Just last week I was suggesting that instead of defaulting to a doomsday approach when discussing the transitions from old to new media, we should be embracing the exciting new creations that arise as a result of emerging forms of communication. “Some books are already being published exclusively on an electronic reader, who is going to be the first person to go even further, break the mold, and bring the e-reader to a whole new level. It’s only a matter of time,” I wrote in response to a classmates blog post.
Little did I know that Shelley Jackson was about 16 years ahead of me. Granted technology-wise, Jackson’s Hypertext is a bit of an outdated form of interactive storytelling. (As far as I could tell from my Google searches, “Patchwork Girl” is only available via CD-ROM, and most of the online Hypertext examples I found were ironically filled with broken links and plagued by 1990s web design.) However, the concept of what Shelley Jackson is describing in “Stitch Bitch” is still very much relevant and houses exciting possibilities.
My journalism undergrad was all about ‘good writing.’ It was concise, structured like a pyramid, formulaic. They encouraged us to write compelling leads, but keep in mind the average reader is at an 8th-grade level. All the important information was to be at the top, so that extraneous facts and details could easily be lopped off for print space. Don’t use anything but “said.” It was as Shelley describes it “direct, effective, clean as bleached bone.” There was little opportunity to “Write Mutt.”
However, stream of consciousness is my favorite way to write, especially in a creative context. When I am taking notes or writing out the first draft of anything, I like to just spew out my ideas in rapid succession. I am still in the habit of writing by hand when it comes to anything that isn’t a journalistic article, school paper, or blog post, and sometimes even for those. And lines be damned. I hate writing within them pretty much always. If anyone was to look at my first drafts they would likely see “writing that verges on nonsense, where nonsense is not the absence of sense, but the superfluity of it,” as Shelley so eloquently describes. Sometimes I can’t even follow what I first write. In school contexts I had to learn to play by the rules and adapt my streams of thoughts into linear writing. Nonsense didn’t fly with my English teachers.
I’m not saying that it was wrong of my schools to maintain and enforce these rules and boundaries. I like to think that I am a better writer now because of it, but I am excited about the possibilities of today’s technologies to break these molds and create new ways of telling stories. Shelley says with Hypertext it is about providing the reader with “other reasons than compulsion about what’s next” to continue. This is a powerful idea. With the shear magnitude of the Internet causing our ever shortening attention spans, how do we keep an audience interested? From a marketing, storytelling, mass communications point-of view – compulsion has always been the driving force behind obtaining and maintaining an audience.
Shelly is suggesting an alternative way of thinking about how we write and communicate. Her style may not be popular or widely accepted but I find it compelling. The lasting idea I took away from “Stitch Bitch” can be summed up with this final quote.
“Art forms take shape around our ability to perceive beauty, but our ability to perceive beauty also takes shape around what forms become possible.”
For a class about visual aesthetics in a program about interactive media, I think this defines the future of our craft. We don’t even know what forms will become possible, but as members of this growing field, we can be a part of that conversation. We can create new perceptions of beauty around these new forms. We can create the new forms that will inspire others to perceive beauty differently.
And if others don’t like what you create, or if they don’t like how you perceive, just remember what Shelly Jackson says, “Other people are wrong.”