Good luck!

On my other website, breathlessnoon.com, I’ve been posting a series of vignettes from childhood. They could be read as part of a single narrative or each a stand-alone piece (that’s one of the beauties of memoir). They’re fairly short stories, but they’re complete. They might be too short for print…but who cares? We’re not talking about print. And, what’s more–who determines what’s good for print? Well, publishers (And having published an honest-to-god book with a real publisher, I can say with certainty they don’t always have the writer or the material’s best interest at heart. They bow to the dollar.) Once you take those guys out of the equation, you’re left with very different “requirements” for print writing, too.

Nobody knows what they want to read until they read it. And it’s people like you who should be deciding what you’re going to present. Not publishers. Not your medium. You decide. If it works, excellent. If not, you refine. But I don’t like the idea of deciding how something must or should be before we even try other ways. I don’t want writers to stop experimenting before we’ve figured out how the web really works.

One of the factors that made me uncomfortable with my support of short storytelling was the scope of each post. It would be perfect onscreen, but when you bring it off and onto the page it’ll start to look … chopped up. Jilted. A cliffhanger every few pages.

Because we do change our writing for the web. And the more it’s suited for the Internet, the less it is suited for the traditional dead tree book.

Just a random thought: there can be a balance, I suppose – 13 bullets does this pretty well, and being on the web doesn’t change his writing drastically (it works both onscreen and off). But if I were to write … I’ll probably make it short … and then not publish it in book form.

Thanks for the note letting me to come over and read. I appreciate what you’ve said here, and its good to be involved in some active discussion.

Couple things:

In the first draft of the ALA piece, I talked about the relationship between the writing and the design, and how designers and writers have to work together to create something people can and will read. If the content is wonderful but the font too small, the line lengths to long, the contrast to mild etc, people still won’t read, even if you write something magnificent. But including that shifted the focus away from my main topic too much, so the ALA editor advised me to save that for another paper (which I did.)

But you’re absolutely right: the design has to make the writer’s job easier, no question. There’s a reason books come in standard sizes. The standardization is both economical and practical: certain sizes are easier for our hands to hold. The same kinds of things are true on the web as well.

@Scott: I’m not really sure what terminology I want to use to express this succinctly, so the longer-winded approach will have to do ;) Most writing on the web is done all in one go–you have articles, essays, reports, etc. delivered to a reader all at once rather than serially. What so many web writers have done, then, is to try and make their point, or tell their story, all in one quick breath without stopping to entertain my ear or my heart. What I want to see is these people, who are only making a single point, take the time to really develop their theories and deliver something beautiful to me–all at once.

Storytelling is a different beast, because you’re breaking up a longer piece into small chunks at a time, and I don’t think that approach is wrong. It doesn’t change the *way* you write, it just changes how much you give me at once. But when people say “give me chunks and bullets” that changes writing as a discipline, and that’s what worries me.

There’s a difference, then, between “summary writing” and “serial brevity”. The latter I get; the former is what I want to reconsider.

Am I making sense?

It’s apparently a challenge to recreate the feeling a book creates – that textile wonder of flipping a page and smelling that 5 year old tea stain …

So she does it through design. Through symbols and visual cues that mean something to the user.

The book may actually be a good idea – if only it wasn’t flash. Flash has … semantic problems, so I’m told. But it being in book form is surely something readers can identify with?

Though I probably think those people who do read online are used to other form of presentation (thinks NYT and news websites) – no longer book form.

And, well. The web evolved beyond hypertext, didn’t it? It got better; and it got worse. I wonder how it’ll shape up to be in the next decade or so.

@Scott: That’s another argument for brevity right there. But after reading an ebook last Sunday (and being rooted to my seat, at that) … I must say I’m no longer as opposed (as I was before) to reading long-form onscreen.

Granted, the story was gripping. And it wasn’t an online medium.

But it still had me reading! All 600 pages of it! On an LCD monitor!

Mindboggling.

We need to promote the idea of reading online fiction in short bursts, e.g. checking email, work breaks. Brevity allows someone to dip into a story and get away quickly and get back to their life, but hopefully leaves them feeling suitably entertained to want to return for the next chapter.

Rather than animation of pages to simulate a book, I think a blog allows a more personal approach to publishing. Opinions and info about the author can be added in off-topic posts, offering the novel equivalent of DVD extras without having to worry about the price per page of the printed version. This is the approach I intend to take for the publication of my next novel.

I still feel that there’s some dumbing down going on with the net now. It used to be – before Stephen King tried to make his pretty pennies with failed experiments – that the future of the net was in hypertext. Now, it seems, people are happy for poorly written texts with no concessions to the formatting bonuses of the internet to succeed if they can make people read on a screen (I did mention a blooker winner here, and then took the name out – I don’t want to start any flame wars yet. Regardless, if you’ve looked at them you probably know which poorly written and ill-formatted novel I speak of). Shame.