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As
anyone who has been unfortunate enough to be in one of my writing classes can attest, I am a strong advocate of the idea that ’story’ is crucial to the eventual success of your communication. It’s just that we business communicators don’t have the luxury of 400+ pages to tell that story.
So what happens when a sci-fi novelist meets both the social web, via blogs, and computer games? Novels, blogs and computer games are three different delivery channels for a story, with three different format requirements and end-user expectations and needs.
Sean Stewart, 40, is the author of eight novels and the winner of the 2000 World Fantasy Award. He was recently interviewed by freelance writer Jim Hanas.
Instructive and illuminating thoughts…
I think that every means of communication carries within itself the potential for a form of art. Once the printing press was built, novels were going to happen. It took the novel a little while to figure out exactly what it was going to be, but once the press was there, something was going to occur. Once motion picture cameras were around, the movies–in some format or another–were going to happen.
[With regard to the computer games I became involved in,] I modestly or immodestly think that we got some things fundamentally right about the way the web and the internet want to tell stories in a way that not everyone had gotten quite when we lucked into it. What people do on the web is they look for things and they gossip. We found a way of storytelling that has a lot to do with looking for things and gossiping about them.
…
The world of the blog clearly exists in patio space, in porch space, in that “I’m going to invite you into a level of intimacy not usually accorded to strangers, and yet you’re still a stranger. I’m going to write a blog, and you and I will communicate with one another, sometimes with startling candor, and yet in this mixed, hybrid place.”
…
Another part of that art form that I think is going to really stay with people is that sense of the collective or collaborative audience–that it exists in what we were talking about as porch space or blog space: A connected group of people who are interested in talking to one another about things and are even willing to be moved by those things. And it will be a little bit interactive, I think. This is where my crystal ball gets murky, because obviously you look at really passive forms of entertainment like TV and say, “Wow, that’s a model that works.”
It is the nature of the web that you get to click on things. I think, at some level, the art forms that evolve to use that platform will need to let people click on things. In some way or another, people want to push a little on something that happens on the web in a way they do not expect to push on their television sets.”
My thoughts about all this?
I’m not sure — I’m at Dubai airport after a mammoth wait to get a flight home (long story, don’t bother…) and haven’t really slept for about two days. In three hours I will be finally winging my way home to Adelaide, so my brain is terribly foggy right now.
But I do believe that what someone who is at the leading edge of ‘telling stories’ in this brave new digital world — with a new audience that is digital-literate in a way that we 30/40/50-somethings will never fully understand — is telling us deserves to be heard.
Got a view? Comments, please… When I have had a good sleep no doubt I’ll be able to add my two cents worth.
Related Technorati posts: Sean Stewart, story
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