The struc­ture and nature of short sto­ries haven’t really changed in the dig­i­tal age, as far as I can tell.  They’re still told the same way mostly, same per­spec­tives, in roughly the same amount of time ( around 3–7000 words).  E-zines are for the most part  straight for­ward adap­ta­tions of the print mag­a­zine for­mat, to vary­ing degrees.  PDF mag­a­zines are iden­ti­cal to print mag­a­zines, except they’re read on a screen instead of on paper, or even printed off by some. E-zines like Strange Horizons make use of basic hyper­text fea­tures, but the sto­ries them­selves do not take advan­tage of of any of those fea­tures except in rare occasions.

Flash fic­tion, or sto­ries under 500 words, has seen a boom online, with elec­tronic mag­a­zines such as Brain Harvest spe­cial­iz­ing in them exclu­sively.   Personally, I don’t find such short sto­ries very sat­is­fy­ing very often, despite my involve­ment with the Daily Cabal, (which you should check out if you do like flash fic­tion).  I don’t think I’ve ever writ­ten a really suc­cess­ful flash fic­tion story.   I would argue that flash fic­tion is even less pop­u­lar than reg­u­lar short fic­tion, which is pretty unpop­u­lar in the first place.

You might think that the inter­net would lend itself to shorter sto­ries, on the assump­tion that the inter­net has short­ened our atten­tion spans.  I don’t really believe that. I think we have mostly the same atten­tion spans we did before the web began to dom­i­nate our enter­tain­ment time, but we’re a lot bet­ter about eval­u­at­ing con­tent quickly to deter­mine if it’s worth our atten­tion.  Scanning is the new read­ing of the 21st Century.

Early on in the web days, there was a lot more exper­i­men­ta­tion with the idea of hyper­text fic­tion, which in my expe­ri­ence is basi­cally a glo­ri­fied “Choose Your Own Adventure” (CYOA) made with links rather than “turn to page X” instruc­tions.   I’d argue that for “choose your own adven­ture” sto­ries, the web is a bet­ter for­mat than print, but– choose your own adven­ture sto­ries were just a rel­a­tively crude form of inter­ac­tive sto­ry­telling, and video games are a more evolved form of the same thing.  CYOA  books are not printed in nearly the same quan­ti­ties as they were when I was a kid in the 80s.  I don’t think it’s a coin­ci­dence that the rise of video games has cor­re­sponded with the fall of CYOA books. Wikipedia’s arti­cle on CYOA ref­er­ences a com­pany called Chooseco that pur­chased the rights to the orig­i­nal CYOA books, but when I tried to visit the site for said com­pany, all I found was a GoDaddy redi­rect. I think it’s fairly safe to say that the Choose Your Own Adventure for­mat is effec­tively played out.

Stories told in an e-mail-like for­mat are really no dif­fer­ent from the epis­to­lary for­mat, which has been around since the let­ter itself.   Wikipedia puts the first epis­to­lary novel appear­ing in 1485 or so.   Over 500 years old.  So the e-mail for­mat noth­ing much new, just a slightly dif­fer­ent take.  The lan­guage might be a bit dif­fer­ent, but that same back-and-forth exists, gen­er­ally writ­ten in alter­nat­ing or single-thread first per­son present or past-tense.

Some have exper­i­mented with Twitter and its 140 char­ac­ter limit.  “Twitter zines” like Thaumatrope pub­lish these sto­ries reg­u­larly.  I wrote a seri­al­ized story in the twit­ter for­mat, using the nature of Twitter itself as an aspect of the story, called #future­jer, to what I think was prob­a­bly vary­ing degrees of suc­cess.  Ultimately was the form of story changed by this?  Not very much, I sus­pect.  It’s just an extremely seri­al­ized tale, probably.

I sus­pect that the ideal for­mat for telling sto­ries online may be the online comic strip.  It is:

• eas­ily scannable, gen­er­ally read very quickly
• seri­al­ized in bite-sized chunks
• visual-rich mul­ti­me­dia, using images to con­vey ideas faster than words alone can.

Except in maybe a few rare instances, how­ever, it doesn’t take advan­tage of the hyper­tex­tual nature of the web to tell sto­ries, how­ever, so per­haps there has really yet to be a story told that truly uti­lizes all the strengths of a web format.

I played around with writ­ing comedic comic strips in col­lege, and while my strips gen­er­ally weren’t great, I learned a lot about rhythm and comedic tim­ing, espe­cially in the 3 panel for­mat.  (I also learned that rarely do two peo­ple have the same sense of humor. )  But the comic for­mat as it’s used today mostly gives words over to pic­tures entirely.  Dialogue, maybe some very basic expo­si­tion text, but oth­er­wise, the story rests in the artwork.

What about alter­nate real­ity games (ARGs)?  Are they a new form of sto­ry­telling?  Or are they sim­ply more inter­ac­tive fic­tion or gam­ing, rather than sto­ries?  As much as I have read about them, I have yet to be fully engrossed in one as it played out, so I can’t really describe the expe­ri­ence.  Have any of you?  Where do you think they fit into things?

In a sense, my Dr. Roundbottom project (cur­rently shame­fully fal­low)  is a bit of an ARG, lean­ing more towards an illus­trated sto­ry­telling style.  Where it dif­fers in an inter­est­ing way is that it’s open to audi­ence involve­ment.  I encour­age the read­ers to adopt char­ac­ters and per­sonas, to com­mu­ni­cate with the char­ac­ters of the story via the web­site, and the story changes and adapts to their sug­ges­tions, incor­po­rat­ing them into the more tra­di­tional nar­ra­tive aspects.

I don’t know what the ideal for­mat in which to tell a story online is, and this post hasn’t got­ten me any closer, but Iam nearly cer­tain that it’s not the same for­mat as the print short story.  We read the web dif­fer­ently than we read mag­a­zines or text on paper.  Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing, I leave as an exer­cise for the reader.  But there are def­i­nite dif­fer­ences, and I think we should be con­sid­er­ing, as writ­ers, how to bet­ter uti­lize the for­mat to share our tales.

Then again, maybe sto­ries have been honed into the for­mat that they are in because it’s the most “fit” for­mat.  Natural selec­tion has dis­carded every­thing else and left us with the ideal spec­i­men?  What do you think?  Have I left out any attempts to use the web to tell sto­ries dif­fer­ently?  I’d love to hear about them.

Tagged as: ezines, story, structure, twitter, web