Abstract
Many creative writers are turning to digital media and multimodal composition as an emerging genre of storytelling; many, however, do not have sufficient familiarity with digital tools to compose digital texts. Digital literacy is still an emerging area of pedagogy; online literacy and multimedia composition are becoming more prominent in classrooms, and deeper understanding of the effects of these tools on individual students and their work is crucial to development of teaching practice. Tacit knowledge of written narrative alone does not permit the creative writer to fully realize the narrative possibilities inherent in the multimodal form. This paper communicates the results of a practice-based research project, Færwhile, conducted expressly to examine the changes wrought in the creative writer’s process and understanding of narrative by shifting to a multimodal, digital composition process. In this paper, I analyze my creative works prior, during, and after development of explicit knowledge of digital fiction and digital composition tool, and discuss how internalizing this explicit knowledge alters the creative composition process. These conclusions, drawn from an in-depth experimentation for the express purposes of research, have implications not only for individual creative writers, but for students and teachers moving into multimodal forms of digital communication.
4. Conclusion
Jim Porter, in his description of his evolution from pencil-and-paper writer to self-described “cyberwriter,” stated that:
The technological past matters. It shapes the writer and writes the body in significant ways — etching itself on the writer’s consciousness and body, influencing how the writer learns to compose and how the writer communicates in a social milieu. Our ideologies about writing, about composing, about rhetorical situation are formed in these various technological pasts, etched by various technologies (2003, p. 390).
Technology etched itself into my composition process, evolving it from monomodal to multimodal practice. Flower and Hayes’ Cognitive Process Model (1981), as well as my own practice-based methodology (Skains, 2016) has provided a solid framework from which to analyze the effects of this shift in my composition process. The technology of digital media, or the “text-as-apparatus” (Weight, 2006), altered the rhetorical situation in creating these fictional texts; in addition to the familiar rhetorical problem of creating a compelling character-driven narrative, digital media added additional considerations, such as multiple modes, reader interaction, and non-traditional story structures. The difficulties I discovered in transitioning to a digital composition practice parallel those of students attempting to draw upon their print-based composition knowledge in multimodal composition tasks (DePalma & Alexander, 2015).
As my long-term memory, or explicit knowledge, of digital fiction and its affordances developed, my composition practice adapted to these additional dimensions. “[W]hile technology-afforded multimedia tools make it comparatively easy for an author to realize a vivid text, they also make it a multiplicatively more complicated matter to vividly realize an authorial intention” (Nelson, Hull, & Roche-Smith, 2008, p. 416). In creating a digital text, the writer is no longer constrained to making meaning solely through written language. The new digital media are exciting, allowing writers to create meaning through whatever mode is most suitable, but at the same time this multiplicity of narrative modes significantly increases the creative decisions that have to be made. The digital writer’s “composing process is a collaborative process of mediating between the prose she writes for the reader, the programs and systems she anticipates underlying that prose. . .In this anticipation, the text endlessly recedes from her control” (Sloane, 2000, p. 40). As I have seen in my own practice, this complexity can lead to changes in narrative structure, narrative perspective, multiplicity in narrative voice, and in the actual world-building for the story. These changes can be both positive in that they present new and under-explored potentials in a writer’s fiction, and negative in that the writer is plunged into unfamiliar territory with many possible paths and very little navigation.
