Clockpunk Studios

Why Hasn’t Story Itself Changed with the Web?

The structure and nature of short stories haven’t really changed in the digital age, as far as I can tell.  They’re still told the same way mostly, same perspectives, in roughly the same amount of time ( around 3-7000 words).  E-zines are for the most part  straight forward adaptations of the print magazine format, to varying degrees.  PDF magazines are identical to print magazines, except they’re read on a screen instead of on paper, or even printed off by some. E-zines like Strange Horizons make use of basic hypertext features, but the stories themselves do not take advantage of of any of those features except in rare occasions.

Flash fiction, or stories under 500 words, has seen a boom online, with electronic magazines such as Brain Harvest specializing in them exclusively.   Personally, I don’t find such short stories very satisfying very often, despite my involvement with the Daily Cabal, (which you should check out if you do like flash fiction).  I don’t think I’ve ever written a really successful flash fiction story.   I would argue that flash fiction is even less popular than regular short fiction, which is pretty unpopular in the first place.

You might think that the internet would lend itself to shorter stories, on the assumption that the internet has shortened our attention spans.  I don’t really believe that. I think we have mostly the same attention spans we did before the web began to dominate our entertainment time, but we’re a lot better about evaluating content quickly to determine if it’s worth our attention.  Scanning is the new reading of the 21st Century.

Early on in the web days, there was a lot more experimentation with the idea of hypertext fiction, which in my experience is basically a glorified “Choose Your Own Adventure” (CYOA) made with links rather than “turn to page X” instructions.   I’d argue that for “choose your own adventure” stories, the web is a better format than print, but– choose your own adventure stories were just a relatively crude form of interactive storytelling, and video games are a more evolved form of the same thing.  CYOA  books are not printed in nearly the same quantities as they were when I was a kid in the 80s.  I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the rise of video games has corresponded with the fall of CYOA books. Wikipedia’s article on CYOA references a company called Chooseco that purchased the rights to the original CYOA books, but when I tried to visit the site for said company, all I found was a GoDaddy redirect. I think it’s fairly safe to say that the Choose Your Own Adventure format is effectively played out.

Stories told in an e-mail-like format are really no different from the epistolary format, which has been around since the letter itself.   Wikipedia puts the first epistolary novel appearing in 1485 or so.   Over 500 years old.  So the e-mail format nothing much new, just a slightly different take.  The language might be a bit different, but that same back-and-forth exists, generally written in alternating or single-thread first person present or past-tense.

Some have experimented with Twitter and its 140 character limit.  “Twitter zines” like Thaumatrope publish these stories regularly.  I wrote a serialized story in the twitter format, using the nature of Twitter itself as an aspect of the story, called #futurejer, to what I think was probably varying degrees of success.  Ultimately was the form of story changed by this?  Not very much, I suspect.  It’s just an extremely serialized tale, probably.

I suspect that the ideal format for telling stories online may be the online comic strip.  It is:

• easily scanned, generally read very quickly
• serialized in bite-sized chunks
• visual-rich multimedia, using images to convey ideas faster than words alone can.

Except in maybe a few rare instances, however, it doesn’t take advantage of the hypertextual nature of the web to tell stories, however, so perhaps there has really yet to be a story told that truly utilizes all the strengths of a web format.

I played around with writing comedic comic strips in college, and while my strips generally weren’t great, I learned a lot about rhythm and comedic timing, especially in the 3 panel format.  (I also learned that rarely do two people have the same sense of humor. )  But the comic format as it’s used today mostly gives words over to pictures entirely.  Dialogue, maybe some very basic exposition text, but otherwise, the story rests in the artwork.

What about alternate reality games (ARGs)?  Are they a new form of storytelling?  Or are they simply more interactive fiction or gaming, rather than stories?  As much as I have read about them, I have yet to be fully engrossed in one as it played out, so I can’t really describe the experience.  Have any of you?  Where do you think they fit into things?

In a sense, my Dr. Roundbottom project (currently shamefully fallow)  is a bit of an ARG, leaning more towards an illustrated storytelling style.  Where it differs in an interesting way is that it’s open to audience involvement.  I encourage the readers to adopt characters and personas, to communicate with the characters of the story via the website, and the story changes and adapts to their suggestions, incorporating them into the more traditional narrative aspects.

I don’t know what the ideal format in which to tell a story online is, and this post hasn’t gotten me any closer, but I am nearly certain that it’s not the same format as the print short story.  We read the web differently than we read magazines or text on paper.  Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing, I leave as an exercise for the reader.  But there are definite differences, and I think we should be considering, as writers, how to better utilize the format to share our tales.

Then again, maybe stories have been honed into the format that they are in because it’s the most “fit” format.  Natural selection has discarded everything else and left us with the ideal specimen?  What do you think?  Have I left out any attempts to use the web to tell stories differently?  I’d love to hear about them.

Posted on Tuesday, May 19th, 2009 at 9:46 pm by Jeremah Tolbert

Tags: Dr.Roundbottom, ezines, story, structure, twitter, Web, Writing