Ok not that I was hurt by the superficial and narcissistic comment but here is some info on blogs… we are not all narcissistic superficial losers you know!
Thursday April 8, 2004
The Guardian
The weblog has justifiably been celebrated as a new publishing platform. But writers are beginning to see that it also has the potential to be a new fictional form. This is one of the lessons of Belle de Jour, the much hyped “blog of a London call girl”. The anonymous prostitute’s diary is a familiar genre in erotic fiction, one that, in print, probably wouldn’t float many boats these days.
But via the blog form’s sense of immediacy, Belle de Jour has revived the cliches so successfully that publishers are offering six-figure advances and journalists are desperate to find out who the real Belle de Jour is. But her real identity, call girl or literary hoaxer, is something of a side issue. The blog gets so much attention because, with its teasing sequence of daily “entries”, it tells an old story in a new way.
In other words, blogs aren’t just about factual journalism. They’re about fictional narrative, too. Writers have always used the net to distribute novels and poems that could appear in print. But there’s a tradition of experimenting with online forms such as email and chatrooms to tell stories that could only work online. Writers are taking this further by working with blogs. Indeed, with their short daily entries, reader feedback and links to the net, blogs seem purpose-built for creating episodic stories.
Jill Walker, a specialist in interactive and online narrative, based at the University of Bergen in Norway http://huminf.uib.no/~jill, says many writers see blogs as a natural way to update/extend the traditional fictional diary (eg Bridget Jones’s Diary). “But what’s genuinely new about blog fictions is their use of the network.” Most blog fictions haven’t really used the net yet, she continues. “Imagine a fictional blogger who left comments in other people’s blogs, chatted with people, and responded to reader comments as the story unfolded.”
Blog fictions pose specific challenges for authors. Some readers visit them every day and hence end up following a standard narrative chronology, but others arrive mid-story. “So each entry needs to be self-contained, while providing access to other posts that explain more details, either by linking or encouraging the reader to peruse the archives,” says Walker.
Diego Doval grappled with this in his “blognovel” Plan B. An episodic office comedy that took readers into the mind of a stressed cubicle jockey, it went online in 2002. Doval says he “wanted to see what the medium could do” and tried to create a story people could enter at any point and still make sense of. He used links not to connect to real sites but to take readers to details from the back-story that might explain that day’s events.
Blogging’s sense of immediacy was key. He didn’t plan a story in advance, but improvised each day. Though readers don’t “direct” the story, the response from them every day probably did have an effect. “When you’re writing, there is a kind of idealised reader in your mind. Here, the idealised reader becomes very real. It’s all these people sending email and commenting on their own blogs.”
Rob Wittig’s blogfiction is closer to weblogs in form and feel. A fictional group weblog, it features entries by Wittig and two friends who aren’t real, though, Wittig jokes, at times they doubt his own reality. Even as they map out the friendship among the three bloggers, the blog entries link to real-world events.
Wittig, who has written email and web-based narratives before, says he’ll incorporate and respond to reader comments within the story. He compares blog fictions to 18th-century pamphleteering. “Addison, Steele, Dr Johnson and the rest would invent a persona, the Spectator or the Rambler, who was mostly the author, but partly fictionalised, and then comment on events that were either real, partly fictionalised or wholly fictionalised. The fictionalising was done in part to skirt lawsuits and, in part, as the novelist does, to create a fiction exemplary of fact.”
Both Plan B and robwit.net create a strong sense of character and via that generate a kind of emergent story. Other blog fictions (eg www.ftrain.com) showcase lots of different micro-narratives, says Jill Walker, but reading them is “very different to reading scattered short short stories in a literary magazine. Visiting FTrain is like visiting the author’s home. You get a sense of continuity that’s important.”
Online since 1997, Paul Ford’s FTrain mixes and links stories, personal commentary, non-fiction and contributions from fictional characters. As such, it’s more complex than a blog, says Ford. “Blog structure is simpler,” he explains. “It’s blocks of text tagged by date, and category, and a few other kinds of relational data. Blogs are text stored in a database, but Ftrain is a database unto itself, and is defined in terms of itself. So, in a way, it’s my map of reality.” It’s also part of an ongoing attempt, he continues, “to create a publishing system that will give readers a rich reading experience, and one that will take full advantage of the web.”
Blogs are now so familiar that print writers are imitating them. An Opening Act of Unspeakable Evil, the fourth novel by Canadian author Jim Munroe takes the form of a blog roommatefromhell.net ) written by a woman worried that her Goth flatmate is genuinely demonic. Munroe was tempted to make fun of blogging’s stylistic tics. “But I tried to stay away from broader humour to look at how the character, a woman in her early 30s, uses the blog to explore her need to be public and private at the same time.”
Appropriately enough, when the novel comes out in the US and Canada in September, Munroe will post the 100 entries that make up the story, one a day, on a real blog. He’s also planning to add photos and links to fake sites connected to the story. “There’ll also be an Is She or Isn’t She? feature, where readers can vote on whether the roommate is, in fact, a demon. Depending on how the vote goes, I’ll be writing and posting a bonus story that won’t be in the print version.”
Munroe’s novel shows how blogs have become part of the cultural landscape. Rob Wittig thinks that blog fiction will become similarly popular. “I can easily see blog fiction becoming part of everyday computer-literate life, especially for the twentysomething generation. So much of their social life is being lived in messages already.” Others suggest it will take a while for things to develop. The personal diary seems to work well in blog form at the moment, says Paul Ford. “But I don’t think we have any way of knowing, just yet, what other sorts of stories are going to work. It’s still too new.”
· Jim McClellan is researching online narrative as part of a three-month post as interactive writer-in-residence at the BBC, attached to the Writers Room website: http://www.bbc.co.uk/writersroom
