and their characters.
This may lead to new areas of study that include “The Reader, the Writer, and Interactivity in the Novel.” What new role will the reader and the writer take at the beginning of this new medium? Will the medium continue to control the message? Will the message be lost in a “sea of irrelevance?”
The novel isn’t dead, but it is on life support. Books are cumbersome. New devices have made vast libraries ever more portable, but they have not taken advantage of the inherent possibilities of the medium. These musings are, of course, an overly simple application of what html, CSS, Java, or Flash might allow a writer to contrive. More importantly, however, it is an aspect of fiction that has been ignored in large part because writers looking to move their fiction into the future ignore the requisite skill set. That is, we are ignoring a shift in medium to the detriment of our most cherished institution, fiction. At present, publishers are beginning to see that this new form of fiction is inevitable. Penguin is already employing their coders to use the tools originated for the web in fiction. Is this the role that publishers will fill? Will they become publishers whose focus is on translating the old fiction into new fiction? If so, how will this effect the publishing industry? Do writers need a larger skill set? Is this where the MFA program is headed?
Thanks,
Lon Koontz
New Media Fiction 