How writers can help create a new narrative form

So far, so simple. The first and until now most successful literary adaptation has been the apping of T.S.Eliot’s long poem The Waste Land. A publisher like Faber understandably wants to exploit an impressive backlist, and Faber’s The Waste Land app is a great way to breathe new life into an existing piece of writing.

This is one approach to making apps for booklovers – use the technology to find creative ways of repackaging works that already exist. It may be, however, that this approach suits only a certain type of book. The idea of flipping from a text version to a video of Fiona Shaw enacting The Da Vinci Code is somehow unenticing.

Other big publishers are repackaging living authors with a pre-established audience. Penguin, for example, created myFry, an ‘app edition’ of Fry’s latest autobiography. The Fry Chronicles. The key-word here is ‘edition’ – the material is the same as in the book, though organized in a slightly different way. Transworld have done something similar with Richard Dawkins, adding illustrations and info-graphics to The Magic of Reality. Chris Meade of if:book reviewed the Dawkins app here on The Literary Platform, with a reluctant sense of disappointment: ‘this is the book transferred to tablet, not transformed by it.’

As apps, these three examples are still a long way ahead of those enhanced e-books where ‘the enhancement’ is a dreary imitation of the extras offered on a movie DVD. The author is filmed speaking. The author walks his dog. The reading experience of the book itself is not ‘enhanced’ – the words on the electronic page work exactly as they do on paper.

Which takes us to the most interesting version of what new digital platforms can achieve for reading and for writers. In time, apps may enable the creation of entirely new work that explores the narrative boundaries of the technology. This is likely to involve a combustion of soundtrack, images (still and moving) with text.

While traditional publishers are busy repackaging, digital design studios are inventing exciting bells and whistles. Design studios move faster than print publishers and have more of an incentive to innovate for its own sake – they understand the value of being first.

Except they don’t, nobody does, not when it comes to story-telling apps. If the value of being first, financially, is a cinema-type value (count the zeros) then it’s worth the investment. Far less so if the hidden value is more of a bookish literary kind (the zeros fade like smoke-rings).

This is the dilemma of the moment. Storytelling apps may be at the ‘birth of cinema’ stage, waiting for innovative writers to create the foundational artworks of a new narrative form. My feeling is that design studios and writers would like publishers to share their excitement about this. Instead, the publishers see a less risky future in repackaging what they already know.

This is where writers can make a difference. T.S.Eliot is no longer able to take sides, but the writer as risk-taker was once a figure to be admired. There are development studios like ustwo and Nosy Crow developing amazing tools that can create an experience that isn’t quite a book but isn’t a film, either.

The designers know what their buttons can do (they invented the buttons) and now they need writers to dream up stories that use these buttons to their best effect. The kind of writers they need are those unafraid to make it new, who understand the value of being first. And also, at this stage, writers who want to make something exist because they can, not because they’re paid a fortune for it.

Unless there’s a publisher out there nostalgic for the artistic excitement of the early twentieth century, and I’m not sure there is, then writers may do better to collaborate directly with the developers. The developers will in turn become the new publishers. And the old publishers will have plenty of work for Fiona Shaw.

Richard Beard is Director of The National Academy of Writing and his latest novel is Lazarus is Dead (Harvill Secker).