Telling Stories the Online Way

Efforts like these usually end unsatisfactorily. Japan's cell-phone novels fly off the metaphorical shelves—they made up the country's top three best sellers last year—but critics deride the short, text-message-like prose and say they should be grouped with comic books, not serious literature. And the wikinovel is nearly incomprehensible, and most of its prose atrocious. (A sample sentence: "His CD began to jump, then skip, then play hopscotch.") As Ettinghausen admits, "I think it's safe to say that we didn't produce a coherent work of fiction."

We Tell Stories is the most ambitious project yet, although it too may end with a whimper, or achieve success only as an ingenious marketing device. But it may also uncover something about the way we'll be telling stories to one another 10 or 20 years from now, especially as we dedicate more and more of our attention to electronic screens instead of printed paper. One fact that the project highlights is the increasing difficulty of compartmentalizing and segregating forms of entertainment. Six to Start, for instance, was founded to create "alternate reality games," which blend multiple forms of media, both online and off, into interactive narratives. And, in fact, We Tell Stories includes a seventh, hidden story that works more like a digital scavenger hunt than an experiment in interactive storytelling. "Publishers aren't competing against publishers anymore," says Hon. "They're competing against anyone who produces entertainment—they're competing for your time."

And what do the writers think of the attempt to update their medium? Both Cumming and Litt say they enjoyed the collaborative process of working with technologists and software engineers, a welcome break from the cloistered life of a novelist. And Litt says the hyperconcision of Twitter, which limits messages to 140 characters, helped him realize "just how little you need in terms of obvious storytelling if people buy into the characters." But neither one worries that blogs or Twitter or online maps will render paperbacks obsolete. "I can't imagine 'War and Peace' told in the style of a Google mash-up," says Cumming. Of course, to Hon and Ettinghausen, that might sound less like a statement of fact and more like a challenge.

© 2008