Part 8: Just Do It

"The winds of the Net are full of straws. Who will make the bricks?"

Bruce Sterling, writer

The urges to tell and listen to stories are primitive desires that arise in children even before they can read and write. Historically, too, storytelling surely arose with modern Homo sapiens over 100,000 years ago, easily predating the existence of writing, which is only around 5,000 years old, and long-form written stories, which have existed for no more than about 3,000 years. But the printed codex and the modern novel are younger still – about 550 and 300 years old, respectively. If the history of storytelling was a book, with each year represented by a word, then the codex and the novel wouldn't appear until the final one or two pages.

In short, there is nothing timeless about either the 100,000-word novel as a format for storytelling or the 300-page block of paper as a cultural artefact. They are both products of their times, and of various practical, technical and economic constraints. A 'book' can now be as vast as Wikipedia or as short as a 140-character tweet providing that it serves its purpose.

In fact we've known for ages that length is no signal of quality. The Fall of the House of Usher weighs in at just 7,000 words; Sailing to Byzantium a mere 230 words; and Ernest Hemingway famously won a bar-room bet by writing a story in six words: "For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn". (I've heard it said that he reckoned this his best piece of writing.)

Many of the constraints we used to face were practical, not artistic, and now they have been lifted. This has led some to suggest that the natural literary form of the web are belles lettresΦ, which seems to me to be a sufficiently imprecise statement to very probably be true.

Famously, artistic impulses thrive on constraints – an important reason why forms such as rhyming and scanning poetry feel so satisfying. In reality, however, we are not simply doing away with old constraints but rather replacing them with new ones. For example, the terseness of Japanese 'keitai' ('mobile phone') novels is a response to small screen and keyboard sizes. (Remarkably, many keitai novels are not only consumed on phones but composed on them too.)

More importantly though, true creativity is never one-dimensional, and now that we have been unleashed we must be concerned not only with the order of words on the page, but also with the form of the story and with the medium itself. Here is book publisher and web guru Tim O'Reilly (from a private mailing list but quoted with permission):

"Google Earth is the new Rand McNally, Wikipedia is the new Britannica, Google itself is the new competitor to many reference works, YouTube is becoming a vehicle for just-in-time learning, and World of Warcraft is the new immersive fantasy novel. What job do we do? And how can new media help us do it better?"

If the job is telling (and selling) stories then I hope I've pointed towards a few potential answers to that question. As with every major technological and social disruption, we stand on the cusp of a creative explosion – one that will see reputations and empires both created and destroyed.

This essay is mainly trying to make the case to publishers for a wholehearted embracement of the new mobile medium. But the people who really need to get to work are the storytellers – after all, they are supposed to be the truly creative ones. Yet in many cases their responses seem to amount to resistance or denial, and to my dismay these include writers whom I respect and admire. Indeed, the term 'novel' has come to feel almost ironic given that so many of its self-appointed defenders define their cause by eschewing novelty, at least in matters of form and medium.

Here is Annie Proulx (quoted in the New York Times on 26 May 1994):

"Nobody is going to sit down and read a book on a twitchy little screen. Ever."

Bzzzst! Wrong!

Then there was John Updike's infamous rant at the Book Expo convention in May 2006Φ, which sought to make a stand for books and land some blows against the upstart, 'edgeless' internet. This has been presentedΦ, plausibly I think, as merely one battle in an ongoing war between the literati and the technorati. If true, this thesis saddens me greatly because I don't ever want to have to choose between two such indispensible aspects of my life.

I've since come across other writers who share Updike's views just as firmly as I reject them. How disappointing. In my naivity I had assumed that anyone with enough imagination to write a passable novel would leap at the opportunity to set their inventiveness loose on the medium itself. After all, credible arguments are put forward to suggest that interests which transcend different domains of knowledge or endeavour are precisely the thing that gives rise to creativity in the first placeΦ.

If the 72-year-old David Hockney can reinvent his art for the smartphone ageΦ then why can't someone similarly prominent do the same for books? Where are the James Joyces and the Douglas Adamses of the twenty-first century when you need them?