Last week, I made my first small attempt to publicize this blog. Having sent an annoucement to the Working Stories list, I got a lovely e-mail from Stephen Harlow, who, I believe, became the first blogger to blog about my blog
Stephen turned me onto several interesting story links. I’m just beginning to digest Ulises Ali Mejias’ blog and his concept of Distributed Textual Discourse.
A bit more accessible to my feeble brain is Mark Bernstein, with whom I was already familiar and one of whose articles is linked from this blog’s links section. In a frequently cited piece for A List Apart magazine, “10 Tips on Writing the Living Web,” Bernstein presents Tip No. 6, Let the story unfold:
The Living Web unfolds in time, and as we see each daily revelation we experience its growth as a story. Your arguments and rivalries, your ideas and your passions: all of these grow and shift in time, and these changes become the dramatic arc of your website.
Understand the storyteller’s art and use the technique of narrative to shape the emerging structure of your living site. Foreshadowing hints at future events and expected interests: your vacation, the election campaign, the endless midnight hours at work in the days before the new product ships.
Surprise, an unexpected flash of humor or a sudden change of direction, refreshes and delights. Use links within your work to build depth, for today’s update will someday be your own back story.
People are endlessly fascinating. Write about them with care and feeling and precision. Invented characters, long a staple of newspaper columnists, are rarely seen on the Living Web; creating a fascinating (but imaginary) friend could balance your own character on your site.
When the star of the site is a product or an organization, temper the temptation to reduce the narrative to a series of triumphs. Although you don’t usually want to advertise bad news, your readers know that every enterprise faces challenges and obstacles. Consider sharing a glimpse of your organization’s problems: having seen the challenge, your readers will experience your success more vividly.
Interweave topics and find ways to vary your pacing and tone. Piling tension on tension, anger on rage, is ultimately self-defeating; sooner or later, the writing will demand more from you than you can give and the whole edifice will collapse in boredom or farce. When one topic, however important, overshadows everything else in your site, stop. Change the subject; go somewhere new, if only for a moment. When you return, you and your reader will be fresher and better prepared.