Andrea Phillips is an award-winning
transmedia writer, game designer and author. She has worked on projects such as
iOS fitness games Zombies, Run! and The Walk, The Maester's Path for HBO's Game
of Thrones, human rights game America 2049, and the independent commercial ARG
Perplex City. Her projects have variously won the Prix Jeunesse Interactivity
Prize, a Broadband Digital award, a Canadian Screen Award, a BIMA, the Origins
Vanguard Innovation Award, and others. Her book A Creator's Guide to Transmedia
Storytelling is used to teach digital storytelling at universities around the
world.
Her independent work includes the
Kickstarted serial The Daring Adventures of Captain Lucy Smokeheart and The
McKinnon Account, a short story that unfolds in your email inbox. Her debut
novel Revision is out on May 5from Fireside Fiction Co. and her short fiction
has been published in Escape Pod and the Jews vs. Aliens anthology.
Andrea dropped in to talk about her new novel - Revision:
Revision is my debut novel, but when I
started it back in 2009, I'd already been a professional writer for four years.
I'd written stories for games, interactive experiences, and sprawling film and
TV marketing campaigns. I'd done things I couldn't have dreamed were possible
when I was a little girl: recruited people into my secret conspiracies, sent
them to pick up confidential documents from a stranger on a street corner, made
my audience feel responsible for an innocent (fictional!) woman's murder. Good
times!
And I thought, I thought, after all that,
writing a novel should be dead simple. Right? It's only one piece to keep track
of, after all: in my case, one Scrivener file. A piece of cake when you're used
to telling stories through fragments of evidence, social media streams and
video clips and emails. You don't need to worry about your readers making an
unexpected choice and throwing the story in a whole different and unexpected
direction. You are the god of that universe, and everything bows to your will.
HAH! I'm sure you see where this is going.
Sure, I had a good handle on some important
tools in the writers' toolbox — particularly the fine art of characterization.
An alternate reality game is a performance art as much as a written one, and in
order to develop distinct styles and voices for your characters, you wind up
deeply embedded in their minds. And that translates really well to novels, it
turns out. As a writer, when you're clear on what all of your characters want
and why they make the choices they do, the work only benefits from it.
But other elements translate poorly.
Pacing, for example. I'm used to writing short and snappy for a digital
audience. I've had to convey even the most complex plot points in a
three-paragraph blog post or email, a 30-second video script, even a single
Tweet. But a novel is a longer love affair. It needs space for the action to
breathe; even the most action-packed adventure novels aren't all speedboat
chases and leaping from helicopter. You need that other stuff so the action
means something.
And the actual process is different, too.
There are no "notes from the client." There's just you and the page
and your brain, which is wonderful in that there's nobody to stomp all over
your creative vision, smashing the metaphors and leaving muddy footprints on
all your lovingly polished subtext.
But it's horrible, too, in that… you are
the god of that universe, and so the universe is only as good as you are. If
you're stuck, nobody else can pull you out. In a good collaboration, everyone
is challenged to produce a whole far greater than the sum of its parts. When
it's just you, it's just you.
But the
absolute best part of these two different kinds of writing are identical: it's
the audience. There is no thrill, no delight, no electric joy like knowing that
you have made a reader feel something.
That you reached out through the infinite spaces between us and touched someone
else. A difficult task no matter what you're writing, but when it works,
everything else just falls away.
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