8 - Creative writing and new media

Summary

From page to screen, from human to computer

Writing has always involved forms of technology, whether the pen, the typewriter or the computer. But the growth of new media technologies is offering many exciting possibilities for experimentation and innovation in creative writing. In new media writing – or networked and programmable writing, e-literature or digital writing as it is variously called – the screen replaces the page. In such writing environments we can make words kinetic, pursue new forms of interactivity and link disparate web pages. We can also interweave text, sound and image, and create environments in which readers/viewers transform texts through their bodily movements. Most radically, we can program the computer to compose fiction or poetry, thereby shifting our conception of authorship. Consequently, new media writing is a very diverse and challenging field which stretches from animated poetry and interactive fiction to computer-generated text and computer-interactive installations.

However, new media writing does not constitute a break with the literary tradition, rather it shows the influence of twentieth-century experimental writing from the modernists to the postmodernists. It incorporates techniques drawn from modernist collage, and visual and sound poetry, as well as the syntactical dislocations of American Language poetry. It can project alternative storylines like those we find in postmodern fiction, though to a higher degree of complexity, and its linking system provides an excellent environment for cross-genre writing, that is writing which mixes prose and poetry or critical and creative writing.