creative writing

This talk shares collaboration strategies and “funnest practices” for using netprov — networked improvisation, online roleplay literature — in the classroom. In sequences of “jump right in” creative games, students explore such topics as character development and character voice in a real-time laboratory of quick creative exchanges (accompanied by mutual encouragement and laughter). By building a bridge between students’ own social media writing practices and learning about historic literature, their creative strategies are expanded and critical connections between canonical texts and contemporary, everyday writing are made. What students may not realize is that netprov also can help break through their own creative blockages and freezes.

“In a participatory medium, immersion implies learning to swim, to do the things that the new environment makes possible.” -Janet Murray, Hamlet on the HolodeckFor new “digital swimmers,” or those just dipping their toes into the pool for a semester or two, complicated (and expensive) technology and skill sets can sometimes hinder creative expression. My goal, as a teacher of digital creative writing, is to get students to “listen to their broccoli” (follow their intuition), as Anne Lamott suggests, and express their unique voices through multiple modes. By utilizing software that is accessible on their own computers and easy to navigate, students are less intimidated and free to create and focus on writing. Although all software has its limitations, I’m seeing some wonderfully creative and thoughtful projects from my students.My digital creative writing courses are “open education resource.” In the past, I have relied heavily on the Adobe Creative Suite in my courses (accessible on campus) and taught mainly Dreamweaver for hypertext projects. With the spring pivot online, Adobe was not quite as easy to access (although the free subscriptions they offered were appreciated by several of my students) and students in the fall wanted to use their own computers and not those in the lab. I had always tried to incorporate free software options—Twine, Google Maps, and Knightlab storytelling tools—but found myself expanding these options even more this past year. Between my writing and e-lit courses, we explored Google Earth, Scene, and ThingLink for 360 work, and relied mostly on Twine and ThingLink for hypertext projects. This semester I am adding Timeline. The simplicity of the software has allowed these new digital swimmers to delve deeper into the platforms’ potential and their subject matter. I have been impressed with the complex projects being made in ThingLink, which at first glance seems like a very simple platform. You can add links to video, 360 environments, add sound, videos, and link multiple “pages” (projects) together. My intro. level students had very little trouble learning the interface and executing their ideas.As Anne Frances Wysocki says in Writing New Media, “When someone makes an object that is both separate from her but that shows how she can use the tools and materials of her time, then she can see a possible self—a self positioned and working within the wide material conditions of her world, even shaping that world—in that object” (21). In this paper, I will discuss several of these “Plat(free)forms” and their capabilities (and limitations). I will explore how these accessible platforms enable expression, in particular of marginalized voices, as Twine has been used widely in the LGBTQ+ community, as well as provide potential for exploring virtual spaces with minimal technology. I will show several student projects that exemplify their uses, as well as how they are being used to create political, diverse, and deeply personal narratives, allowing digital learners to shape their worlds and add their voices to the world of e-lit.

Postdigital Storytelling offers a groundbreaking re-evaluation of one of the most dynamic and innovative areas of creativity today: digital storytelling. Central to this reassessment is the emergence of metamodernism as our dominant cultural condition.

This volume argues that metamodernism has brought with it a new kind of creative modality in which the divide between the digital and non-digital is no longer binary and oppositional. Jordan explores the emerging poetics of this inherently transmedial and hybridic postdigital condition through a detailed analysis of hypertextual, locative mobile and collaborative storytelling. With a focus on twenty-first century storytelling, including print-based and nondigital art forms, the book ultimately widens our understanding of the modes and forms of metamodernist creativity.

Postdigital Storytelling is of value to anyone engaged in creative writing within the arts and humanities. This includes scholars, students and practitioners of both physical and digital texts as well as those engaged in interdisciplinary practice-based research in which storytelling remains a primary approach.

(Source: Routledge catalog copy)

Learn a cutting-edge method of performative creative writing based on human-computer interaction.

You will learn to “write with your voices” (as opposed to typing on a keyboard) by using speech recognition software. We will take turns saying impromptu lines out loud into a microphone. The computer will recognize the lines with varying accuracy and turn the speech into text on the computer screen. We will develop a set of improvisational tools to enhance dramatic writing by utilizing the computer’s errors (misrecognitions) in collaboration with other participants. You will be confronted with situations requiring quick decision-making, because the computer does not reproduce your speech with hundred-percent accuracy – a fact that will challenge you to deal with technological dysfunction in the here-and-now of a performative writing situation. Also, you will be challenged to listen and respond to your human writing partners and their texts. Through guided practice, you will learn to take the writing process in unexpected directions, further into an improvisational realm.

While practicing this collaborative, performative live writing method with human and computer partners, we will work toward creating short fictional scenes. The scenes will be based on dramatic situations that we will come up with together through rehearsals and discussion. In addition to this practical work, we will spend time discussing readings of relevant texts (live writing, new technology, human-computer interfaces and drama).

At the end of the workshop, we will present a live, performative writing event, in which you will have the opportunity to perform those aspects of the writing method that you find most compelling. The showing will be planned and performed collaboratively. At the end of this workshop, you will have the tools to continue exploring the relationship between text, digital media, and performance in your own work.

(source: ELO 2015 catalog)

The course concerns the classic tension in poetry between decontextualization and juxtaposition: deciding what a text’s constituent elements are, breaking the text into those elements, and then bringing them back together in surprising and interesting ways. Students are taught not just about string processing and text analysis, but also about the poetic possibilities of using those techniques to algorithmically build new texts. Each semester, the course culminates in a live performance, in which each student must read aloud for an audience a text that one of their programs has generated.

(Source: Author's Abstract)

In this interview Michael J. Maguire also known as clevercelt writes about his development in the field of electronic literature both as creative writer and academic scholar. He gives some insights into the work of programming, his interest for computer games and the Phd thesis. The interview stands out for the many references to other authors.

Riccardo Giovanni Milanesi is creator and author of the two Web Series L’Altra (The Other Girl, 2011) and FableGirls (2012). In thi interview he explains how the work for the realization of L’Altra were carried out, an online project which was co-created with users/readers on FaceBook e published in real time. Moreover he announces the new Web Serie Vera Bes (2013).

A presentation of the joint course "Collaborative Creativity in New Media" which took place in 2013 at the University of Bergen. Involving students and faculty from Bergen, the University of Minnesota Duluth, Temple University, and West Virginia University, the course was an experiment in developing a new model for teaching electronic literature and new media arts production as a collaborative process.

I will try to make a blend between the notion of "creative writing", which is typically American (and doesn't exist in most of continental Europe), and the discourse of creative industries, which is typically European, and try to stab the notion of "creative" a bit as a kind of helpless placeholder for something that, for whatever reason, is no longer called literary or artistic. So, referring to Kenny Goldsmith, it's not about a dichotomy creative/uncreative, but what's questionable about the concept in the first place. If we shift the issue from an idealist to a materialist perspective, then the difference between creative/literary writing and common writing has always been arbitrary.

The critical edition of Kafka, which now includes the documents he wrote for his insurance company, is a good example, as are earlier examples of published letters, diaries etc. Foucault's criticism of the the notion of the oeuvre, whether it would include scraps and laundry bills or not, seems quite backwards to me. The actual difference has been one of published and non-published writing, with publishing being (for technical and economic reasons) controlled by an industry.

With the Internet, particularly social media, this difference is gone. There also is no real difference anymore between written language and spoken everyday language, everything is in one space. Yet it seems to me as if 'electronic
literature'/e-poetry is not embracing this - which would even be a logical consequence of the innovation of literary writing through Joyce, W.S. Burroughs and others -, but preserving a narrow concept of the literary within the massive writing/reading environment of the Internet. (Hence also the insistence of e-literature on works in
self-contained files, a legacy of Brown University hyperfiction, which recurs for example in the acid-free bits debate.) My conclusion will be that the notion of 'creativity' is reactionary, and that 'uncreative' is just its dialectical flipside.

(Source: Author's abstract, 2012 ELO Conference site)