Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Publishing Possibilities on the Interweb

I've been thinking for some time now about publishing on the web in new and different ways, whether that be interactive fiction or very short form.

My first foray into this was a blog I developed in 2004 while getting my master's in media studies at The New School. I registered for a class called "Narrative in Dynamic Systems," taught by Gamelab's Nick Fortugno at Parsons. Most of my classmates were designing and developing actual games for the final project. But storytelling, not design, is my forte, so I tried to develop a game of sorts using stories as a base. I recruited a few friends from around the country and gave them a storyline and some basic rules and let them have at it. Here's what they came up with.

In the past year I've noticed similar concepts arise online. First there's ficlets, which allows authors to serve up stories from 64 to 1,024 characters on which other authors can build. I particularly like the idea of letting go of control of the storyline. It's kind of an open source for writing.

Last week the New York Times published an article, "You say Face Ads, They Say Satire," where writers publish fake ads, really mini stories, on Craigslist. What' interesting about this approach is the medium. Classified ads often hint at fiction anyways, but these ads take the venue and really run with it.

Finally, there's recipes a la twitter, which publish short form recipes, a truly creative use of twitter. Yes that's pumpkin pie in under 140 characters.

Have a great Thanksgiving!
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