Writing for an Interactive Audience

Think about how a book or a short story is written. The author conceives of a plot, creates characters from his or her imagination, and develops a story line. A good writer will research the people/places/events to provide convincing descriptions of the background setting of the story. Finally, the author introduces plot twists at key points in the story.

For whom is the author writing? Traditionally, the answer has been a mass market of people who read that book genre. And, unless you wrote comic books, the novel had no pictures. The reader was left to envision the story setting in their mind’s eye. To a greater or lesser degree, each reader envisioned the same setting for the same story as everyone else.

Many people grew reading J.R. R. Tolkien’s trilogy, The Lord of the Rings. However, not until the movie The Fellowship of the Ring first appeared in 2001, did fans of the written word actually have a clear picture of the characters envisioned by Tolkien when he first finished the story in 1949.

Interactive new media now allows the consumer of the Lord of the Rings to read it, watch it, or play a game based on it. Tolkien probably never envisioned how his original story could become mass customized and presented in alternative, multimedia forms.

Are you a writer? Ask yourself these questions:

1. What if the reader had the ability to customize your story as they read it – explore more information about the characters/places/plot ideas as they desired – or not?
2. What if they could access audio or video clips to help them better visualize what they were reading – or not? What if the author planned ahead of time to allow the reader to customize their reading experience, if they so choose?
3. What if you learned to write a mass market work with the ability for it to be mass customized? In other words, planning to write for an audience of one?

With something called New Media, we can create as many different story “branches” as there are combinations of the different link paths we can choose. What is new media? It’s a catchall phrase that includes technologies that allow us to use pictures, audio and video files, and hyper text links that are embedded into a book, video, or game to make the “reading” experience interactive.

The idea for interactive media that allows the reader to help create the story has been around for a long time. In 1882, Frank Stockton wrote a short story, The Lady or the Tiger , that English teachers have been assigning to their students for years. The genius of Stockton’s story is that he writes the introduction of a story, but then engages the reader to help create the ending the story’s ending. (If you’ve never heard of The Lady or the Tiger , I invite you to go to http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/LadyTige.shtml to read the story. Stockton planned for mass customization of his story – he wrote for an audience of one).

That’s what New Media lets us do. But it allows far more than what Stockton could do, for his was still a linear story – progressing straight through from the beginning to the end. But consider reading content on a web page today. You read a paragraph, and then click on a link that takes you to another website before you’ve even finished the article. Then, you see a link to a video on yet another website, and you click to go see it. You may, or may not, ever return to finish the original article with which you started.

Amazon has recognized this with their innovative e-reader, the Kindle. Beginning with Kindle II, you can embed hyper text links that allow the reader to click and go to the Internet. In my novels, The Brotherhood of the Scroll and the Sword of the Scroll, I’ve embedded hyperlinks that allow the reader to learn more about the people/places/events described in the novel – or not. Amazon is now beta testing the inclusion of audio and video into ebooks published on their digital text platform

Traditional writing is the creation of a story that follows a logical, linear progression. With the introduction of New Media linked to the World Wide Web, the book is transformed into an information portal through which we can explore meaningful questions.

Are you still writing for mass communication, or are you leveraging new technologies, like the Kindle, to mass customize your work and write for an audience of one?