Category Archives: Digiwrimo

(This is part two of a Storyjumper activity for Digital Writing Month, where we are handing off stories to each other on blogs and writing the story forward. Bruno W. started us off with a personal narrative, and I am taking part of what he wrote and moving into a story. — Kevin)

The paper note spilled out of the computer case, fluttering into in hands. I wasn’t expecting that. Not at all. But I was intrigued. Much of the wording on the paper had been smudged by water or by time, or both, but the story itself ended with these intriguing lines:

A few more days later, I realized it was again different: They are more proofs that I didn’t imagine this story, I didn’t dream it or exaggerate it. This part of the story is so trite you barely need a proof, other memories, encounters are more exceptional, surprising that I’ve been relieved to find some tracks of them. Like the sand that you find in the morning, in your pocket reminds you that a dream could have been more than a dream.

Most of my friends know I am someone who takes pleasure in old worn-out devices. I gut them out on my workbench in the basement, working at the insides with some magic that even I could never explain — I just know — finding a way to get the old machines up and running again, pulling them out of sleep.

This particular laptop and case – with the lettering saying “Bruno W., Strasbourg, France, 2015” and nothing more — was retrieved from an old shop that my friend, Sarah, visited while overseas on a trip searching for ukeles. She’s a uke collector. And she calls me strange for my obsession with technology.

My circle of friends, they know my hobby and they indulge me. An old phone. A cracked PC. An iPad with bad battery.  They all come my way eventually. And I often return the favor by fixing their devices for free. Sometimes, it’s only a reminder that “plugs go into the outlet.” Other times, it’s me, digging deep into the engine of the device. Is there anything more pleasurable than ripping out a hard drive? I don’t think so. There’s a certain satisfaction I find with taking apart something that others think can’t be taken apart, to see technology as story of parts.

I think of myself less as a fixer of technology than a reconstructor of stories.

I held the Bruno paper print-out in my hand. It was clearly the ending of some story, of a narrative. I tried to imagine who this Bruno was. I could hear his voice in his words.

Who was he writing to? Was it some loved one? Some invisible audience in the world? Was it a story he hoped others would read? Or was it some private tale, and now, as I read his lines, were my eyes were intruding on a private moment?

I turned the paper over, seeking understanding.

Faintly hidden, no doubt from the passage of time, I saw the faint pencil outline of what seemed to be a map. I held the story up to the light, trying to make the lines more visible. I was reminded of my childhood interest in detective gear, and the trick of writing in lemon juice as invisible ink. I squinted. The light filtered through the paper like an onionskin. An outline emerged. It was indeed a map and on the map, I could just make out some lines of text and a set of arrows that seemed to be leading towards ….

(the end of the chapter. Maha Bali now takes it from here …)

Peace (in the exquisite corpse story),
Kevin

Jeffrey posted this question as we gear up for Digital Writing Month in November:

@Bali_Maha @sensor63 @dogtrax @NomadWarMachine @wentale How do you have the time given work and family? What is your WIIFM?

— Jeffrey Keefer (@JeffreyKeefer) October 23, 2015

Good one.

I can only answer for myself and say, that as Maha noted in her own response, I find myself writing all the time: either in my head (knowing I need to remember that in order to write that down) or on paper (that scrap will do) or on various screens (although I find that using my thumbs to write takes too long and is very frustrating to the train of thought … my words feel like a caboose).

Here’s how I end up finding ways and time to write: I stake out the morning. I get myself up early before my family (three boys, wife and dog) are all up and the house gets its crazy-time feel. I usually have about an hour or so before the day begins. I walk the dog, make my coffee … and sit down to write, either at my blog (the starting line) or in some other space.

But I am writing in my head all the time, too.

Years ago, when I was writing a long of songs, I used to walk around with melodies and lyrics humming in my head. I’d be lost in thought, literally, using my footfalls for rhythm, working out word choices based on rhymes and patterns and meaning. I still write songs, but not as much, and now, I find myself working out ideas around teaching and writing and art during the drive to and from work, while walking the dog, when waking up after sleep.

I’m blogging even when I am nowhere near my blog. I am a poet of ideas out in thin air. I am a storywriter, spinning characters out of clouds. I am essayist with no paper, a songwriter with invisible notes. I am a writer even without the physical tools of writing. (Or is that just a thinker?)

It’s as if I have this huge invisible notebook and pen, and I am mentally jotting down ideas. For a long time at this blog, I was writing two posts a day. But even I knew that was too much for any reader. But I felt compelled to write, write, write, and so I did. Now, I try to focus a bit more on a single post a day, and some things just never get written. Not every idea is a good one, anyway.

I’m not suggesting this all-day-writing-in-the-head works for anyone else. In answering Jeffrey’s query about writing management, I can only speak for myself: the words are coming all the time and I need my morning quiet time to write. When I don’t have that time, as happens now and then, I feel empty that day, as if the writing nourishes me.

I need to write.

Peace (in writing this from me to you),
Kevin

Check out this quote from a blog post by Michael Manderino at his blog, Pedagogical Consciousness:

.. we should treat songs as texts and albums like literature …

In this wonderful analytical post, Michael deconstructs the experience of listening to the band, Best Coast, and makes the case that the act of listening is akin to the act of reading (so, I am going to flip that, and suggest that the act of writing music is akin to the act of writing. I don’t think he would disagree.) He goes after mood, and sound, and then image and video sequencing. He touches on the lost art of album design. He views the experience through multimodal eyes.

The overall impression that I get (or I should say, gets reinforced by Michael’s analysis) is that the “composition” here is the collection of media parts that wind their way into the whole experience, and when thinking of how technology is shifting our notions of what writing is, this kind of analysis is insightful and metaphorical: if technology allows us to move our stories into multimedia, what does that do the story itself that we writers write, and that our readers read (or our viewers view, or listeners listen).

Michael, in fact, even notes that the use of a blog makes a difference in the writing of the analysis itself, and of course, he is write. The affordances of a space where links can be embedded, and media shared, and more, lends to something deeper and richer.

Analyzing the individual modes are insufficient to recognize the cross modal dependency to communicate the narrative.  We need to foster instructional opportunities to recognize these sites of multimodal intertextuality.  Music is an optimal media source for doing so. — Michael Manderino

It’s as wonderful muddle that we (writers, teachers, readers) find ourselves in, mainly because we are still in “the moment” when all of this is unfolding. When you are in the midst of change, it’s difficult to know where it will end up. Writing is in the midst of change. I don’t know where it will end up. You don’t, either. That doesn’t mean we give up and moan about the old days. It means we are in the midst of adventure, so gather up your compass and backpack, and head out into the edges of the world.

So, what do we do? We play and reflect.

In November, I am helping to facilitate this year’s version of Digital Writing Month (DiGiWriMo) with my global friends, Maha Bali and Sarah Honeychurch, with support by the folks at Hybrid Pedagogy. We’re inviting all sorts of people in all sorts of fields to write guest posts and we hope to suggest some activities that will get participants thinking about what we mean when we talk about “writing” in this digital age. Interestingly, November is also NaNoWriMo, so lots of folks are digging into traditional writing and storytelling. Maybe some will find some convergence points in November.

We’ll be facilitating discussions to explore the shifts in writing, the way image informs a composition, how audio and listening tap into something intriguing, and how transmedia/multimedia composition might alter the experience of text for a reader/viewer/listener/player.

Need help to consider what it is all about? How about this interactive?

We hope you come along for the adventure. Come on over to the Digital Writing Month website. If you add your name to the newsletter, we’ll send you updates on posts and activities in November. Get making and creating.

Peace (inside the text),
Kevin

I’ve been having an interesting backchannel discussion about digital writing with some friends of mine, whose opinions I greatly respect. An issue in our discussions arose around the idea of curating writing that has been posted in one site on the Web and whether or not the writer needs to grant approval for someone else to curate that writing into another digital space. (There’s a slight twist here, in that the topic that sparked this conversation concerns inviting specific people to write for a specific site for a specific reason.)

On one hand, I think the argument that a writer should have some say over where and when their writing is re-used once it is published makes sense. They wrote it. It’s their ideas. They took the time to craft it into something worth curating. They created something.

But …

… on the other hand …

… digital writing is untethered writing.

Therefore, I think that if you publish it as a digital text, you have to be aware that someone else might find what you write interesting and useful, and the might just pull it into some sort of curation, either for personal saving (like Diigo, for example) or for community sharing (like via a retweet, or a Scoop.it magazine, or Flipboard). I might email a story to you, or recommend one via our social networking. I wrote about a similar topic with the automated paper.li curation that is built on algorithms. (I don’t know where that post ended up, but I hope it found a home somewhere nice.)

This ability to curate and be curated doesn’t mean that someone has permission to scrape your content off a website and put out there elsewhere as if it were their own. That’s theft. That’s not what I am talking about (although digital spaces does make that easier than ever to do).

What I mean is that while we — the writer — might put some writing at a certain website, such as this blog or that digital space over there, someone else might come along and pull what we made into another project via RSS or hyperlink or some other format, and the writing moves onward.

Or, as Cory Doctorow wrote in his book — Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free — that I recently reviewed here in this space (maybe you curated it or bookmarked it?), we can think of content that we create (writing, media, etc.) as a dandelion in its puffy seed phase, casting ideas to the wind with hope that something will catch root somewhere, in some time. If you write it, someone may read it. You just won’t necessarily know when and where your writing will find its reader.

You need faith — faith that your writing can withstand the sharing world. Faith that your ideas can travel and still have impact. Faith that the digital world is not taking away from the writing experience, but adding to the potential: of audience, of medium, of impact.

It’s complicated and frustrating and liberating, too — this idea of ownership with digital writing. Sites put up paywalls, I know. Others use technology that resist copying or sharing. I’m all for Creative Commons designations. None of this seems to really matter, though. The writing moves on at its own pace, in some form or another.

Again, Doctorow’s “think like a dandelion” metaphor seems apt.

I find myself coming more down on the side of “let the ideas go free as much as possible” than the side of  “keep the writing tethered to the extent possible.”  I know that makes a lot of writers uncomfortable. It may be that those writers will avoid the digital spaces, and hope that the dandelion seeds still take root somewhere.

Me? I’m one of those fools who takes a deep breath and sends the seeds scattering.

Peace (in the shift),
Kevin