Fireside Chat: Christopher Higgs on Transmedia Storytelling

Christopher Higgs is one of my favorite minds and a real hero of art and literature. His output is constantly invigorating and thought-provoking from his brightstupidconfetti  curations, his series of posts on HTMLGiant concerning the nature of experimental literature, his short fiction, and his tremendous novel The Complete Works of Marvin K. Mooney. Recently Mr. Higgs and I chatted about some of the implications of his April 14th HTMLGiant post What Could Small/Micro/Indie Presses Learn From the Concept of Transmedia Storytelling? 

Q: We’re coming at this from the point of view of publishing, so, would you talk a little about where you see the text itself fitting in with the rest of the media? Does the other media offshoot from the text (as in an audio book or a trailer) or is the text potentially conceived as just one piece of a larger project? Is there any concern that the print becomes the forgotten part of the equation?

A: Yes, I would imagine the text being only one node in the overall assemblage.  Since different media offer different strengths and weaknesses, I imagine manipulating or pressing the boundaries might yield interesting work.  For instance, perhaps part of the transmedia story “takes place” (for lack of a better phrase) on soundcloud, while another part takes place on flicker, another on youtube, another on tumbler,perhaps there are fliers or stickers that add to the narrative, which the producer would arrange to have posted in various cities across the globe.  At this point, the threat of losing the text is real, but only if you think of it that way, only if you privilege the text.  I don’t see this model working successfully if the text is held as sacred. It almost requires that the text share the limelight.  Since it’s NBA finals season, this has got me thinking about the difference between a team that relies on one superstar player versus a team that plays as a team. Transmedia storytelling is like the latter.  You have to think of the project as a project, a team, rather than think of the text as sovereign and the other stuff as extra.  Thus, I see the text and the other media working harmoniously as individual nodes in a nonhierarchical assemblage.  In fact, this model doesn’t actually threaten the text, it merely extends the definition of “the text” to include other media.

Q: The Jenkins hand out you linked to mentions “expanding markets” and “action figures.” He does so in the context of allowing the audience to participate in new ways, but it does seem there is a fine line between marketing and an interesting, exciting way of telling a story. Is there any concern about becoming George Lucas—where aspects of a book are written not out of some artistic impulse but where characters or events in the original texts are conceived by how well the spin offs will sell?

A:  Small press attempts at incorporating transmedia storytelling would need to negotiate the relevance of expanding markets and producing action figures.  It seems to me that expanding markets is a good idea for any level of storytelling: the larger the audience the better.  But as far as merchandising goes, I’m not sure that applies to small press ventures, although it would certainly be interesting to see how these might emerge.  As far as “becoming George Lucas” (that’s agreat phrase, by the way) it would seem to me that small press folks by virtue of being small press folks would find more creative and interesting ways to manage spin-offs rather than defer to them, in other words I imagine disallowing the marketing end to dictate the creative production as a general rule.

Q: Jenkins uses the examples of large, multi-narrative tales. I’m writing a novel now with a lot of vastness in it—time and characters and events— and I’m excited about the possibilities raised by this proposal of yours—but I wonder how you see smaller novels or novels that focus less on stories and events or even what people think of as a ‘literary realist’ novel fitting into this approach?

A: I think the possibilities and potential for imbricating experimental fiction and transmedia storytelling is vast – perhaps even greater than conventional, or as you put it “literary realist” work, because experimental work approaches the idea of storytelling differently.  If the narrative is fragmented to begin with that would lends itself to spreading across multiple medias, I would think.

Q: Have you put any serious thought into specific ways The Complete Works of Marvin K. Mooney could be translated into different media? It seems like that particular novel would lend itself particularly well.

A: Yeah, I mean, Ken [Baumann, publisher of Sator Press] and I tried to do a little of this transmedia stuff.  We made various cryptic videos (one, two, three), we made a cryptic website that appeared before the official release of the book, which is now the official hub, but before it had a bunch of strange messages and pictures and stuff that tried to push this mysterious “who is Marvin K. Mooney” narrative, we also tried to do this blog comment bomb thing where Marvin K. Mooney showed up in various comment threads, all of this in the hopes of building a kind of pre-release, pre-reveal hype.  Also, there’s the audiobook, which is more a performance piece slash re-imagining of the novel than your typical author-reads-text-quietly type of thing.  All of this was an experiment along transmedia lines.  But it came before I had studied any of Jenkins’s work.  And it came after the book had already been written.  To really succeed at transmedia storytelling, I think the transmedia element needs to be part of the original vision, needs to be part of the creation process from the very beginning.

Q: The focus of your post was on small presses so I may as well ask to what extent funding as a limitation in all of this? Especially with the smaller small presses?

A: Creative thinking trumps financial shortcomings 9 out of 10 times.  Makes me think of the independent film movement that caught fire in the 90s: these people with no money started making movies that embraced the fact that they had no money.  Clerks, Blair Witch Project, etc.  They didn’t let the absence of funding stop them from making important work.  Same should apply for publishing.

Q: Where does the idea of authorship fit into all of this? Is this idea tending toward a series of collaborations with equal say over a story? Or would a publisher potentially become the “producer”? That makes me a little itchy—does it make you at all itchy?

A: This is a good question, with a bunch of possible answers.  I could envision a project where the publisher serves as “the producer” in the sense of orchestrating the various media components, with a single author or multiple authors producing the individual content.  There could be some interesting multi-author or team-author work.  In that sense, it would require a different way of thinking about authorship.  On the other hand, although it would be super challenging for one author to produce all of the various media components of a transmedia story, perhaps that’s the kind of challenge an independent writer or publisher might best be suited.

Q: I know along with film and television that musicians like Trent Reznor and Radiohead have embraced creative thinking in this direction. I wonder to what extent  this owed to the fact that writers are, generally, isolated with their work whereas TV and film and pop groups are necessarily collaborative on many levels? As much as this is about thinking about publishing in a broader way should writers begin thinking more collectively?

A: Yes.  Exactly.  Collaboration holds possibilities beyond the scope of what a single author can produce.  Recently, I participated in a collective project called Pushcorpse for the print journal No Colony.  Sixty-five different writers contributed something like 100 words to a single story, and the final product is a stunning ensemble of riotously diverse voices.  That’s just one example, but what it signals is that collective work provides a different scope.  Look at the potency of collective websites like Plumb, or the one I write for, HTMLGiant.  Individual identity is not lost or even compromised by affiliating with collaborative projects like these, in fact, I would argue that the power of affiliation magnifies the intensity of the individual writer.  That’s the first hurdle to overcome: acknowledging that we don’t lose when we team up, we actually gain.  I know for many writers this seems anathema: giving up sovereignty.  Put another way, I think some novelists and poets tend to be novelists and poets rather than filmmakers or musicians because they get sole creative control over their creations.  This works for a certain model of creation, but as I’ve said, transmedia storytelling lends itself best to those who are willing to give up sole creative control and instead embrace the power of collaboration.