My Digital Evolution in Fiction

I’ve been writing books of fiction for 20 years now, and writing digital fiction for around seven; moving online has had as profound an effect on me as publishing my first book did, if not more. Moving online has forced me to consider the future of publishing -- indeed, the future of writing and reading itself -- much more profoundly than I could ever have anticipated.

For me, the idea of the World Wide Web as a repository for knowledge, a vast open access library containing every text ever written in every language ever spoken, is a utopian ideal. And this ideal leads me to question the place of the book in our culture.

Of course, I’d never be able to part with my children’s books, books by friends, favorite books, let alone books I’ve written myself. This is not what I’m saying.

Many people are deeply attached to books, for reasons much more complex than the simple statement “I like to read” could ever convey. The book-lined room is an interior design status symbol as meaning-laden as the most expensive hand-printed wallpaper; the desk surrounded by books is as potent an image of intellect as that photograph of Einstein with his hair standing on end.

But a book is nothing more than a piece of technology for reading, created by a printing press, moved from warehouse to retailer to reader via a network of transport technology, thus conveying the writer’s words to you in a manner to which you are completely accustomed -- a technology you were taught to use on your mother’s knee, most likely.

As a fiction writer, I’m not really interested in the technological platform itself, be that book, or Internet, or cell phone, or e-reader. What I am interested in is stories. What I am interested in is language; words, crafted and precise and beautiful; and the way that the right words in the right order can create mental pictures as indelible as the greatest film or photograph or painting.

However, words on a page are one thing, words on a computer screen are another, and for me the movement of literature from page to screen will only really start to happen when writers and publishers and readers come fully awake to the potential of new media for creating hybrid forms: fiction for iPods that combines pictures, music, and sound with compelling stories; stories for phones that make the most of the fact that many people have a phone in their pockets at all times; networked fiction that moves across social networks and beyond, drawing readers en route. All these new forms will be able to incorporate reader response in ways as yet unimagined.

Pundits may bemoan the fact that young people are reading fewer books, but for the under-twenties, the born-digital generation, the acts of reading and writing have been fundamentally altered by the digital age already, and there’s no turning back the clock on that.

With this in mind, it could be argued that the novel, defined as a single work by a single author aimed at the solitary reader published on paper using fixed print type, is a relic of a cultural moment, a moment that lasted more than 250 years but, in the context of our shared history of story-telling, a moment nonetheless.

Mobile phone technology on its own is already capable of integrating story and community, writer and reader, providing a platform for interactivity and response that could make sitting alone in a room reading a book seem like one of the most anti-social activities of all time (although of course that’s why we love to read, and that’s why I love to write!).

However, as we know, television did not destroy radio, video did not destroy movies, just as iTunes did not kill music -- quite the contrary. Good writing must jostle to find its place on the media shelf; as a writer and reader I find the challenges we face hugely exciting.

— Kate Pullinger, works both in print and new media. Her most recent novels include A Little Stranger (2006), Weird Sister (1999), and the short-story collection My Life as a Girl in a Men's Prison (1997).