Abel, Jessica. Out on the Wire: Uncovering the Secrets of Radio’s New Masters of Story with Ira Glass.Broadway Books, 2015.
Excellent look at the process of writing for podcasts. Strongly considering for a class.
Alexander, Jonathan and Jaqueline Alexander. The Routledge Handbook of Digital Writing. Routledge. 2018.
This collection of essays covers a wide range of topics from the writing process with multimodal writing, the impact of the concepts of authorship and originality (including a discussion of copyright) and the future role of computers in generating text.
Alison, Jane. Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative, Catapult, 2019.
Interesting theory of narrative; analysis needs deeper explination.
Aston, Judith, Sandra Gaudenzi, and Mandy Rose. I-Docs: The Evolving Practices of Interactive Documentary, Wallflower Press, 2017.
Essential look at iDocs. Very applicable to Comp.
Bogest, Ian. Persuasive Games, MIT Press, 2007.
This textbook discusses educational theory in relation to video games, suggesting the potential for games lies somewhere between the behaviorist and constructivist camps (inpart depending on the design and purpose of the game). Almost no mention of narrative.
Bucher, John. Storytelling for Virtual Reality: Methods and Principles for Crafting Immersive Narratives, Routledge, 2017.
Solid intro to narrative and potentials.
Clark, Michael Dean, Trent Hergenrader and Joseph Rein. Creative Writing in the Digital Age: Theory, Practice, and Pedagogy, Bloomsbury Academic, 2015.
Collection of essays looking at the physical changes brought to reading and writing by media and the impact of the tools on storytelling.
Collins, Jim. “The Use Values of Narrativity in Digital Cultures.” New Literary History., vol. 44, no. 4, University of Virginia, 2013.
This article looks at the rise of seriality and the reduction of form and length limitations that new media and online publishing opportunities have brought to storytelling: fanfiction has brought opportunities for fans to engage in storywolds (it is no accident that 4 or the 5 top “most loved” books in the 2018 PBS poll were books with strong fandoms who have built out their storyworld). The flexibility, however, also moves video adaptations away from the confines of the 2-hour movie–American Gods, Handmaid’s Tale, and One Hundred Years of Solitude cannot be forced into a 2 hours or a 22-episode “season.”
Drannan, Marie and Yuri Baranovsky, Vlad Baranovsky. Scriptwriting for Web Series. Routledge, 2018.
If I ever teach a class with a major scriptwriting component, this is the book. It walks through the process of finding a premise, building a story arch, designing characters, developing episodes within the arch of a season, writing distinctive, authentic dialogue, and formatting the script.
Gray, Kishonna L and David J Leonard. Woke Gaming: Digital Challenges to Oppression and Social Injustice, U of Washington Press, 2018.
Excellent book covering intention and gaming as well as the level of toxic masculinity that pervades many corners of the video game community (consumers as well as producers).
Hall, Tony. Education, Narrative Technologies and Digital Learning: Designing Storytelling for Creativity with Computing. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.
This book addresses the compatibility of many writing centric technologies to storytelling and narrative. This inclination works for for types of compositions well beyond the personal essay, although my favorite idea in this book is that these technologies (including microblogging and video/audio technologies) have brought us into the Age of Autobiography.
Hartley, Scott. The Fuzzy and the Techie: Why the Liberal Arts Will Rule the Digital World. Houghton Mifflin, 2017.
Similar to In Defense of a Liberal Education but with tech.
Haynes, N. Katherine. Writing Machines. MIT University Press. 2002.
Hellerman, David and Tevis Thomson. Second Quest. http://www.secondquestcomic.com/#intro
Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing, Belnap Press, 2016.
Lambert, Joe. Digital Storytelling: Capturing Lives, Creating Community. Digital Diner, 2002.
Readable introduction to one of the most important digital storytelling curriculum.
McCracken, Ellen. The Serial Podcast and Storytelling in the Digital Age. Routledge, 2017.
Collection of essays that demonstrate how podcasts can flourish as a storytelling — and particularly a serialized storytelling–medium.
McGonigal, Jane. Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World, Jonathan Cape, 2011.
Popular but overly optimistic look at the potential of games for teaching (as opposed to learning).
Miller, Carolyn (Editor). Emerging Genres in New Media Environments. Palgrave McMillan, 2017.
`This collection of essays looks at genre in new media in terms of the changing definition of the term — whether it should be defined by content features, technology, or user experience. There are several essays on illness narratives, which connects to the idea of technology-based communication apps leading into an “age of autobiography.” One of the differences of blogging, in addition to the feedback loops and the ability to reach highly specialized audiences, is the uncertainty of the form something like an illness or quest narrative will take. When someone publishes a traditional narrative, the outcome is generally known; when a blogger begins narrating their journey through a cancer diagnosis, the path the narrative will take (not just the outcome but the length of the path) is completely unknown.
Murray, Janet H. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. MIT Press, 2017.
Update of Murrays 1997 classic– is the update worth repurchasing the book for? YES!!! Major progression–Murray moves her list of descriptors (digital environments are procedural, participatory, spatial, and encyclopedia) to two meaningful equations =>
Participatory + Procedural = Agency
Spatial + Encyclopedic = Immersive
Newkirk, Thomas. Embarrassment and the Emotional Underlife of Learning. Heinemann, 2017.
Key take-aways include things you know (embarrassment silences people and creates anxiety that makes it difficult to learn) and things maybe many of us have not thought about. For example, “grit” or insistence that students “tough out” challenges they encountered in writing is ineffective for many because they are more likely to create if they focus on “play” than work. The most interesting section highlighted modeling conversation tactics for students that keep the focus on the writer or teller of a story rather than take it to the critic. Rather than responding to a text with “If this were my project I might” or “That reminds me of”, Newkirk works with his student to model and reward authentic questions that will encourage the writer to think through their own ideas rather than surrender to the opinions of others. These questions include (but are not limited to:
- How did you figure that out?
- What kind of problems did you come across?
- Where are you going with this piece of writing?
- What are you noticing?
- How did you figure this out?
plus comments/questions that start with phrases like
- You must have…
- It sounds like you…
- I wonder if you…
Oakley, Todd. “Conceptual Blending, Narrative Discourse, and Rhetoric.” Cognitive Linguistics, vol. 9, no. 4, January 1998, www.researchgate.net/publication/228299919_Conceptual_Blending_Narrative_Discourse_and_Rhetoric.
O’Connor, John S. This Time It’s Personal: Teaching Creative Nonfiction, National Council of Teachers of English, 2012.
Great information on narrative as a currency; I would like to see more of a bridge to research-based narratives.
Olson, Randy. Houston, We Have a Narrative: Why Science Needs Story. U of Chicago Press, 2015.
Peary, Alexandra and Tom C. Hunley. Creative Writing Pedagogies for the Twenty-First Century. Southern Illinois University Press. 2015.
A consideration of the pedagogy for creative writing, with a particular focus on providing more direct instruction in writing and genre (including exposing undergraduate students to a variety of writing genres). The book includes one chapter on digital media that extols the values of the collaboration the media encourages.
Phillips. Adrrrea. A Creator’s Guide to Transmedia Storytelling: How to Captivate and Engage Audiences Across Multiple Platforms. McGraw-Hill. 2012.
Great introduction to the concepts and basic techniques and uses of transmedia storytelling. The materials are still valid although the material is beginning to show its age–the introduction of new technologies and the development of different series and genres cannot be covered, so this book would benefit from an update.
Rettberg, Scott and Patricia Tomaszek, Sandy Baldwin. Electronic Literature Communities, Center for Literary Computing, 2015.
This book includes a series of essays looking at the history of electronic literature from its initial roots to the mid-2010s. The essays bring up many of the initial issues, from defining electronic literature to popularizing the format to archiving texts once the technology used for important texts grow dated. The final essay inches toward transmedia storytelling with a closer look at “netprov.”
Reflection: the question of curating and archiving the texts is a major one if this is going to develop into a literature with staying power; however, the use of the “prov” from “improv” does stress that the connection between much of electronic literature and theater — yes, there is a physical form for both a transmedia story and for a play or theatrical performance, but the words on the page are not the event.
Ryan, Marie-Laure. Narrative as Virtual Reality 2: Revisiting Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015.
This book offers the most innovative consideration of introducing interactivity into IFiction; some of the ideas appear dated even 4 years after the original publication, but “old” things are repurposed in new media frequently. For me, this book as two chapters that raise the question as to when and if literature will move to IF that is not game based on a larger scale.
Ryan, Marie-Laure and Jan-Noel Thon. Storyworlds across Media: Toward a Media-Conscious Narratology, University of Nebraska Press, 2014.
Three-part collection of essays looking at how narrative theory is changing as a result of new media. The first explores narrative concepts such as storyworld, narrator, representation of subjectivity, and fictionality. The second deals with issues of multimodality and intermediality; the third explores the relationship between media convergence and transmedial storyworlds.
Vanderslice, Stephanie. Rethinking Creative Writing. National Association of Writers in Education, 2015.
Vanderslice looks at the history of established creative writing pedagogy, much of which is based on the Writers Workshop established at the University of Iowa in the 1940s. The criticisms of the workshop structure are these. First, that the workshop was designed to be used with polished writers in an exclusive graduate program (and is now being used in undergraduate programs and with students who have far less experience and instruction in writing. Second, the workshop structure focuses on the product rather than the process of composing. Third, workshop rules (the writer does not speak, participants discuss a text, often without any input from the writer on their goals for the piece) can foster competitiveness and overly harsh criticism. Finally, some critics (including many editors) complain that the traditional writing workshop “norm” the writing being produced–critiques and feedback reward people who write “literary” prose on serious topics and discourage experimentation or writing “genre” work (romance, scifi, fantasy, westerns, etc).
Vanderslice notes many programs that are making changes, starting with expanding the number of genres offered from the traditional prose, poetry, and playwriting to include media arts, new technologies, creative nonfiction, graphic literature, etc.). Genres like new media often change the dynamics of the writing process because they encourage collaboration and early feedback (because it is cheaper to make changes in the planning level than the production level).
Another important shift Vanderslice advocates is using creative writing classes to teach students how to live a creative life — not in an existential way, but in a “pay the rent” way. College teaching jobs are scarce, as are editing jobs and staff writing positions, but the demand for creative minds who understand writing and narrative is out there if the writer opens their expectations and maybe learns skills beyond traditional writing–if not coding itself, for example, than at least an understanding of what coding can do.
Response: Many of the criticisms Vanderslice notes are relevant not only to new media but for traditional composition classrooms. Asking students to give each other feedback before all the writing can be finished seems a logical way to inspire stronger or less obvious ideas for the direction of a text-in-progress (before hours are spent on a less interesting path and before a writer becomes less entrenched in an idea).
Vee, Annette. Coding Literacy: How Computer Programming Is Changing Writing, MIT Press, 2017.
Raises the question about how much computers are capable of taking over the grunt work in writing.https://portfolio.jccc.edu/creativewritinginnewmedia/2019/03/20/week-9-will-your-computer-write-your-paper-for-you/
Warner, John. Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities, Johns Hopkins Press, 2018.
Warner mostly makes a solid case about the limitations of the high school standby 5-paragraph theme, noting it is particularly out of step in the digital age.
Zeman, Nicholas B. Storytelling for Interactive Digital Media and Video Games, A.K. Peters, 2017.
If a person is looking for a textbook, this provides a solid introduction to narrative and media; if you have a solid foundation in the basics, you are probably not the audience. Interesting exercises.