{reading and writing in} The Age of Sand

Matt Bell is a terrific writer and an exemplar of ‘born digital.’ If you follow writing circles online you will find Matt. That’s one reason  -two, actually – I’m watching his online writing exercise this week at “Everday Genius,” the online journal of the chapbook publisher Publishing Genius.

Matt’s week at “Everyday Genius” will begin with him starting a story on Monday, seeded from his “failure files” (his writing block isn’t so much as an ability to write, but an inability to write something he feels worthwhile to publish, he explains), then turning it over to two different authors over the course of the week, then over to the community at large, and then back to Matt on Friday to revise before they publish the final story on the site.

I like this exercise because it gives the author some level of control while mimicking not just collaborative writing, but the editorial process to a degree. At the very least it takes the writer out of his vacuum while leaving him in control of the final product.

Collaborative writing has been around for a long time. I have several books of not-bad attempts at it. Penguin UK (a leader among publishers in terms of their online work) recently attempted and failed a massive collaborative writing exercise, using a Wiki. Truthfully, it was too massive and showman-like to produce anything good, but perhaps served its purpose in the iterative sense of moving forward with possibilities. Ultimately though, too many cooks in the pot at the least, and I think that the exercise demonstrated that a wiki is not a place for “writing” so much as a place for “documenting.”

What’s interesting about “Everyday Genius’s” project is that it puts a lone writer on the line. This is brave because creative writing at its best comes from deep places within, yet the form Matt is doing this in is something akin to an art installation where the artist lives in a glass booth baring all to the world around him.

Here’s where the tools come in to play. Matt will be writing his story, along with his collaborators, on software called “EtherPad” (I’m not sure if they’ll be using their own installation of Etherpad, which went Opensource when Google bought the company who created it last year, but there’s an installation of it called “MeetingWords” available freely online).

The beauty of Etherpad is that it truly is real-time and it’s very easy to see who is doing what to the text. I’ve used it before to edit articles at “Dispatches” at Words Without Borders (as well its decidedly less real-time brethren, Writeboard). Writing on Etherpad is fun to watch, if a little eerie at first, as another person’s writing appears before your eyes. The software has a chat function where writers can talk about what they’re writing. Obviously there are implications here for all sorts of uses (n.b. Google Wave).

But what I think is really interesting – taking it back down to earth with “Everyday Genius’s” purpose – is how it affects one’s writing in a creative or critical sense. Is it possible that this can make for better writing? I know that from my perspective as an editor working with a writer it was incredibly productive.

One of the things I’ve been a student of over the past seven years of building Websites is watching how people interact with technology: how technology influences what they write; for instance, the difference between articles, blog posts, micro-blog posts, as an enabler or hindrance to certain types of writing. It’s plain to see that a piece written outside of the Web entirely (e.g. on MS Word, ugh) may be entirely different than one written in the control panel of a content management system or a bookmarklet popup. That might be due to technological noise – the inhibiting feel of a text-editor – but I think there’s a time factor at play as well.

As an aside of sorts, I often have to communicate to my Web design clients my design conceptions for their site. In the past I typically created a static mockup of the site and sent it to the client via email. Sometimes my design ideas don’t jive with the client’s expectations or there’s some element that I want the client to react to without me prompting them with expectations. This rarely works out well or smoothly, but I found that the more time that went by between when I sent the mockup to our discussion of it, the issues were always amplified to the same degree.

Lately I’ve begun to only reveal the design with the client when I have them on the phone, reviewing the designs then and there and making small changes as part of our conversation and instantly putting those changes up for them to see. What before seemed monumental tends to evaporate into just part of the discussion, even if the result is a bit less polished than it might have been the old way.

Writing sometimes loses its way. That’s why we have editors. But as any writer knows, it hurts quite a bit to see your words changed for you. I think shortening the distance between writer and editor, or writer and collaborator may stand to improve writing in general and the possibility of a form of writing that never has been able to get out of the gate. “Everyday Genius’s” exercise, along with sites like BookOven may go along way to getting us there.

Links:

Matt Bell, Everyday Genius, Matt’s first post on the writing project, The Writing Project (it is at MeetingWords).

BookOven (whom I’ll be writing about soon), The Penguin UK Blog, EtherPad landing page