Monday, March 14, 2011

The Bias against Multimedia Writing

As I've been working on my own multimedia fiction, I've been looking for inspiration. I want to see what different authors have done with the form, and how they have done it. I'm always excited to see, along with the prose, experiments in graphics (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, The Collected Works of T.S. Spivet, Breakfast of Champions, etc), typography (House of Leaves, The Raw Shark Texts, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, etc), the book design itself (The Original of Laura, Flatland, Tree of Codes), or unusual formats (stories told through Facebook as we've seen, Egan's powerpoint chapter, etc).


Despite my love for multimedia writing, I find it enormously difficult to find works of this sort, both online and in the stores. I'm left scouring the Internet for books deemed similar to the ones I have already read, and I feel like I've nearly exhausted those recommendations. My last resort is often to just go to a bookstore, and flip through the pages of novels that look like they might be multimedia candidates. This method is of course extremely inefficient and whenever a bookseller sees me doing this, I feel like an idiot. I almost want to say, "I'm not a lazy reader looking for pictures. I'm a writer looking for inspiration." But I never do. The embarrassment is worth some of the recent finds I've located: Criss Cross, The Last Invisible Boy, The Invention of Hugo Cabret.


Do you have any recommendations of multimedia writing? How do you find the model works for the writing you want to accomplish?

No comments:

Post a Comment