Interactive Writing Experiments
David Artsmith - Writing can be a lonely task. Whether you are a professional or an amateur, writing generally requires you to sit alone in a room, living halfway inside your head, and halfway on the paper before you. You don’t have any feedback, and inspiration, anything at all except what is inside of your head, and in the environment around you. You can of course have a friend look at your work when your done, but that is more of a review, and doesnt bring them into the real time creative process. Being creative is often an isolated process.
However new web 2.0 technologies are giving writers new tools to help expand their creativity and improve their craft, through interactive writing projects. Interactive fiction is not a terribly new concept. Aside from authors collaborating on books, the idea of interactive stories has been around for a long time. Originally they were stories written in tandem, with first one person adding a paragraph, then another expanding with a second paragraph, and so on.
These were sometimes open to social communities, but the more open they were, the more prone they were to spam and poor writing. Eventually most of these limited active threads to a few members, or a moderated community.
New technologies however are allowing writers to expand these ideas exponentially. With places like twitter, facebook, rolepages, and others, you can now take on character roles and write stories across a variety of media, including several written forms of communication. This can involve forums, chat rooms, profiles, walls, and bulletins, as well as videos, podcasts and pictures.
The general term for this sort of writing is role-play; a word which derives to some extent from the old dungeons and dragons board games that were popular in the eighties. However rather than a self indulgent chance to act out fantasy stories with your friends, this new style of roleplay is actually a form of fiction, which allows writers to finally break out of their own heads, and collaborate with others in a meaningful, and multi dimensional manner.
This can lead to vast improvements in a person's writing skills. When interacting with others, you can get feedback, as well as fresh ideas, from a whole community of like minded fellow writers. It is even an opportunity to bounce ideas off of one another in a safe place.
As technology increases, and people's ability to use it increases, we will see more and more leaps forward in the way people communicate. This may lead to an improvement in the general writing population, or it may give rise to an entirely new form of fiction altogether. It’s hard to say what the future holds.
