Jo and Alison kicked off the student-led element of retreat with a talk about their work and experiences of the course.  Jo took us through her various projects and explained what she is doing beyond the course, whilst Alison talked about the iwritestoriesonline.com project and her experiences with the creative non-fiction module on the course.  The iwritestoriesonline.com website has been designed to give people a platform to write stories or short snippets of life in a blog, in an environment where the blogs are linked to form a community of writers.  Toni is really the driving force behind the tech side of this, but Jo and Alison showed us the page and discussed their ideas for this collaborative project.     

 

The discussion lead on to their experiences collaboration to fill in the gaps in their own skills and how, as writers, we need to think outside the box in terms of what we want to do (or expand the envelope as Michael put it) so that our writing and story ideas can push the technology – even if the technology does not currently allow for an idea to work with the existing tools.  We also talked about Machinima, Alison’s attempts at this in The Sims and the way that Machinima is developing outside of the gaming world to produce more meaningful stories for those outside this culture.

 

Alison discussed the success of Staying Single, how she promoted it and where she wants to take the story now – including a talk she has been asked to give at a conference in New York.  She had a lot to talk about following her research project into the attitude of publishers and the responses she got from publishers when she contacted them to discuss digital fiction.  Jo made a very valid point about the push for literary fiction in the digital realms rather than the more popular fiction and how that is affecting the type of work that is being produced.  Alison’s experience with Staying Single in terms of the cross over between escapism and participation – which is obviously not what those readers come to chick lit for – shows how this cross over is a blurry kind of area.   

 

We then got a bit deep talking about truth – or Truth – and how this relates to fiction – including Alison’s decision to admit that her blog was a fictional story, how she came to that decision and what effects this had on the readership for the project.  This is a pretty central issue for all of us writing all sorts of fiction – whether new media in format or more traditional.  Ultimately we are playing with people’s beliefs and trust when we are writing fiction… asking them to suspend belief either consciously or unconsciously.

 

Interesting stuff!