TRANSMEDIA STORYTELLING AND CREATIVE WRITING: CAN MEDIA CONVERGENCE CHANGE THE WAY WE CREATIVELY WRITE?

Abstract

This article traces the history of transmedia storytelling and its evolutionary steps through multidisciplinary fields of media, art, culture and technology and the way it is currently being used and exploited. Transmedia storytelling as a particular narrative structure that expands through both different languages (verbal, iconic, etc.) and media (cinema, comics, television, video games, etc.) has been engaged by professional and non- professional media as an example of media convergence. The current unprecedented access to content, products and media allows- at least in what is deemed the developed and developing world - unlimited control over a person's experience as he or she can customise, personalise and respond towards a narrative in multiple ways and across multiple platforms. Trying to map this whole narrative universe offers a rather unique experience, especially for a creative writer and potential producer and consumer of this synergy of modes, media, technologies and content. Moreover, it is argued that creative writing can really benefit by introducing its modes and practices into each medium separately and across media at the same time leading into innovative narrative practices.

Keywords

• transmedia storytelling
• creative writing
• media convergence
• narrative structures
• interactive storytelling

-

and “living through” a story (or multiple stories) for the “readers”. Thus, the written, handheld book becomes a digital copy with images and sounds or a virtual world with narration and dialogues in simultaneity with the action, where the reader-player becomes the hero (or the villain etc.) and creates his own storyline. In that way, the variability, interactivity and open-endedness of these literary worlds may produce variable instances of place and time, altering several times the initial chronotopy of a literary text.

Digital Literature

Nowadays, people are constantly surrounded by media-rich environments - television, DVDs, MP3s, Touch/iPhones, computers, video games, cell phones, smart toys, 3D goggles are almost ever present in developed countries (Critcher, 2008; Drotner & Livingston, 2008; Hasebrink, Livingstone, Haddon, & Olafsson, 2009; Linebarger & Piotrowski, 2009) . The contact with digital worlds is almost an everyday occurrence (Bowman, Donovan, & Burns, 2001; Byron, T. 2010; Druin, 2009; Guernsey, 2007; Marsh, 2004; Marsh & Millard, 2000; Marsh, Brooks, Hughes, Ritchie, Roberts, & Wright, 2005; McPake, Stephen & Plowman, 2007; Pahl & Roswell, 2006; Palfrey & Gasser, 2008; Shuler, 2007; Specht, 2009; Stephen, McPake, Plowman, & BerchHeyman, 2008) . This digitization of form, content and presence has not left literature unaffected. Handheld books went on becoming digitised and wholly digital books were created (Koskimaa, 2000) . These trends have also entered the world of Literature leading to multi-layered, nonlinear, non-sequential, interactive and graphic- rich books that bear small to great differences from their handheld counterparts (Dresang, 1997) .

As Koskimaa points out, “digital literature is very diffuse and very hard to define” (Koskimaa, 2000) . He continues discerning three different instances. Firstly, he presents the digitalisations of print literature, as works which aim at digitalising as comprehensively as possible the old, mostly canonical, literature, with a lot of practical attributes such as conserving old texts physically deteriorating, making rare works available for the larger public, creating useful corpuses for researchers and students and enabling all kinds of statistical style analyses. He considers as a second type the digital publication of original literature, where texts do not employ any hypertextual techniques at all and literature confirms to the established conventions. Here, he argues that digital form is primarily used in the distribution of the texts. Last but not least, comes the literature using new techniques made possible by the digital format, including everything from hypernovels to interactive poetry and multimedia encyclopaedias (Koskimaa, 2000) .

Later, Koskimaa goes on creating another categorisation of digital literature. He again distinguishes three different meanings but here he assigns totally different categorisations. First, comes Digital Publishing, which focuses on the production and marketing of literature, and books in general, with the aid of digital technology. It includes eBooks, Print on Demand, Audiobooks made available as MP3 files, etc. He considers it, content-wise, literature in the traditional sense, as digital technology mainly serves for packaging and distribution purposes. As a second category, Scholarly literary hypertext editions for educational and research purposes are presented. This category includes hypertextually annotated literary works, as well as multimedia implementations of literary classics. Due to royalty rights, these are mainly older works. Finally, the third category comprises writing for Digital Media which he considers as programmed text, text based on computer code. This opens up a limitless field of literary play and experimentation, as texts can be programmed to behave in a more or less dynamic way. This perspective is called ‘cybertextuality’ and the works ‘cybertexts’, in accordance with Espen Aarseth (1997) . Cybertextuality is an umbrella term for different types of digital texts, such as hypertexts, kinetic texts, generated texts, texts employing agent technologies, etc. There are also poetic works using interactivity and kinetic techniques. (Koskimaa, 2007) . Moreover, there are digital games and its various genres. In addition to the mainstream game genres, such as action, adventure, sports, and puzzle games, the subfields of news games, political games, advergames, edugames, and such, bring the game approach to cultural fields. These new kinds of works are characterised as ‘cybertexts’ or ‘technotexts’ (Aarseth 1997, Hayles, 2002) . And then, an even richer textual – but, at the same time not- experience emerges: digital storytelling.

Digital Storytelling

A transmedia story unfolds across multiple media platforms with each new text making a distinctive and valuable contribution to the whole (Jenkins, 2006) . Although each component can be experienced individually, they all clearly exist in relation to each other in the larger transmedia story. The connections between different components mean that experiencing the other media forms will improve the experience as a whole. In the ideal form of transmedia storytelling each medium does what it does best – so that a story might be introduced in a film, expanded through television, novels, and comics, and its world might be explored and experienced through game play (Jenkins, 2006) . Jenkins insists on the term convergence, defined “as the flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries, and the migratory behaviour of media audiences” (Jenkins, 2006) .

In parallel to the aforementioned definitions, there are also the characterisations of “media mix” by Ito (2007), the “multisensory stories told across two or more diverse media (film, print literature, web, video games, live performance, recorded music, etc.) (Ruppel, 2005) or differently worded characterisations as “cross media storytelling” (Dena 2004a, 2004b) , “synergistic storytelling” (Jenkins, 2004) , “intertextual commodity” (Marshall 2004) , “transmedial worlds” (Klastrup & Tosca, 2004) , “distributed narration” (Walker, 2004) , “transmedia practice” (Dena, 2009) , and “multimedia storytelling‘ (Perryman, 2008) .

Creative Writing

The term Creative Writing (C.W.) can cause confusion due to its multitude of definitions, functions (Ramet, 2011) , purposes and educational roles (Harper, 2015, Donnelly, 2012, Harper and Kroll, 2007) . Many identify Creative Writing with literary production, while others believe that Creative Writing is identical to producing an original written composition (or re-composition). Some proponents of the teaching of Creative Writing want it to refer to any writing referred as “creative, e.g. original, unconventional, expressive and seemingly, sometimes, to oppose the official literature” (Dawson, 2005) , not only a literary genre. Kotopoulos (2011) regards it as a quest for creativity that deviates from the traditional notion of writing as an elitist, solitary practice. It can also seem to conceptually refer to a series of meanings: literary activity field, art of literary production, emotive educational method for the teaching of literature and of literary writing through games, a form of mental relief (Donnelly, 2015) and a means of strengthening self-esteem, academic subject knowledge, etc. (Kotopoulos, 2012) .

Creative Writing (Harper, 2013) is cross-disciplinary because it is incorporated in the field of literature (as literary writing, the art of writing and as literary theory of reading), in the area of pedagogy (as an educational method of teaching language and literature) and in the field of psychology (as a therapeutic method). At the same time though, it constitutes an independent discipline dealing with the art of writing and its implications. Gianni Rodari describes creativity as a synonym of “divergent thought” that has the ability of “continually breaking the schemes of experience” (Rodari, 1973) .

Research on Creative Writing practice in Greece suggests that support of creativity increases exponentially with the implementation of various writing techniques (Kotopoulos, 2011) . Creative Writing as an art uses all known writing techniques and experiments with new ones. It is based on dialogue, blending different styles, while leaving free the “subconscious flow” of writing. It also uses both linguistic and emotional elements in order to activate the creative function and support an increase in the brain’s potential (Kallas-Kalogeropoulou, 2006) .

Having creativity at its core, Creative Writing is considered to be any fiction or nonfiction writing, whether prose or poetry, that exceeds the limits of standard professional, journalistic or academic writing and, in general, any writing that uses certain speech techniques (Kotopoulos, 2011) . In Jacobson’s terms, Creative Writing refers to texts exemplifying the poetic function of language (Kotopoulos, 2011) . At the same time, the term Creative Writing represents the art of writing literature. Literary art belongs to the broader category of “the arts”, which includes music, theatre, dance, painting, etc. and it can be taught. It incorporates the ways and means, the tools and the techniques, that are used consciously and unconsciously, intentionally and unintentionally by the authors for the creation of a literary work. The poetics of Creative Writing aim to provide an emotional and aesthetic stimulation for the reader, but also to the expression of the writer. As a term therefore, it refers to an act, to a set of acts but also to the combination of an act and its outcome (Harper and Kroll, 2007) .

Combining the two fields

By considering these two seemingly unrelated fields, a common thread can be traced, that of narration. Having at their core the basic element of narrating a story, they provide with an interesting question: could a combination of both digital storytelling and creative writing create an equally interesting and exponentially challenging new product? In order to attempt answering such a question, Roland Barthes provides the underlying inherent links. In his text Le Plaisir du Texte (1973) he sets out some of his ideas for a literary theory, characterising texts as scriptible, that is writerly texts that rely heavily upon the audiences to provide any semblance of meaning and lisible or readerly texts that require very little work on the part of the audience and afford very little room for individual interpretation. Digital storytelling can be seen as a writerly text, where the audience follows narratives across multiple platforms. These narratives can be created in ways and modes presented in the filed of creative writing.

Moreover, creative writing techniques can make their way and be incorporated into the whole process of creation of a transmedia story. From its initial crafting to the crafting of the whole storytelling universe, from the insertion of references and allusions, that may function as connecting devices through the different media to the creation of ambiguity, suspense and uncertainty with the incorporation of migratory cues, from the creation of a core story to the limitless expansion of new media, creative writing techniques may infuse, enhance, enrich and provide with different alternative throughout the whole construction of a digital storytelling project. A wholly new universe can be created, by letting the text speak for itself. Either the original writer or other participants can creatively construct interconnected stories, bearing different characteristics, elements, modes and tropes, incorporating migratory cues and creating allusions. The final product? Awhole new universe as a writerly text.

Conclusion

Even though digital storytelling and creative writing seem to embark from totally different perspectives of the notion of text, they have one common streak: the desire to narrate a story. Thus, by incorporating creative writing techniques, modes and styles into the digital storytelling process, media convergence can propagate itself into the field of literature and vice versa creating a contingent new literary field.

References

Aarseth , E. ( 1997 ). Cybertext. Perspectives on Ergodic Literature . Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Barthes. R. ( 1973 ). Le Plaisir du Texte . Paris: Editionds du Seuil.

Bowman , B. , Donovan , S. and Burns , S. . (Eds.) ( 2001 ). Eager to learn: Educating our preschoolers . Washington DC: National Academy Press.

Byron , T. ( 2010 ). Do we have Safer Children in a Digital World? A Review of Progress since the 2008 Byron Review . London: Department for children, schools and families .

Critcher , C. ( 2008 ). Making waves: Historical aspects of public debates about children and mass media . In K.Drotner & S. Livingston (Eds.) International Handbook of Children, Media and Culture (pp. 91 - 104 ). London: Sage.

Dawson , P. ( 2005 ). Creative writing and the new humanities . London: Routledge.

Dena , C. ( 2004a ). Current State of Cross Media Storytelling: Preliminary observations for future design' , Proceedings of Crossmedia communication in the dynamic knowledge society networking session 2004 , The Netherlands, 15 Nov, European Information Society Technologies (IST) Event 2004: Participate in your future .

Dena , C. ( 2004b ). Towards a Poetics of Multi-Channel Storytelling' Proceedings of Critical Animals postgraduate conference, 1October , 2004 , This Is Not Art Festival, Newcastle.

Dena , C. ( 2006 ). How the Internet is Holding the Centre of Conjured Universes' , Presented at Internet Research 7 .0: Internet Convergences , Association of Internet Researchers 2006 , Brisbane, Queensland, 27 - 30 September 2006 .

Dena , C. ( 2009 ). Transmedia Practice: Theorising the Practice of Expressing a Fictional World across Distinct Media and Environments' , School of Letters, Art and Media, Department of Media and Communications, Digital Cultures Program, PhD , University of Sydney.

Donnelly , D. ( 2012 ). Establishing Creative Writing Studies as an Academic Discipline . Bristol: Multilingual Matters.

Donnelly , D. ( 2015 ). Embracing the Learning Paradigm: How Assessment Drives Creative Writing Pedagogy . In Harper, G. (Ed.) Creative Writing and Education (pp. 46 - 56 ). Bristol, Buffalo, Toronto: Multilingual Matters.

Druin , A . (Ed.) ( 2009 ). Mobile technology for children . Elsevier: Amsterdam

Dresang , E. . ( 1997 ). Influence of the Digital Environment on Literature for Youth: Radical Change in the Handheld Book . Library Trends . Vol 45 , No. 4. pp. 639 - 663

Drotner , K. and Livingston , S. (Eds.) ( 2008 ). The international handbook of children, media and culture . London: Sage.

Guernsey , L . ( 2007 ). Into the minds of babes . New York: Basic Books.

Harper , G , and Kroll , J.. ( 2007 ). Creative Writing Studies: Practice , Research and Pedagogy. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.

Harper , G. ( 2013 ). Creative writing research . In Harper, G. (Ed.) A Companion to Creative Writing (pp. 278 - 290 ). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

Harper , G. ( 2015 ). Creative Writing and Education: An Introduction . In Harper, G. (Ed.). Creative Writing and Education (pp. 1 - 16 ). Bristol, Buffalo, Toronto: Multilingual Matters.

Hasebrink , U. , Livingstone , S. , Haddon , L. , & Olafsson , K. ( 2009 ). Comparing children's online opportunities and risks across Europe: Cross-national comparisons for EU kids online . LSE , London: EU Kids Online.

Jenkins , H ( 2004 ). The Cultural Logic of Media Convergence . International Journal of Cultural Studies , vol. 7 ( 1 ): 33 - 43 . DOI: 10 .1177/1367877904040603

Jenkins , H. ( 2006 ). Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide . New York: New York University Press.

Jenkins , H & Deuze , M ( 2008 ). Editorial: Convergence Culture', Convergence: the International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies , vol. 14 , no. 1 , pp. 5 - 12 .

Kallas-Kalogeropoulou , C. ( 2006 ). Scripts -The art of confecting a narration to the cinema. 66 exercises and 1 method . Athens: Nefeli.

Klastrup , L & Tosca , S ( 2004 ). Transmedial worlds - rethinking cyberworld design . In Proceedings of the International Conference on Cyberworlds 18-20 November , 2004 , IEEEE Computer Society, Tokyo, Japan: Klastrup Cataclysms.

Linebarger , D. , & Piotrowski , J. ( 2009 ). TV as storyteller: How exposure to television narratives impacts at-risk preschoolers' story knowledge and narrative skills . British Journal of Developmental Psychology , Vol. 27 , 47 - 69 .

Koskimaa , R. ( 2000 ). Digital Literature. From Text to Hypertext and Beyond . Doctoral Dissertation [Electronic text, available online]. Jyväskylä . University of Jyväskylä. http://users.jyu.fi/~koskimaa/thesis/thesis.shtml

Koskimaa , R. ( 2007 ). “ The challenge of cybertext: teaching literature in the digital world” [article online] . UOC Papers. Iss. 4 . UOC. http://www.uoc.edu/ uocpapers/4/dt/eng/koskimaa.pdf

Kotopoulos , T.. ( 2011 ). From reading to literary reading and playful disposition of Creative Writing . In Papantonakis, G. and Kotopoulos , T. Ta eterothali (pp. 21 - 35 ). Athens: Ion.

Kotopoulos , T.. ( 2012 ). Keimena Magazine. The «legalisation»of Creative Writing. 26 July. Accessed May 19 , 2018 http://keimena.ece.uth.gr/main/t15/03- kotopoulos.pdf.

Kotopoulos , T. , Papantonakis , G. and Nanou , V. ( 2012 ). Creatiive Writing, Suspenseful Literature and Excited Students . In 1st International Conference «Education Across Borders» Proceedings (pp. 268 - 276 ). Florina: University Of Western Macedonia.

McGann , J. ( 2006 ). From text to work: Digital tools and the emergence of the social text . Romanticism on the Net , 16 ( 41 - 42 ), 49 - 62 .

Marsh , J. ( 2004 ). The techno-literacy practices of young children . Journal of Early Childhood Research , Vol 2 ( 1 ), 51 - 66 DOI: 10.1177/1476718X0421003

Marsh , J , Brooks, G. , Hughes , J. , L. Ritchie , Roberts, S. , and Wright , K. , ( 2005 ). Digital beginnings: Young children's use of popular culture, media and new technologies . University of Sheffield: Literacy Research Centre. http://www. digitalbeginnings.shef.ac.uk/.

Marsh , J. and Millard , E. ( 2000 ). Literacy and popular culture . London: Paul Chapman.

Marshall , P.D. ( 2004 ). New Media Cultures . London: Arnold.

McPake , J. , Stephen , C. , and Plowman , L. ( 2007 ). Entering e-society: Young children's development of e-literacy .Stirling: Institute of Education, University of Stirling.

Pahl , K. and Rowsell , J . (Eds.) ( 2006 ). Travel notes from the new literacy studies . Clevedon , England: Multilingual Matters.

Palfrey , J. and Gasser , U. ( 2008 ). Born digital: Understanding the first generation of digital natives . New York: Basic Books.

Perryman , N. ( 2008 ). Doctor Who and the convergence of media: a case study in “transmedia storytelling” . Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies , vol. 14 , no. 1 , 21 - 39 . https://doi. org/10.1177/1354856507084417

Ramet , A.. (2011). Creative Writing . London: Little, Brown Book Group.

Rodari , G. . ( 1973 ). Grammatica della fantasia . Torino: Giulio Einaudi editore s .p. a .

Ruppel , M. ( 2009 ). Narrative Convergence, Cross-Sited Productions and the Archival Dilemma . Convergence , vol. 15 , no. 3 , 281 - 298 .

Shuler , C. ( 2007 ). D is for digital: An analysis of the children's interactive media environment with a focus on mass marketed products that promote learning . New York: Joan Ganz Cooney Center.

Specht , M. ( 2009 ). Inaugural address: Learning in a technology enhanced world . Heerlen, Nederland: Centre for Learning Sciences and Technologies , Open Universiteit.

Stephen , C. , McPake , J. , Plowman , L. , Berch-Heyman , S. ( 2008 ). Learning from children: Exploring preschool children's encounters with ICT at home . Journal of Early Childhood Research , Vol. 6 . No. 2 , 99 - 117 . https://doi. org/10.1177/1476718X08088673

Walker , J. ( 2004 ). Distributed Narrative: Telling Stories Across Networks . Conference Proceedings of AoIR 5.0 , 21 September , 2004 . Brighton: University of Sussex. http://jilltxt.net/txt/Walker-AoIR-3500words.pdf