I’m starting preliminary development on a wiki fiction project that will eventually take over the criticalfutures.com domain. This post is a discussion of that history, my idea, and what I hope to accomplish.

My friend Julia and I have been corresponding on topics related to the future of publishing and genre fiction for a few weeks. When the topic turned to wikis, I spouted off the things I usually say about bootstrapping wiki participation (it’s hard and pretty lonely,) then I had an idea.

I read wikis, mostly wikipeida, a lot. For fun. I’m sure a lot of people do this, as “getting lost in wikipedia,” is a thing that happens. You say, “I’m interested in public transit in Iran,” and you get lost clicking through various pages related to rapid transit systems in the middle east, and then an hour or two is past and you really ought to finish that blog post. The same thing happens on the c2 wiki for me.

While I wish I were less compulsive about it, reading wikis is a pleasurable reading experience, and since the format seems the web, why not run with it? The question becomes: why are we spending so much time figuring out the most ideal way to publish novels and short stories--forms that developed with the physicality of the book--in the digital age?

To be fair, I think there’s a place for digital distribution of paper-centric forms (periodicals and monographs,) but I doubt that in 50 years “digital fiction,” will mean eBook editions of novels. People have been making a similar point for some time about video games for a while. Interactive fiction is definitely a part of digital fiction, but I don’t think it’s the full story.

Meanwhile back at the point…

Here’s the idea. We use wiki software to construct a website that is written as a light-hearted encyclopedia. In the vein of TV Tropes meets Wikipedia except with fictional content. But there needs to be more than just page after page of exposition and condensed blather: my current plan is to have a “dialogue” section, which will be bits of dialogue and scenes published with some contextual metadata (when it happened, who was present, where it happened.) The dialogues can then be linked to as quasi-citations in the more conventional expository wiki pages.

So basically I’m proposing a couple of things here. First, I want to splitting up all content into small self contained pages. This makes it better for multiple people to edit, because editing and writing can happen in a more parallel manner, and you don’t need to agree to an outline, or write things in any sort of sequence. Second, shorter pages with more segmented content is easier to read for the attention limited.

Having said that, I’m not sure that collaborative, for all that will editing is really the way to go. The truth is that so few people edit wikis relative to the number of people who could edit wikis, that you might be better off having some sort of more select editorial community, just in terms of establishing buy-in from contributors and avoiding diffusion of responsibility. I’m undecided.

Along a similar line of thought, I’m considering releasing release updates and new content on a regular basis (e.g. bi-weekly or monthly?) rather than every time an edit is made. This will require some sort of closed-development process. At the same time new wiki projects often fail because there’s little incentive to return to a wiki to “see what’s changed. Blogs, contrast are good at securing return visits.

Thoughts? Anyone interested in being on the editorial board?

The Debate

Computer programmers want data to be as structured as possible. If you don’t give users a lot of room to do unpredictable things, it’s easier to write software that does cool things. Users on the other hand, want (or think that they want) total control over data and the ability to do whatever they want.

The problem is they don’t. Most digital collateral, even the content stored in unstructured formats, is pretty structured. While people may want freedom, they don’t use it, and in many cases users go through a lot of effort to recreate structure within unstructured forms.

Definitions

Structured data are data that is stored and represented in a tabular form or as some sort of hierarchical tree that is easily parsed by computers. By contrast, unstructured data, are things like files that have data and where all of the content is organized manually in the file and written to durable storage manually.

The astute among you will recognize that there’s an intermediate category, where largely unstructured data is stored in a database. This happens a lot in content management systems, in mobile device applications, and in a lot of note taking and project management applications. There’s also a parallel semi-structured form, where people organize their writing, notes, content in a regular and structured manner even though the tools they’re using don’t require it. They’d probably argue that this was “best practice,” rather than “semi-structured” data, but it probably counts.

The Impact

The less structured content or data is the less computer programs are able to do with the data, and the more people have to work to make the data useful for them. So while we as users want freedom, that freedom doesn’t get us very far and we don’t really use it even when we have it. Relatedly, I think we could read the crux of the technological shift in Web 2.0 as a move toward more structured forms, and the “mash up” as the celebration of a new “structured data.”

The lines around “semi-structured” data are fuzzy. The trick is probably to figure out how to give people just enough freedom so that they don’t feel encumbered by the requirements of the form, but so much freedom that the software developers are unable to do really smart things behind the scene. That’s going to be difficult to figure out how to implement, and I think the general theme of this progress is “people can handle and developers should err on the side of stricture.”

Current Directions

Software like org-mode and twiki are attempts to leverage structure within unstructured forms, and although the buzz around enterprise content management (ECM) has started to die down, there is a huge collection of software that attempts to impose some sort of order on the chaos of unstructured documents and information. ECM falls short probably because it’s not structured enough: it mandates a small amount of structure (categories, some meta-data, perhaps validation and workflow,) which doesn’t provide significant benefit relative to the amount of time it takes to add content to these repositories.

There will be more applications that bridge the structure boundary, and begin to allow users to work with more structured data in a productive sort of way.

On a potentially orthogonal note, I’m working on cooking up a proposal for a LaTeX-based build system for non-technical document production that might demonstrate--at least hypothetically--how much structure can help people do awesome things with technology. I’m calling it “A LaTeX Build System.”

I’d love to hear what you think, either about this “structure question,” or about the LaTeX build system!

Continuing from the discussion regarding intellectual practice, I’ve been talking with a number of people (my father in particular) about graduate school and the prospect of “bootstrapping” a scholarly practice using “new media,” like blogging, and wiki making. I want to explore both my thoughts graduate school and bootstrapping with new media, and as you’d expect both of these ideas are rather intertwined. My initial gloss follows:

Bootstrapping for Success

The “new media,” even 10 or more years on, is still quite new. The media shift and technological changes have had a pretty clear impact on economic and industry practices. At the same time, reading, participation, and writing are still in flux. People say, “oh look, blogging and wikis; we can use this as a teaching and learning tool!” and then there are classes, tools, and software to integrate blogging into courses and learning management systems, but the media itself is still in flux and I’m not sure that anyone has blogging and wikis (as an example) figured out.

While the changes in new media are important, the changes to education itself is probably more important. Educators of all kinds have begun to take this we begin to think about the was that traditional education has changed and will change. Given new media, a changing job market, and the shifting economics of education it’s hard to think that education isn’t changing.

I’m not sure it’s changing that much.

There are cases of successful auto-didacts, and people who’ve been able acheive success

I’d love to be wrong about this, but I’m pretty sure that the only people who blog/wiki and have found real success in fields are people with some other more conventional route to success: people who are already successful and figure out how to use new media, people who have conventional training or have achieved success in traditional media and then moved to using blogs:

Some examples: Cory Doctorow began publishing fiction conventionally and doing freelance work for Weird magazine, and became a blogger and used that to multiply existing success. John Scalzi (and Tobias Buckell) published non-fiction and had successful professional writing careers before beginning to blog and write and publish fiction. The Valve is a successful academic blog/publication/forum, but as near as I can tell all of the contributors have traditional literary training, and all/most have academic postings. Bitch, Ph.D. has/had a formal background.

Samuel Delany doesn’t have formal training but has had a scholarly career, and while his is an inspiring story there’s not much that’s reproducible from it given some historical constraints: he started publishing before the demise of SF pulp magazines and Ace Double, because creative writing hadn’t been established when he entered the academy, etc.

I’m certainly willing to believe that my sample is skewed, and that people have been able to move in the other direction (from online success to conventional success, or been able to bootstrap their own success online,) but I can’t think of a single anecdote. I’d love to be proved wrong here.

Disciplining and Formal Education

I think that working as a technical writer is something to which I am very suited, something that provides a great deal of value, gives me access to the kinds of people that I’m interested in talking with (software developers, admins.) And writing experience and skill is largely fungible, so the skill I’m honing and developing is very transferable.

So, while I’m not opposed to doing academic work eventually, I’m pretty sure that no matter what kind of industry work I end up doing (product management, community management/organization, training, etc.) I’ll sill basically be a technical writer. And here’s the thing, if graduate school has no effect on my career except dominating my time and earning potential for a few years? It becomes very difficult to justify.

The equation that keeps going through my head is: two job searches within a few years years¹ and a hundred thousand dollars or more,² for what amounts to a personal betterment project. It’s not getting any easier to justify.

Here’s the catch: I’m a decent writer and I’m getting better all the time can I write or help people write books, articles, essays, stories, and a whole host of more specific forms. I’m not really sure that I could write a quality academic paper without an unreasonable amount of effort. I don’t know the process, I don’t know how to start, which literature to look at for resources, or for models, I’m not sure where the line between concision and complexity is in academic prose, and so forth. That’s the kind of knowledge that I’m certain I could get out of graduate education. And perhaps I’ve been a technical writer for too long, but I think not being able to “write like a scholar” makes it hard to participate in scholarly discussions.

The Remains of the Practice

I’m not sure where this leaves me. I’m thinking about seeing if I can take a seminar and a methods class at CUNY in the next year I might be able to get what I need. The right collaborative project might be a good way to build the required skills, but that’s even more complicated. As far as using the blog/wiki to build and participate in a conversation about new media practices, collaboration, and digital labor practices… there is much work left to be done.

I was reading an Ian M. Banks novel, `The Use of Weapons <>`_, and there’s a scene where the main character reports on having spent a few years “trying to become a poet.” And we get this very idyllic tale of him surrounding himself with beauty and simplicity. It didn’t work for the character and I suspect it wouldn’t work for you.

This reminds me of a post I wrote some time ago that made the argument that poems are made of words rather than images or some sort of spiritually inspired emotional state. In short, poetry is about form, structure, and the conveyance of meaning at the level of the word and that “transcendence” doesn’t really play into the craft or purpose of poetry. Or at least, poetry is not exceptional among literary forms in this regard. I think that this is basically true, and is probably a good way of approaching creative writing and texts in general. Maybe this is just a tychoish thing.

Here’s a corollary, and I don’t think that it’s too contradictory even though it nearly sounds it:

Poetry, and texts in general, exist in the real world and require a purpose to succeed. Poets don’t just spend a lot of time “living like a poet” and are then write poems that grow from these experiences. Writing well requires some skills and some basic training, but beyond that foundation writing needs a purpose or a goal. It’s easy to see how this might be true in prose forms, but I think the exact same is true of poetry. Perhaps more so.

The character in the novel was attempting to achieve some sort of aesthetic, working from an idea of “how poets should work.” While it can be hard to learn what the poet’s ulterior purpose is, that is a different issue. The most important thing is that you have something to say, regardless of the form.

Hear Hear!

Over the past few weeks, I have developed (redeveloped?) the habit of pushing through a few hundred words of fiction writing a day on the train. If nothing else, this means I get a few pages done a day. I sometimes wish that I were able to write more, writing something is better than nothing, and I’m within a chapter and some change of the end of this beast, so I’ll take it. Some, dare I say most, days the writing is pretty easy, but it can get a bit rough. The problem is really when the writing is impossible. After all, if writing were easy, than we wouldn’t really think of it as work.

Most of the time, I don’t feel “blocked,” but I got close last week. I got to the end of a section and I realized I was in a bit of a corner. I’d changed the order of a few little events, and I didn’t think it would change much.

Except it did, which left me pretty stuck.

It wasn’t an unsolvable problem, but because I was faced with writing a scene under a different set of assumptions than the one I’d been thinking about, I didn’t know how to proceed. My solution was to take a step back, think about things, and then redesign the next scene so that it accomplished what I needed. This took a day or two.

Most of the time the only real marker for progress in writing is in “number of words recorded,” but the truth is this is the fun part of writing. The hard part is, and the part that I had gotten stuck in was, figuring out what’s worth writing. Here are some interesting lessons about writing for your consideration:

• Sometimes the most productive thing you can do as a writer is to not write and spend time figure out what doesn’t need to be said. It doesn’t make your writing longer, but it does make your writing more clear and more useful as a result.

• As a corallary, sometimes the most important thing you can do to a text is remove stuff that is distracting.

• Although having too many “open projects” on your plate can make you feel like you’re spread too thin, it’s true that having a lot of things in the air increases your chance of getting thigns done, because having multiple projects in different stages lets you get more work done in general.

  Sometimes the best way to solve these kinds of problems with writing is to take a break and go for a walk. Or a couple of walks. This is difficult to do on the train and can be hard to practice effectively in more conventional situations life. What’s the difference between taking a break to clear your mind, and breaking your writing ritual/habit? It’s hard to say.

If you do it right, the great thing is that after a break and some serious thinking time, a clear mind makes it possible to get past bigger challenges accomplish something important. I’ll leave the judgements of “how much time away is enough,” and “how much time is too much,” to the reader (and myself!) as an exercise, but don’t always be afraid of taking a break.

And if you won’t, I won’t either.

Onward and Upward!

I’m a writer. I spend most of my day sitting in front of a computer, with an open text editing program, and I write things that hopefully--after a bit of editorial work--will be useful, enlightening, and/or entertaining as appropriate. I’ve been doing this since I was a teenager and frankly it never seemed to be particularly notable a skill. The fact that I came of age with the Internet a member of its native participant-driven textual culture had a profound effect, without question. This is a difficult lineage to manage and integrate.

Obviously I’m conflicted: on the one hand I think that the Internet has been great for allowing people like me to figure out how to write. I am forever thankful for the opportunities and conversations that the Internet has provided for me as a writer. At the same time, the Internet, and particularly the emergence of “Social Media” as a phenomena complicates what I do and how my work is valued.

Let’s be totally clear. I’m not exactly saying “Dear Internet, Leave content generation to the professionals,” but rather something closer to “Dear Internet, Let’s not distribute the responsibility of content generation too thinly, and have it come back to bite us in the ass.” Let me elaborate these fears and concerns a bit:

I’m afraid that as it becomes easier and easier to generate content, more will start creating things, and there will be more and more text and that will lead to all sorts of market-related problems, as in a vicious cycle. If we get too used to crowd sourcing content, it’s not clear to me that the idea of “paying writers for their efforts,” will endure. Furthermore, I worry that as the amount of content grows, it will be harder for new content to get exposure and the general audience will become so fragmented that it will be increasingly difficult to generate income from such niche groups.

Some of these fears are probably realistic: figuring out how we will need to work in order to our jobs in an uncertain future is always difficult. Some are not: writing has never been a particularly profitable or economically viable project, and capturing audience is arguably easier in the networked era.

The answer to these questions is universally: we’ll have to wait and see, and in the mean time, experimenting with different and possibly better ways of working. My apologies for this rip-off, but it’s better to live and work as if we’re living in the early days of an exciting new era, rather than the dying days of a faltering regime.

Perhaps the more interesting implication of this doesn’t stem from asking “how will today’s (and yesterday’s) writers survive in the forthcoming age,” but rather “how do these changes affect writing itself.” If I don’t have an answer to the economic question, I definitely don’t have an answer to the literary question. I’m hoping some of you do.

As an interesting peak behind the curtain, this post was mostly inspired as a reaction to this piece of popular criticism that drove me batty. It’s not a bad piece and I think my objections are largely style and form related rather than political. Perhaps I’m responding to the tropes of fan writing, and in retrospect my critique of this piece isn’t particularly relevant here. But that article might provide good fodder for discussion. I look forward to your thoughts in comments or on a wiki page.

Onward and Upward!

I spent a lot of formative time in high school and college listening to writing teachers and would be mentors tell me that I was too sloppy or too disorganized to write effectively. They were probably right. Furthermore, this is probably not something that I think I’ve been able to keep secret from anyone who has read my blog for any measurable period of time. (Though I do think most of my more recent entries are better than nearly all of my early entries.) What no one really dared to tell me, are probably the most important things I’ve learned as a writer:

• First, that editors are not only essential to the writing process, but that there’s something fundamentally wrong if something leaves the original author and is handed to final readers without passing through at least one editor, and often more.
• Second, the skill of writing isn’t necessarily being able to write artful sentences, or being able to perfectly apply all of the rules of grammar (which, aren’t detrimental to the craft of writing). No, writing is about being able to get things written. Writing is pobably about being able to do research while keeping in mind the parameters of the project and ending up with a few paragraphs on a given topic that make sense and enlighten more than they confuse. That is considerably more rare.

The problem, and I wish I had a solution for this, is that there is no real way to teach people to write and to love writing. Exposing people to lots of examples of writing (i.e. literature) is helpful in teaching people to read and cherish the practice of reading. Unfortunately, I think reading and writing pull on vastly different skills. And while readers have a useful and required prospective on the text, readers who don’t write often provide ambiguous and difficult to assimilate feedback.¹

Fundamentally, I think, readers live on the plane of words, and writers--at least writer’s like me--live on the plane of paragraphs. And then there’s the whole issue of confusing a love of reading with a need or desire to write, but that’s another story for another time.

The way, I think, to learn how to write better is to write a lot of crappy stuff and learn how to “fail” better and more gracefully. Blogging has and is a great tool for me in this regard, but it’s not a cure-all, and I think integrating blogging in the writing curriculum is a difficult project that requires a very nuanced view of blogging, and the right set of learning objective. Beyond this, the project of learning to write and learning to write “better” is one that I’m not sure how to properly facilitate in myself or in others.

At the end of the day, I think it’s important to realize that growth as a writer isn’t the kind of thing that happens quickly. Being a writer is a life-long project with slow and steady improvement, minor regressions, stunning breakthroughs, dashed hopes, and tactical successes.

Onward and Upward!

I don’t read romance literature.

It’s not my thing, which isn’t saying much: there’s a lot of literature that I don’t tend to consider “my thing,” for one reason or another. I don’t really read fantasy, or horror, and I’m even picky within science fiction. There are enough books out there and there is only so much time. At least that’s what I tell myself.

Nevertheless, Susan Groppi wrote a great post about coming out as a reader of romance that I found useful. I’m also reminded of comments that N. K. Jemison made about the in progress merging of the fantasy and romance genres (sorry if I’ve miss-cited this), and I’ve been thinking about how I view Romance fiction, and perhaps a bit more generally about genre fiction ghettos.

In general, I think Romance has merit, both because it’s entrancing and I think fiction which captures people’s imaginations and interest I worthwhile and important to not dismiss because it’s commercial, or the readership/writers are largely women. There are potential problems with romance, at least insofar as we typically envision it: with strong hetero tendencies, an idealization of monogamy as a social practice and marriage as an institution, and the potential to accept a very conventional conceptualization of gender. I’m sure some romance literature has been able to engage and trouble these troupes productively, but I think it’s a potential concern.

Having said that, I’m not sure that Romance has a lot of future as a genre. This is to say that I think many of the elements of romance--female characters, and an engagement with sexuality and relationships--will increasingly merge into other genres. Romance as an independent genre will linger on, but I think the “cool stuff happening in the Romance field,” will probably eventually move out into corners of other genres: thriller, fantasy, maybe science fiction.

Actually, as I think about this, it’s probably backwards. I think it’s less that Romance doesn’t have a future, as it is that the future of most popular literature lies in engaging with romance-elements and other aspects of romance stories the context of non-romance specific styles. This kind of thing is happening, and I think it’ll probably continue to happen.

I wish I could speak with greater certainty about the reasons why romance literature enjoy higher readership, or what elements of romance stories can be transplanted to other genres, but I think these are probably questions which are beyond the scope of this post. Thanks for reading!