When
people harp on to me about the smell of a book I have to say I’m fairly
dismissive. I mean come on, when was the
last time you saw someone on the train taking a good whiff of a book as if it
were a bunch of pungent flowers? I pick a book up because of the content, the
author and yes, the pretty front covers.
I pick it up because I know it’s going to take me somewhere new, and if
I’m lucky, the author is going to have a little play with their words and
format. Digital will work just as well for this as any musty book that makes
you cough if you sniff a little too hard.
The
digital era is allowing us to do so many things with the written word, creating
new forms and genres. It also has the capacity to bring an old art form back
from the literary dead, such as the Choose Your Own Adventure, which I spoke
about in my last post.
Let’s face it, we’re never going to see
the Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) back in print, but digital has allowed us
to resurrect this childhood memory, and the writing skills that were lost with
it.
It
may surprise you to hear me talk about writing skills and CYOA in the same
sentence. Perhaps you believe that CYOA is just a form of fan fiction gone mad,
requiring no writing skills other than to be able to string words together.
However, the truth of the matter is, writing a CYOA? Not as easy as you might
think. Creating multiple endings is exceptionally difficult, for as writers we
rarely contemplate two or three endings let alone the eight endings I wrote in
my Victoria Square Invasion. And you
just can’t make the endings subtly different (what I would term a creative cop-out),
because why would your reader bother to choose their own adventure when their
choice is no choice at all? Also, when you’re doing a physical CYOA you can’t
just make up the location details and props as you would a book; they have to
have some basis in the reality that surrounds the participant/reader.
In
the end, when our creativity failed us, the locations of Adelaide kick started
our brains. We had to start digging into quirks of Adelaide, the locations
where interesting features had gone unnoticed by the normal pedestrians. What
was it about the location that could set the scene? What might happen in the
story to bring the reader’s attention to this feature? Did the location itself
have an atmosphere that could be played on? Was it close enough to the previous
location to stop our readers wearing holes in their shoes? We also had to
consider whether we were going to make the endings wins, loses, or partial
wins. Making a person walk from one side of the city to the other and then
having them die, may see your project unattended the next year. Like in all
writing, reader satisfaction is key.
In
a way, these restrictions were a godsend, because they got us out of our
writing comfort zone - out of our writing fat pants and into the sweat pants.
Elements that I would never have added normally were incorporated because of
their unusualness rather than being dismissed as too unwieldy. In the long run
it made the whole experience and the adventure itself, unexpected and more
interesting, because these things were there,
the reader could see them, and it
made the science fiction component more believable.
Now,
I can apply this skill to my normal novel writing. So rather than ending with
the easiest and obvious path, I can contemplate ends that are vastly different
and, in many ways, more satisfying. John Cleese, in his wonderful address on creativity would say that I am allowing myself to ‘play’ more. To root around for the
right answer rather than the noticeable one. To give a contemporary example, I
would point to Suzanne Collins who wrote the Hunger Games. Though I didn’t like
the way the series ended, I knew it was the right
ending. It’s an invaluable skill to have and one I would never have thought
I needed before I embarked on this project. I’ve always been a ‘this idea WILL
work’ kind of girl. Now I have a story that involves shrinking aliens in water;
four statues and a Post Office façade of a unicorn, coming to life and battling
a spaceship; and a choir of rather dirty angels bringing down God’s wrath on
alien invaders. Adelaide has never seen so much drama.
My recent novel a comedy set in Facebook, The Grand Adventures of Madeline Cain, is available at http://emilycraven.bkclb.co/the-grand-adventures-of-madeline-cain. You can also purchase E-Book Revolution: The Ultimate Guide to E-Book Success at
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