Notes on How to Create an Interactive Story Website

Dreaming Methods explore ways in which stories can be told through websites. The key lessons to learn from the stories they have are:

1. The combination of images, sound, effects and words
Their clear objective is to tell stories not to create a game, but they have learned valuable lessons from games. The online reader of their story is hooked through simple visual effects delivered through the Flash interface. The method of moving through the story mimics the way a gamer moves through a game: draging the screen left/right and clicking on something to move in.

2. Reducing the number of words
The digital reader has a shorter attention span than the book reader. Dreaming Methods provide an image for the reader to explore after reading little more than a paragraph. When preparing a story for the internet the number of words are limited and should be carefully chosen.

3. Ensuring the hyperlinking is part of the story
The internet allows the user to interact with the story, Dreaming Methods have used hyperlinks to great effect by ensuring that everytime the reader clicks they are drawn a little further into the story and every hyperlink is an integral part of the story.

I recomment reading the stories on their site to learn about how to make a story interactive.

http://www.dreamingmethods.com/

The Naked Author

The digital author needs to be brave, much braver than the traditional author. New digital authors will develop and produce their stories in the public view of the internet. They will bear their artistic souls. They will need to be as brave as a naked author.

Stripping the Story
When a new digital author is sitting in the cafe, drinking espresso and jotting down initial thoughts for their story idea, the author needs to break the story into small parcels of information. Each of these parcels is a small coherent idea, much like a paragraph. Alexander & Levine define these small pieces of information as microcontent (Web 2.0 Storytelling: Emergence of a new Genre). Microcontent differs from a paragraph in 2 main ways. Firstly, microcontent is not restricted to writing: a picture, a short video, an animation, a podcast are all ways of presenting these small parcels of information. Secondly, the author needs to work out how the story will be affected if the microcontent is read out of the ideal order. The majority of information on the internet is found using search engines. The digital reader may happen upon any of the microcontents from the story (possibly from the digital author or from another digital reader's response). The digital reader may now follow the author's directions for reading the story, or may even establish an alternative set of directions for other digital readers to follow.

Employ Characters

Digitally, life can be given to any character. The fastest growing area on the internet is the social networking sector. The digital author needs to develop their audience and the best way to do this is through online social networking and through viral marketing. Developing audiences online is a major business which commands high professionalism; however, the amateur digital author has the advantage that people love supporting the underdog. To establish an online audience the digital author needs to take the following steps. Firstly, establish links with a digital publisher to provide the technical support and marketing guidance - New Digital Storytelling is a project that can provide prospective authors with this support. Secondly, work in multi-author teams. Maintaining multiple characters online personas will take considerable time as will producing simple videos, podcasts, etc.

Finally the story
A digital author (author team) following the steps above will find that the story jotted down in the cafe in paragraph 2 will be changed by the ideas and feedbackreceived. This feedback will come in 2 ways: directly from the digital reader (emails, comments on blog posts, etc.) and indirectly from the digital readers (reuse and parody of the author's ideas, writing and microcontent). The digital author (author team) following this process will produce a better story through this process but it is a difficult process to follow. The author (author team) must have enough self belief to survive the critisism and enough self confidence to understand the reason they will succeed and not the unscrupulous people who steal their ideas is the quality of their writing.

Call for Authors

The way we look for information has changed. The way we look for entertainment has changed. The way we tell stories is changing. Traditional publishers are reducing their risks, they will only take on authors who already have an audience. But how does an author reach their potential audience online? New authors will need to:

• write a blog,
• utilise social networking site,
• bring your ideas to life in pictures for flickr, etc.,
• record podcasts,
• prepare videos for u-tube, etc.,
• pull all these ideas together in a website.

The way we tell stories will change to include all the forms of media you will need to reach your audience AND it will change to allow for the feedback your audience will give you through blogs, emails and their own responses on the internet.

New Digital Storytelling is a project at the cutting edge of these changes. Our team has the expertise to deliver the technology support needed for blogs, social networking, image, podcasts, videos, animations, and websites. We have understanding of storytelling developed through working for traditional publishers. We have experience of online marketing from the 1990 to now.

Are you an author with an idea? Are you struggling to find a publisher? Be prepared for the future and join our team. Email jules.artvan@googlemail.com with an outline of your idea and a sample of your writing.