Saturday 10 October 2009

Cell Phone Stories









arrested heart

I wrote the first chapter of my new mobile text story today. As a long time fan and a dabbler in short story telling, I think this is going to become my new favourite hobby for the forseeable. 

I'm not sure the site I'm working with at the moment is 100% there yet, i had some little niggles in getting started, but it's pretty much the only one I found of any scale, where you could write in English (my Japanese just isn't quite there yet). And it is in Beta, so fair play.

I'm pretty interested in this whole concept (apart from my love of short stories) becuase it's making me think about how we tell short stories: so we plan them, half plan them and make the rest up on the fly, or do we rely utterly and completely on our intuition to navigate our way through it and make everything up in real time as we type or talk...

In the most part it made me think about my own life as a story. And as I do, i've realised that i am as a person fairly 'episodic'. Maybe we all are, but when i realised that, 'my own story' started to make much more sense. And actually i started to see everything in a much more future focussed, flexible, dramatic way. Rather than looking back, which we are all so prone to do, i started to only look forward. Such is the power of storytelling, and not just the content but the whole structure.

I've got a fairly good idea of the storyline for this latest 'novella' *jokes*. But not 100%. It's made me think a lot more about each of the characters. Becuase as I write it, I am publishing it, my readers already have an idea of the characters, and they know how the plot is progressing and it already exists in their consciousness. I can't go back and edit anything. I haven't finished the story and even though there are many chapters to come, in some sense many things are already final. 

I can't believe some version of text storywriting or chapter-following can't happen here in the UK, and I'm certainly going to be championing it, as there are some brands that this makes total sense for them and their fans to get into, together.

Read along at textnovel.com if you dare. Or more apt for these times, ..."if you care".