Writers and readers

I had the pleasure today of talking with people in the Intelligent Narrative Computing group at Georgia Tech, and the wonderful conversation we had got me thinking about the relationship between readers and writers.

The act of writing a story is a human activity quite distinct from the act of reading a story. If you’ve written stories, you know that it’s a kind of process of discovery. As soon as you start writing, all sorts things start to emerge — characters, situations, conflicts, dramatic arcs — that surprise you yourself, the author. In a way, you are writing a travelogue into your own mind, a place that may turn out to be foreign and exotic even to yourself.

Reading is also a process of discovery, but of a very different kind, since the reader experiences the story as a received object. We tend to think of this transaction as a duality: Traditionally, there is a “writer” and a “reader”, and nothing in between. And this is generally true for all of the traditional arts. The painter or sculptor is distinct from the museum-goer, just as the song writer is distinct from the song listener.

But in music we have a concept of jazz improvisation. Richard Rodgers may write one version of his lovely melody for “My Favorite Things”, but then John Coltrane and his quartet can turn it into quite a different object of beauty.

Could we have jazz writing, in which the reader is also a writer? There are stories that are structured in a way as to suggest such an activity. If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco’s Six Walks in the Fictional Woods are each structured so as to imply a kind of call and response, a deliberate turning around of the camera to invite the reader in as an active participant, although in both cases this “reader participation” is an illusion.

There are music games, such as Guitar Hero, that put the listener of music into the pose of performer. I wonder whether there can be some analog game for storytelling. Perhaps a card came in which the bones of a story are laid out, and the player is charged with constructing a plausible story that connects the dots. It could even be a cooperative game, in which people form teams, as we do when we solve a jigsaw puzzle.

This could be an interesting way to invite readers to understand what makes a story work. For example, the player could be presented with the pieces that constitute a hero’s journey, including the mentor, the villain, the conflict between what the hero thinks he/she wants and what he/she actually needs, the necessary suffering, the second-act low, the redemptive third act.

People might even come to see what makes great writing work, such as the way Aaron Sorkin structured The Social Network as a variation on the classic hero’s journey, but one in which the hero is deprived of a true mentor (and therefore can never find a moral center).