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#onid17 Participatory Storytelling on Twitter
Crowd-sourced fiction appropriated and retold or an hybridized literary criticism.
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Read selected Tweets from the #onid17 participatory story
Captures the Tweets that are about the character Kes. -
It was Kes’s story that I wanted to hear and develop. Re was well started, and our cohort propelled her along organically. It was an effort to bring Kes along and keep the characters engaged. I am less certain as to why that is? One possibility is that we as writers did not engage in any back-channel, or meta-dialog. We had both the Google+ and a second hashtag where we could have communicated about the story and collaborated on any and all of the elements of fiction writing.
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Above I show such a conversation that Skip and I had at the very beginning of the story. We discuss, gender, character development versus plot in this anarchic storytelling venue.
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On the one hand, I disliked the heavy-handedness of this following Tweet. Nonetheless, I wanted to continue the emphasis on Kes. I also wanted to play with the circular or at least non-linear quality of time that seemed to be developing in the story. It was additionally an attempt to wrestle with my previous comment about character over plot.
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Deus ex machina in classical theatre: Euripides’ Medea, performed in 2009 in Syracuse, Italy
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I also wondered if such a device might subtly signal to the cohort the value of bringing characters along together throughout the story.
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The story thread that arose however anticipated the eventual shape-shifting device that developed later Skip referred to it as “morphing” in our synchronous class session.
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It is interesting to me that the posts that followed Skip’s initial post of Re’s version of that Tweet were relatively figurative. Whereas the Tweets following my recycling of it were quite literal and embodied, something I noticed but probably could not articulate at the time.
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Notice the dates of these two posts about Kes, five days elapsed while this character languished.
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I was happier with this Tweet. I felt like I was able to develop character, set a scene, and advance the plot, all at once. We knew that Re was exploring the house. And this Tweet ensured that the two characters would reconnect there as well. Skip, introduced the mise en abyme very early on with Re’s mention of the “documents.” My mention of Re’s use of a tablet as well plays on this device. As a cohort, we flirted with this throughout the story, but we did not pull those threads together very tightly. Again, probably this is because we did not enter into any meta-dialog, at least that I could find.
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Story within a story – WikipediaA story within a story is a literary device in which one character within a narrative narrates.[1] Mise en abyme is the French term for a similar literary device (also referring to the practice in heraldry of placing the image of a small shield on a larger shield). -
Again, notice the seven days elapsed without mention of Kes. Keeping this character in the story had become a personal agenda. This Tweet was less satisfying since effectively it only repeated the work of the previous one though with the most emphasis on setting and plot.
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Happily, Valarie propelled Kes along by adding the following Tweet. She also connected the two most important characters and the new third, very vague childlike character; all were within sight of each other at last.
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Text within a text, again I was just riffing on a theme that I thought might have importance and might develop.
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I would have been content with temporal shifting alone, but it was clear that we were also talking about the morphing of embodiments as well. I wondered if it was more Matrix-like or more shape-shifting like lycanthropy. I was not very excited by that twist.
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data processing, computer, technology, laser, plastic surgery, cosmetic surgery, skin treatment, innovation, invention, ,blue background, computer screen, laser beam, laser, light, ray, blue, portrait, scan, virtual screen, virtual reality, floating screen, data, future, futuristic, wireless, light, ideas, security, hacker, programmer, internet, cyberspace, cyber, techie, connection, scanning, information, information highway, light beam, modern, control panel, data gathering, innovation, creative, concept, creative concepts, intelligence, -
I think both the Science Fiction and the Horror genres give us great traditions of shapeshifting, so it is not the device I am opposed to. Rather, I struggled with it because it felt like one thing too many for us to sustain. Again if we had a meta-conversation about our project, we could have done more. And I want to be clear that while I am repeating this point, it is something I could have affected and did not. So, I bear the blame and do not aim to point fingers.
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There was a definite tension between the need to propel the story forward and the usefulness of crafting backstory. We introduced devices particularly the various texts as tools we could have used both to develop the temporal discontinuities and the shapeshifting. Speaking for myself I struggled with this tension and most of my contributions to the story are aimed at propelling characters and plot elements forward. Even as I longed to do more with our texts, backstory and mise en abyme. We could as well have violated the boundaries of the 140 character tweet by embedding an image, documents, yellowed snapshots, really anything we could imagine. We stuck to the letter of the law and that is not a bad thing just an interesting one.
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Another spontaneous technique that arose was the open ending and beginning post which facilitated other contributors engaging in a kind of baton pass. I think it was a good tactic and yet I wanted to post my own complete elements so a minor tension for me.
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One task of literary criticism is to identify what does not work in a piece of writing. However, criticism can as well celebrate what is accomplished. I think a fascinating social experiment developed out of this stripped down creative environment. For a bunch of folks just winging it, we came up with a surprisingly coherent story. Many elements of the story were at least interesting if not downright good.
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In hindsight, I wish I had been less skeptical and more participative. I felt some dread and ambivalence over the assignment. I wonder if we had linked to other classes stories and saw their success it that would have helped? I suspect this was not encouraged in order to avoid tainting our own little social experiment. I suspect that were this same cohort to engage in a similar storytelling again we would tell a significantly better story because of what we learned, but I suspect that the process would be less fascinating. And that, in turn, leads me to wonder about this as a pedagogic element. We have both process and content to analyze and as we saw in the synchronous class we did have a lot of group comment and debrief in this rich vein. Obviously, this assignment could be recycled in higher education, and perhaps high school. I suspect a very different coaching and pre-posting editing practice would need to be developed to use it in middle school, though if the teacher had the time and the passion it might be very productive for young people that age.
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Turning to this retelling/critical reading of the story I think this too was fascinating. Because it returned ownership of authorship to me. But that is a conceit and fiction itself because I can only claim a tenth or so of the story. And, this sets us up to remember that Roland Barth’s essay “Death of the Author?” is profoundly relevant in this environment of digital storytelling, fan fiction, mashups, re-appropriation (as here) as well the original Tweet thread. The story is produced by our reading.
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When I introduced Kes to the story, I did so to create another character and suggest some sort of backstory, a history between Re and Kes. Interestingly, I would have made Kes female, but subsequent contributions showed that Kes was male. That created a very different story context for me.
I also thought that adding a potential plot point of there being some documents that pertained to the relationship between Re and Kes would take us down another road, and eventually it did if you consider the diary as being part (or all) of those documents.
From the outset of the story, there was a sense of some supernatural or paranormal potential (“…in an ever forward relentless march toward the end of time known to us.”) that eventually materialized when Re entered the cottage. That would have been an interesting line to follow as well.
In reading the story all the way through, I’m struck by a couple of things:
1. It’s actually pretty compelling. There are some plot points that get neglected here and there, but overall it holds together and does a nice job of melding two story strands into one.
2. I want to know how it ends. It never ceases to amaze me that an artifact created in this manner can hold so much meaning. It speaks to our innate desire to interact with stories, I think.
I fumbled around and in the end just focused on propelling the story and the character of Kes forward. I so very much wanted to get into the backstory and to play around with the document theme. I also suffered a weird ambivalence about the story because the rules kept it so anarchic I was hugely skeptical about it and only in hindsight have a sense of what we accomplished.
I though ending your story on the Red Queen quote was clever and great, so I did not mind that there was no definite “flat” ending as this quote brings to mind casual-loop paradox 🙂 and maybe serves as a commentary on a way the stories get constructed in the digital realm with definite causality but where the origin of the story really is hard to determine 🙂 I am not sure it was intentional. One thing that did not work too well for me is the inclusion of images. I am not sure why though… they were in right places and I got the meaning. Maybe added too much of a literal where I wanted the story to stay open for my own visual interpretation? Well done though.
Tatiana, thanks for the feedback. I have criticized movies, in the same way, saying “It wasn’t how I imagined it at all.” And, in the online environment and a crowdsourced story where the roles of author and reader are polymorphic and shifting I am just not certain what that criticism means? Reading/writing becomes both more tentative and more assertive. Scenarios standing adjacently and provisionally but none ever able to establish authority.
I enjoyed your honest commentary and analysis on the participatory story. I felt like somebody had to process all of this — I certainly didn’t want to =) — and I’m glad it was you. I decided to put an ending on the story, which to me was enjoyable because I like to write. What you did seemed to take more brain power.
Did we really go seven days without mentioning Kes? Yikes. I like how you declared it your “personal agenda” to keep his character alive. That made me laugh. I’m glad I wasn’t the only one who really got into this assignment.
Your commentary and analysis made me wonder … What if Skip gave the same starting line to another cohort? I would love to see how that story unfolds compared to ours. When you wrote the line, “He needed to collect more evidence at the house,” I’m curious to know where you wanted the story to go from there. Also, you mentioned that we did not enter into any meta-dialog. What does that mean?
Kevin, I meant by “meta-dialog” a conversation about the story outside and parallel to the story where we could strategize and debate about it. And to answer your other question I only wanted to make sure that Kes and Re intersected again. The mechanics of Skip’s rules prevented us from controlling the story, and so I didn’t over anticipate.
You make a good point about us not using any backchannel communication to tell the story. I’ve done team writing projects before, and one of the key things you do is communicate- you communicate the goals before you get started, you talk extensively throughout the process about where the writing project is going and who is doing what, etc. If we were collaborating on writing this story, it would’ve made sense to do more communicating about the story, outside of just writing it and “winging it.” Same goes for your comment on how we stuck to the letter of the law- if we’d leveraged the use of images or links or other things, we could’ve expanded the scope of what we were able to cover in 140 characters. I wonder if the fact that it was such a public forum for storytelling made people feel a little more hesitant to get too crazy.
I like the structure of your post- it was like you used Storify and Twitter sources to weave in a literary critique of the story itself.
I was incredibly frustrated by the lack of development for Kes…particularly the short turn he got in the coffee shop and we were back to Re. When character development is done well, they feel like old friends you’re coming home to each time you see them in a book. Further, I believe there is a reason that authors with staying power are typically those who know their characters. Stories and plot are driven by the interaction of characters and the moments between them (and the created world that create joy, suspense, etc.). While I chose to create a journal for Re, Kes very much plays a part of it. From the few tweets we got if him, he appeared to be a character with strong, quiet strength and I wrote him as such, but from her perspective.
To your comment about plot being collaboratively and spobtaneously developed…the struggle is real. I think this experience (and many of our reactions) bears out that you can have one, but not the other. From my readings, many of the best collective projects either have a main driving story and supplemental collaboration provides the collaborative piece (but is still bound by the original author’s created world or am author who edits and selects submissions for cohesion. As to spontaneity, the plot may develop as such, but I’d posit the author knows their characters well enough to make it work.