Nick Earls: The big impediment for the novella in the 20th century was that stories were delivered on paper. But this century we've seen a couple of very significant developments, one being the rise of the e-book. And with the e-book, size can be whatever it needs to be.
Naomi Alderman: There are things you can do in games and in interactive storytelling that get at some truths about life in a way that no other medium really gets at them. It's the medium of the age, it's coming-of-age right now, it's an incredibly exciting time.
Mike Jones: There's a lot to be said about virtual reality as being a kind of final medium, that to be in the story, to be immersed in it is either the most impure or pure form of storytelling you can imagine, depending on your point of view.
Antony Funnell: Three different authors and three different perspectives on the future of storytelling. That's Future Tense today, hello Antony Funnell here, welcome as always.
A few weeks ago, a very good friend of mine, a writer herself, sent me the link to some audio, a wonderful short story by the British writer Ian McEwan. The story is called My Purple Scented Novel.
Reading: You will have heard of my friend, the once celebrated novelist Jocelyn Tarbet, but I suspect his memory is beginning to fade. Time can be ruthless with reputation. The association in your mind is probably with a half-forgotten scandal and disgrace…
Antony Funnell: It's a terrific little story, extremely well written, and McEwan's narration brings it to life. It also happens to be just 28 minutes and six seconds long: perfect, one might think, in the age of podcasting.
Well, our first guest today approaches the issue of future storytelling with time foremost in his thinking. He's Brisbane-based novelist Nick Earls, and Nick sees enormous future potential not necessarily in the short story, but in something just a little longer, the novella, which he asserts may well turn out to be the writing form of our current age.
Nick Earls: Well, I think two things have come together to make that the case. One is the technology is there. So the big impediment for the novella in the 20th century was that stories were delivered on paper, and to make a novella, to bind it up as a book costs almost as much as it does to make a novel, so therefore the novella looks like it's not at a competitive price point. And there's a perception in the industry that that scares people off. Of course that's not how we value books. We value books based on what they do to us, based on what the reading experience is like. So no one who has read Breakfast at Tiffany's, Heart of Darkness, some of the greater novellas, has come away from that saying, 'That was excellent but I should have paid five dollars less.' But before you buy something you haven't read it, so you don't place that value on it. So that was always the industry's concerned with it, and so novellas tended to be bound up with other things.
But this century we've seen a couple of very significant developments, one being the rise of the e-book. You don't bind up an e-book, so you can make an e-book whatever length it needs to be. And we are also now seeing a big change in the last couple of years, the rise in the audiobook market. Audio used to be a box of cassette tapes, now it's a digital download, and the audio market is growing 30% to 40% a year. And with lots of people listening to podcasts, and podcasts getting longer, I think there's a real market for the novella there, for the kind of 2 to 3 hour movie length audio experience.
So the novella I think has real potential as an e-book and as an audiobook, but also as a print book that fits in your pocket and fits in a purse. And I think the other aspect of it is that perhaps it fits well with our lives now. I know that when I was on holidays at the start of the year I read a couple of complete novels on holidays, I loved that. Towards the end of the holidays I started Jonathan Franzen's Purity, and I got about 100 pages in. It's 563 pages long. I didn't finish Purity until the end of March. So it took me 10 weeks. And sometimes I'd pick it up and go, 'Who is Andreas,' because I hadn't read it for two weeks, whereas with the novella it's an evening, it's a plane flight from Brisbane to Melbourne, it's a much shorter time commitment. It takes you deeper than a short story does, the way a novel does, but it gets you to the end of the story in one intense go, and I think that's why it's got potential now. Because a lot of us, for technology and other reasons, don't have much time.
Antony Funnell: And the stats show, don't they, that people are reading less, they are reading fewer novels at least.
Nick Earls: That's right. In Australia there is a Nielsen survey that showed in a 10-year period to 2014, and all they checked were people who were reading at least I think a book every three months, so that's four a year, and it had fallen from just under 55% to 50%, which doesn't sound like a huge number in percentage terms but that's a million people. And it's also a trend, because that was underway already. So some people are reading less, a lot of people are reading less, and some people aren't reading when they used to read.
Antony Funnell: The novella fitting the times, fitting our technology, fitting the amount of time we have in our day to sit down and read, that all makes sense to me. But you are a bit ahead of the curve on this, because certainly the industry isn't wholesale going in that direction at the moment.
Nick Earls: It's not. So you'll typically see novellas published in one of a couple of ways. One is bound up with other novellas or short stories as a collection. And my argument is that if people don't have time in their lives for a fat book, don't make an unnecessarily fat book. Show them that the novella can actually be compact and fit their lives. Sometimes you'll see novellas from well-established authors who are between novels, and there will be a one-off novella. But what I wanted to experiment with was…I had five stories I really wanted to write. They needed to be novella length, so I wanted to commit myself to that and to show people that here is a novella series, we release them at monthly intervals, we release them on paper as e-books, as audiobooks simultaneously and do it in this different way. It's a model that hasn't been tried before, and also with the audiobooks it was a chance to find five different narrators that fitted with the tone of the books. And so the first one is done by Rhys Muldoon, the second by Gyton Grantley. We got to kind of come up with a TV cast for these novellas. I wanted to push it that far and try something different.
Antony Funnell: And just to be clear, because there will be some purists out there, no offence to the purists, who say this sounds awful, potentially what you are signalling is the end of long form reading. You're not talking about that, are you, you still think there will be a place for longer form reading, but you do feel as though we are on the cusp of something different, a different sort of choice for people.
Nick Earls: That's right, and I definitely think there is a space for longer form reading. We have actually I think never had more fat books coming out than we are having at the moment. I think reading will not go away. Reading is neurologically not the same experience as watching a screen or listening to something. With reading, whether you are reading from a screen or from the page, the words go in and the reader then interacts with them to create the pictures and the sounds. It's a neurologically active experience, I think we value that and it won't go away.
And I also think there's a real place for the deep, long read that a novel gives, but I think there is also a place for a deep shorter read, and that's what we haven't had so much of so far. And I think through having done the work I've done on the Wisdom Tree novellas I've learned quite a bit about novella writing, how the novella can be its own thing. So whereas with a short story you might read that in 20 minutes, maybe even less, it's essentially one idea and one pass through that idea, even if it's a pass from an interesting angle. A novel takes a number of plotlines. There are a range of developments. There needs to be some resolution of all of those towards the end, whereas with a novella it can be a chance to take a couple of things and put them together, not one, not four or five but a couple of things and put them together in a way that allows each to shine light on the other, a way that embraces detail rather than avoiding it the way you do with a short story and a way that really lets the reader connect with the characters and gives them that kind of powerful reading experience. But it's not 12 hours of reading that ends up being spread over weeks.
Antony Funnell: From your perspective has the nature of storytelling begun to change?
Nick Earls: I think it has in some respects. I don't think we will lose some of the things we've got at the moment. Just as I don't want people to get concerned about the fact that I'm saying that I think we might give up on novels, because I don't, I don't think we are going to lose the human connection with a well told story and with the written word. But we're seeing new ways of telling stories emerge as well. For example, there was a book that was shortlisted for the Booker prize a couple of years ago that was published as a very large print book but was also published as an e-book. It was an enhanced e-book that included video footage and it was a more complicated work. So there are extra ways in to that story. So we are seeing technology adding to stories, but I think we should only use that if it's actually going to add to the story.
Antony Funnell: It's almost like a layering of a story.
Nick Earls: Exactly, and in fact there is an app called Layar, that I will be using with a children's book later this year where as you read the book there is a little key symbol there, and if you've downloaded the Layar app for this book and you hover it over the page you get extra content.
Antony Funnell: So the nature of storytelling is changing, but you say the essence of storytelling will remain the same into the future. What do you see as the essence? What makes for a story and what will make for a story in the future?
Nick Earls: I think one thing is authenticity. It has to feel as though you are experiencing something real, whether it's fiction or non-fiction, authenticity is I think part of it. It needs to connect, a story that connects, that gets readers in, and there needs to be something at stake in the story. As a viewer or reader or participant in the story, you need to feel that you are in something real that could go in one of a number of directions, and you need to feel a compulsion to follow it to its conclusion, and that's what makes storytelling work. If it gets its hooks in you so that you need to follow it to see what happens, then that's good storytelling, and I think that compulsion is a big part of it.
Antony Funnell: That sounds like making a radio program or a podcast.
Nick Earls: Exactly, it's like a radio program, it's a podcast, it's a novel, it's a novella, it's a TV series. I think that goes, whatever the medium.
Antony Funnell: Nick Earls, it's been terrific talking to you, thank you very much for talking to us on Future Tense.
Nick Earls: Thanks very much Antony, it's been a pleasure.
[AUDIO: Grand Theft Auto]
Antony Funnell: What we're listening to is the set-up dialogue for the video game Grand Theft Auto, one of its many versions. Don't ask me which one.
We don't tend to think of video games as being examples of great storytelling. But our next guest, award-winning British novelist Naomi Alderman, believes they're way underestimated. Well, not so much Grand Theft Auto, she's not particularly fond of that one actually, but games in general. In fact, the other side of her writing persona is as a very successful game developer and script-writer, think Zombies, Run!.
Naomi Alderman: Every new medium, when it's invented people feel a bit suspicious of it, they don't think it's real. The same sort of worries existed about cinema in the 1920s, that, oh, you're going into this dark cavernous space with these strangers, it seems a bit sexy and a bit weird, that's not a real storytelling is it, real storytelling takes place in a theatre, on a stage.
And yet, as creative people explore the medium, as they work out what they can do, you suddenly find, oh, there are things you can you with film that you can't do with any other medium. And the same, to me, is true with games. There are things you can do in games and in interactive storytelling that get at some truths about life in a way that no other medium really gets at them. So one of the things that games do so well is to be able to talk about what it is to make a choice. We all have that feeling I think about our lives, very often that actually there was some moment where we had a choice, maybe a big choice but maybe quite a small choice, that looking back we can see that having taken a different path could really have affected our lives.
I think as a novelist when I'm creating a plot for a novel I often have that thought, that there is a possibility space that my characters exist in, that their lives could go in all sorts of different directions, that there could be different things I could do. And I think maybe we have that sense about all human life, that we all live in this kind of possibility space; could have done something different, could have made a little change. And what an interactive medium can do is to really map that out, to go how far can this character go, who else could this character have been?
I would agree that not all video games are using that in a literary way. That's absolutely fine. A lot of games are just really good fun, you know, shooting things, tracking things down, exploring, whatever. But I do think there are really interesting games emerging now which are deliberately trying to map out that space of human life, to talk about what that element of choice in our lives really means. Really they are the best medium for talking about free will.
So I'm thinking about games like Kentucky Route Zero, which came out a couple of years ago which I would just encourage anyone who thinks that games can't be literary to play Kentucky Route Zero. It's a game in which you don't really choose what the characters do but you can choose what they are thinking about whilst they are doing it. It's a very strange, surreal, fascinating story. It's a journey through the subconscious of America really.
I would also encourage people to have a look at games like Gone Home, which is very much a storytelling game. That's much more linear. There is one story in there, but on the other hand you uncover it in lots of different ways. So you have that feeling of, oh yes, I'm here, I'm finding out what's happening. So in Gone Home you play a teenage girl who has come home from a year abroad, her parents have moved house in the meantime, and when she arrives at the house expecting to be greeted by her family at this new house, she finds that the new house is completely empty and so she has to work out what has happened there and where her family have gone. It comes out quite differently than you are expecting at the start. It's a game that really plays with your expectations, which is something that I really loved about it.
Antony Funnell: Now, picking up on the interactive nature of videogames, the fact that there is a player involved as well, what does that mean for the story making process, from your perspective, from a writer's perspective?
Naomi Alderman: It's very interesting, you have to leave room as a games writer for the player. You have to leave room for the player to be your partner in telling that story. You give them tools, you give them opportunities to take part in the storytelling, and you have to never let the player feel that the character is doing something that they as a player would never do, could never do, or it feels so distant from them that they can't place themselves into that character.
However, I don't know, that's not a hard and fast rule. Sometimes you want to play with that and suddenly reveal to the player that the character that they are playing is a little bit darker or different than they thought they were. So that's quite an interesting tension actually. In the game that I write, Zombies, Run!, the player character never speaks. So you are Runner Five, you are running away from these on the zombie horde, you are collecting supplies for your village. You are also hearing about the stories of other people who are around you. For me, the critical thing in writing Runner Five is that what Runner Five does must always be reasonable. So I never want that gap to open up between the player and the character where the player is going, oh, no, you're telling me that I'm doing this thing, but I don't really feel like that's me.
Now, having said all that about leaving a gap, I think that novels also need to leave a gap for the reader. There are novels which try to tell you too much. It's really kind of aggravating when a novel tries to tell you what you should be making of this novel or what the message is. It feels a bit childish. And actually I think the best art leaves a gap for the viewer, the watcher, the audience, to take their own meaning from it.
Antony Funnell: So there are differences, obviously, in the way in which you would write for both media, but there are similarities, as you say, in good writing across them.
Naomi Alderman: So me there are absolutely similarities between all kinds of good writing. So, what is good writing? Well, you have characters who are believable. That's a very deep question, how you make a character believable. Fundamentally there's something about understanding that each of those characters is real inside themselves, they have an internality, so a real feeling character. You can think about them and you go, oh yes, I see, they have things that they want for themselves, not just to help the hero. They have things that they fear for themselves, they have secrets they are keeping for themselves. Those are very complex questions. And you have to do that as much in a game as in a movie or in a book if you want those characters to feel real.
Then there's world building. Does the world feel coherent, does it feel real in that same way, does it feel like somewhere that you want to explore, is it showing you new things, is it showing you things that feel in some sense familiar as humans, as a kind of world that we can imagine humans living in? World building is the same from all different kinds of writing. Theme, when you talk about, well, what is this story really about? On some deep level is it about justice, is it about the nature of revenge, is it about the nature of freedom and how much we would swap for freedom? All those things take place in all different kinds of media. It's not like games suddenly exist outside humanity in these common interests in what makes a good story.
Antony Funnell: And we shouldn't forget, should we, that games as a form of storytelling are enormously popular.
Naomi Alderman: Well, games are the largest entertainment medium in the world now. They blew past movies in about 2012. Games are still growing by about 20% a year, which is a gross figure that would make any other entertainment industry weep copiously if they were able to achieve that. By contrast, movies are growing by about 1% to 2% a year, the music industry is shrinking by about 1% to 2% a year. So yes, games are just growing so rapidly and taking such a market share that of course now there is room for all sorts of interesting experiments to be going on, which is what is so very exciting to me.
I'm not going to defend Call of Duty as the best storytelling experience out there. It's fun, but I'm not going to defend it as the best storytelling experience out there. But because the market is becoming so mature and so enormous, it means that there is room for all sorts of different wonderful things to be going on in there. And I think if you're not culturally educated about what's going on in storytelling and games, then you are not really educated about story at all. I think it is as important to know what's going on in games as it is to know what's going on with museums or to be familiar with opera. It's the medium of the age, it's coming-of-age right now, it's an incredibly exciting time.
Antony Funnell: Naomi Alderman, speaking to me there from London.
This is Future Tense, and the future of storytelling, some of the ways in which it's changing, that's our theme today.
Our third and final perspective comes from a Sydney-based writer we've spoken to many times on this program, Mike Jones. Mike is a writer and creative producer and lecturer at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School. His latest project is called VR Noir and it premiered recently at the Vivid Festival in Sydney
[AUDIO: VR Noir]
Well, that's the opener for VR Noir and despite the fact that it will soon be touring film festivals in Australia and North America, it's not actually a film in the traditional sense. It's a virtual reality experience, hence the letters in its title.
So why is an experienced storyteller like Mike interested in virtual reality?
Mike Jones: I think as a writer, because I've been reasonably flexible in working across a number of mediums, there is something that's very appealing about virtual reality. When you've written books or worked in screen media and in television and film and online and interactive, there is a lot to be said about virtual reality as being a kind of final medium, that to be in the story, to be immersed in it is either the most impure or pure form of storytelling you can imagine, depending on your point of view. So I'm certainly very attracted to virtual reality as a way to put an audience into a story, and then experience it in a way that is utterly unique.
Antony Funnell: And why choose a crime story for this VR experiment? Was that a deliberate choice?
Mike Jones: My producers and I were conscious that virtual reality is a very new medium, it's something not a lot of people have had a lot of experience with. So the grammar of that medium, the way you engage with it as a form is still unknown. So we are very conscious of wanting to give them a story that was in a genre that was the opposite of that, that was very familiar, a noir detective thriller that really honoured the traditions and the conventions of that genre. So it was trying to give the audience something very familiar whilst putting them into a position of something that was very foreign.
The other thing you get from a storytelling form like noir is it has such a clear role for the audience to play. In any noir story this detective has a palpable, active agency to solve a crime or get to the bottom of a great mystery. And that's an empowering position to put the audience in, that they too are now compelled to get the bottom of the mystery.
Antony Funnell: And VR Noir, it was created using 360 cameras, wasn't it, so you really are there, immersed in the experience itself. So as a storyteller you've got to incorporate that spatial experience into your storytelling, haven't you.
Mike Jones: Creating a story in virtual reality is in many ways drawing upon long traditions of storytelling, you still have cause and effect and escalation and dramatic questions for the audience. But because the position of the audience is not outside looking in but inside experiencing in a very immediate, present way, you have to think spatially about the story. I had this experience as I was halfway through writing the script where I realised I simply couldn't keep writing it the way I was, which was quite a traditional screenplay layout, and I had to draw it, I had to draw a map of the space, I had to draw maps of the room in order to understand how the audience was in that story and how I could compel them to look, motivate them to search, and drive the dynamics of the story spatially, dynamically, something much more akin to architecture potentially than traditional cinematic storytelling.
And we certainly can't ignore four decades of fantastically complex interactive narrative and video gaming. So virtual reality doesn't come out of nowhere and it doesn't just come out of cinema, it comes out of a long tradition of the audience being present in a story or engaged with a story more actively. And particularly you look at some of the contemporary forms of theatre performance, of spatial theatre, of the work of, say, Punchdrunk in New York and London where the audience walk a building to experience a play. That's not new idea, that's a long-standing tradition. There's a lot we can learn in virtual reality about how to position the audience within a story spatially and dynamically.
Antony Funnell: You mentioned video games there, and of course with video games there are issues of audience agency, and also their expectations for the level of interaction that will go on within the experience. It is also going to be the case with virtual reality, isn't it, and it gives you a real challenge as a writer, trying to incorporate, to anticipate what the audience would like.
Mike Jones: In many ways you have to do think of it like a spectrum, that at one end you can handover enormous amounts of agency to the audience. In video game terms we often call this a sandbox game or an open world game where the audience is essentially free to explore at will. And at the other end of the spectrum you can have a just as engaging and interactive experience but with very limited agency, very specific agency. And you look back on some of the classics of video gaming, games like Myst and point and click adventures where the level of control I have is very, very small, but that level of control really matters to the storytelling. So I think when we come to virtual reality we have that spectrum as well. The ability for the audience to freely look in all directions is of itself an enormous amount of agency. Even if they can't make choices or have game mechanic interactions, just the ability to look demands a level of presence and immersion and participation that's quite extraordinary.
And then when you add levels of interactivity to that…with VR Noir we have levels of exploration, you have to find certain objects, solve certain puzzles, and in certain cases pose questions and answers in a branching narrative. So we've given a little more agency to the audience. But fundamentally for a writer it's a negotiation between how much am I handing over and how can I compel the audience to take up that agency and make it matter?
I think audiences are complex in the way they consume stories, but in many ways they are looking for something very pure and very simple. I think most often we make choices about what we watch to watch or play, for that matter, based on simply how we choose to feel on an emotional expectation. We can be standing in front of the billboard at the movies on a Friday night and I turn to my partner and I say, 'Hey, what do you feel like watching?' And what I've asked is not plot they are after or what platform they like or whether they want a particular kind of mechanical experience, I have simply ask how do they choose to feel.
Particularly in a multiplatform world where our choices for consuming stories are so varied and spread thinner and thinner across multiple mediums, all offering something unique, I think in many ways audiences look for the thing that unifies them, they are looking for an emotional response. And in many ways that is the genre. A horror film will make me feel a certain way, a science fiction film or story or book or game will make me feel a certain way, a romance, a romantic comedy, a thriller, a mystery and so on.
And I think the most important thing we can do as writers working in that multiplatform world, whether that's virtual reality at one end or good old-fashioned books, plays and films at the other, is recognise those emotional expectations and work very hard as storytellers how we can both acknowledge them and satisfy them, but also challenge and subvert them as well by being consistent with those emotional feeling states the audiences are after.
I think writers are going to have to have a level of flexibility, storytellers are going to have to have a level of flexibility that is quite extraordinary and different from the past. I think the days of defining ourselves as playwrights or as television writers or novelists are becoming harder, simply because the audiences are spreading thin. For my own work, I am increasingly approached by producers and networks or studios to say we would like you to develop this idea. And if I say, well, what is it, do you want a book, do you want a movie, do you want a TV show? They say, well, we don't know, you tell us.
Antony Funnell: So, just finally, it's easy to think of VR as a very personal experience, as a niche experience in a sense, but do you envisage VR actually having mainstream appeal in the future?
Mike Jones: This is the big question with virtual reality. In many ways those of us who are working in it are sort of working in a medium that doesn't yet have an en masse audience. But that audience is rising very rapidly. The headsets, the equipment, the technology is becoming mainstream, it's becoming accessible, it's becoming very affordable. So I don't think there's any doubt from anyone in the industry sector to suggest that VR won't be a significant medium. The question is how significant, how big. Will it be as broad in its reach as television or the novel, or will it remain in niche? Even in the contemporary global world a niche audience is a big audience, is an audience of significance.
And so I think what is potentially more interesting to ask is what kinds of stories are best told in virtual reality, what audiences will be looking for when they come to a virtual reality experience. I don't think that it's any accident that the major investors in virtual reality has been social media platforms, namely Facebook who owns Oculus Rift, and Google, because they certainly see VR as a social experience as much as anything else. The applications for this medium are wide, from surgery and engineering at one end, to storytelling at the other, and very quickly we are going to see not just the single-user 'it's me in this world' experience of VR, but very quickly social VR where we can all be part of the story. We might all be able to recognise each other within a virtual space. The future is quite extraordinary. Terrifying, brilliant, exciting, but certainly extraordinary.
Antony Funnell: Well, Mike Jones, good luck on the film festival circuit, and thank you very much joining us on Future Tense.
Mike Jones: Always a pleasure, thanks very much.
Antony Funnell: VR Noir: A Day Before the Night is the name of Mike's virtual reality experience, and he tells me it will be available to the public once it's finished touring.
Our other guests today were London-based novelist and game developer Naomi Alderman, and novella-loving author Nick Earls.
Go to our website for more details and for a link to the wonderful short story I mentioned at the beginning of the program, My Purple Scented Novel, by Ian McEwan.
Thanks to co-producer Karin Zsivanovits and sound engineer Peter McMurray.
I'm Antony Funnell, cheers!
There are so many more platforms available to writers now - and so many more ways in which to tell a story.
In this episode we get perspectives from three successful novelists, each of whom is exploring the boundaries of their craft in new ways.
Nick Earls explains why he’s now interested in reviving the novella and the similarity that form of storytelling has with podcasting.
British novelist, Naomi Alderman, champions video games, describing them as the ‘medium of the age’.
And Mike Jones talks about the challenges of writing crime fiction for a Virtual Reality experience.
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