Teaching digital fiction: integrating experimental writing and current technologies

R Lyle Skains

doi:10.1057/s41599-019-0223-z

Abstract

Today’s creative writers are immersed in a multiplicative, multimodal—digital—universe. It requires “multiliteracies”, all in a constantly and rapidly evolving technological environment, which are not yet fundamentally integrated into the basic literacy skills entrenched in school learning. How can creative writing instructors in higher education best prepare their students for the real-world contexts of their creative practice? One approach is to integrate the creative writing workshop with a focus on digital and interactive design. This paper outlines a module incorporating multiple literacies into a creative writing course, Playable Fiction, noting the affordances, limitations, and benefits of teaching workshops for writing digital fiction (“born-digital” fiction, composed for and read on digital devices). The researcher took an ethnographical approach to the question, designing a module to encourage creative writing students to experiment with digital fiction, and observing the effects on the students’ attitudes and their coursework. Included is a discussion of the benefits to students of developing multiliteracies and considerations for teaching, including issues of technical know-how and the lack of infrastructural support. Finally, the paper describes the model class taught to second-year and third-year undergraduates in the ‘Games Design and Professional Writing' programs at Bangor University, in the UK, including marking recommendations and reading list advice.

Highlights

The prevailing notion of creative writing workshops in higher education—that our creative writing students are all going to become short fiction writers and novelists—is shortsighted, it is backwards-facing
This paper offers a model for teaching digital fiction workshops for undergraduate instructors
There is a general attitude around digital media that they are “killing” the book, or that they herald “a movement away from the traditional text-based methods of teaching and executing creative writing

Summary

Introduction

The prevailing notion of creative writing workshops in higher education—that our creative writing students are all going to become short fiction writers and novelists—is shortsighted, it is backwards-facing. A design-focused approach engages students in multiliteracies holistically, encouraging them to practice a process of development for their work that closely resembles the draftworkshop-revise creative writing process we have taught for decades It reaches further, asking students to: develop awareness of all the methods of communication at their disposal; analyze their audience, market, and communication media; choose communication methods and modes that best suit their message and audience; construct texts that make the best use of these options—and, at their best, create a text that adds these media and modes together, but combines them in such a way that their meanings, when (re-)constructed by the reader, are multiplicative (Lemke, 1998), the whole more than the sum of its parts. Create a simple story, such as a joke or recent event, to get familiar with creating links and passages

Week 5

Findings

Conclusion