Kid Helios

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about storytelling for several reasons. Firstly in the day job we are doing some investigation into new ways of telling stories and new narrative forms as a means of reaching new audiences. Over the past year I’ve looked after a few projects that have taken storytelling in different sorts of directions. These kind of stories are exactly the sort of things that I think we should be doing at the Castle and I plan to blog about them separately in more detail. One project uses in car GPS to deliver stories to families on the move. Another drama ‘Over the Bridge‘ presents a forty part fragmented narrative to a younger audience via bluetooth to their mobile phones, and invites them to share, collect and watch the material (video, txt and voicemail) to make sense of the story.

The second reason is that I’ve started to write again after a long break – I have an idea for a book that I’ve begun to get down, and in thinking about it, I’m beginning to realise that my sensibilities around storytelling have now changed – and that in fact the opportunities that transmedia storytelling could bring to my story, could change it into something different entirely. I think that the evolved story is actually the one that I want to tell. The narrative will still have to work – even better than it would have before – but the approach will be more playful and that playfulness is liberating and is really the thing that has made me want to come back to doing some creative writing in the first place.

The starting point for the musings on transmedia storytelling were some thoughts around ‘the book’ itself – the traditional physical structure that encloses the story – the portable object that contains pages, text, pictures and information – the books I’m addicted to buying and that I can never throw away. I love the fact that books don’t need plugs or power cables – you can read them in bed, on the beach and in the bath. Books smell nice and bookshops and libraries are places of discovery – I would rather spend an hour on my own wandering around a good bookshop than almost anywhere.

A couple of years ago I was doing some early stage research into the idea of a classroom based ARG. I’d seen Elan Lee give a talk at ETech and one of the projects that he’d profiled was ‘Year Zero‘, an ARG on behalf of Nine Inch Nails, which had culminated in a secret gig, armed SWAT teams and generally the sort of full on adult ARG experience that you might expect in support of a Trent Reznor concept album. I asked Elan how he thought an ARG could be configured for a younger audience and he suggested a text book as a starting point. This seemed to be a very interesting idea and one that I’m still very keen to explore, where the book becomes the rabbit hole that propels a school class into a story. What appealed to me the most was an idea that developed over time – which was that the classroom teacher (who would initiate the ARG) could direct the student who most ‘needed’ to find the book towards it – that the book itself would be hiding in plain sight within the school library – and that within the fabric of the book would be all of the clues and structures necessary to start a group of students on an adventure that none of them would ever forget.

So back to the book – and the cover of the book. I love the artwork on bookcovers – you might not be able to judge a book by the cover, but who cares when you see something that tickles you into a bookshop to pick up and buy. When I was a kid I loved the artwork or Edward Ardizone, Charles Keeping, Arthur Ransome, E. H. Shepard – but what if the cover of that book could become alive. Memoires was a situationist collaboration between Asger Jorn and Guy Debord in the 1950’s. The cover of the book was made of heavy duty sandpaper, and the idea was that over time the book would have a destructive effect on the neghbouring books on the shelf. The naughty situationists imagined a passive aggressive book-cover – something that wold scratch the bourgeois coffee tables. Now we have book covers that can talk directly to us - A recent edition of Esquire magazine featured an augmented reality cover – that brought cover star Robert Downey Jr perkily to life.

So maybe now you can judge a book by the cover..?