What goes where? – structure, content and medium

Please pick three…

Back in December, I realised that for the structure of the HayleyWorld app to work as I envisaged, I needed to rethink the number of topics for readers to select. Asking readers to select three topics of "conversation" with William Hayley at a time has always felt – and still feels – appropriate: picking one or two at at time would mean too many interruptions, while selecting more than three felt like asking for too much. 

Not a scientific approach, it's true, but sometimes it's worth listening to a gut reaction in the first instance… and then pivoting if, in user testing, you discover you've got it wrong.

Which, realistically, meant a choice between nine or twelve subjects/chapters.

Then my development partner Michael Kowalski mentioned that reaching the end of each topic and going straight on to the next one felt disorientating. He suggested contextual essays at the end of each topic.

I'd always planned to write a contextual essay on each major topic, but… not until much later in the process. Realising that I'd need at least two or three of these in time for user testing rather focused my mind. And changed it.

Recreate George Romney's Four Friends pic with Vangoyourself

Essays or documentaries?

Short, video documentaries, I realised, would probably be more appropriate. They

• would better exploit the capabilities of digital tech
• could ensure that a reader's "relationship" with me-as-biographer would be different in kind and quality than their relationship with Hayley (I want that to feel closer, more direct), and could act to deepen the latter
• can contextualise more effectively, by taking readers to where stories actually happened
• provide the opportunity for me to include a variety of voices and perspectives

and

• (this was a major factor), because I edit video professionally, it feels like they'd be quicker and easier to construct than a well-written essay would be. I could be wrong there, though.

So - decision made. Implementation… will take a while longer, but I'm aiming to complete the first one within the next few weeks, with each short video centring on a couple of stories from William Hayley's life…

Pick three, three times

Meanwhile, I also decided to restrict the number of topics/chapters to nine. However, when I sat down* to do it, I couldn't squeeze all the material in. So there'll be twelve, which means readers will choose three topics, three times during the zoeography (with the last, unchosen three either delivered at the end, or not, as readers decide).

Once I'd done this, I needed to trawl through all 440-odd "pages", checking and amending keywords, to ensure that the right material appears in the right chapter(s): some content is relevant to more than one topic, so will appear in the first pertinent one the reader chooses.

Setting the tone

Then I needed to render the topic/chapter titles into authentically Hayleyan language. This demanded more trawling through material to find appropriate wording, and a lot more sitting down thinking*. 

Got there in the end, though, and the topics/chapters will be (in no particular order, for obvious reasons)…

Marriage & love
Parental duties, children & education
Physic
Death & dying
Sensibility & instances of friendship
Popular applause & emolument
The theatre
Mental infelicities
Religious & political topics
Literary occupations
The arts of painting and sculpture
Home & retirement


Better get down to storyboarding and arranging locations and interviews… If you'd like to be one of my subject experts - please email me.

* For sat down/sitting down and thinking, please read "lying on my back, eyes half-closed, mouth half-open with a small trail of dribble sparkling across my cheek". Essential part of the creative process, innit…

I'm not a story. But what am I?

This week, I'm returning to Galen Strawson's essay "I am not a story" in Zachary Leader's On Life-Writing –  read the essay on Aeon (the comments on the essay make fascinating reading) – about the relationship between story and identity in more depth, because its implications have been preoccupying me.

In the essay, Strawson challenges the veracity of the claim that we are our life stories. He quotes five or six philosophers, psychologists and novelists supporting this idea, including social psychologist Dan P McAdams:

"Beginning in late adolescence and young adulthood, we construct integrative narratives of the self that selectively recall the past and wishfully anticipate the future to provide our lives with some semblance of unity, purpose, and identity. Personal identity is the internalised and evolving life story that each of us is working on as we move through our adult lives… I… do not really know who I am until I have a good understanding of my narrative identity."

philosopher Daniel Dennett: "We try to make all of our material cohere into a single good story. And that story is our autobiography"; and Oliver Sacks "Each of us constructs and lives a “narrative”… this narrative is us"*.

His basic thesis is that while some, possibly even most people – "narrativists" – view their lives in story form, others, the non-narrativists – amongst whom he situates himself – don't.

It's partly a question of whether you are a diachronic or synchronic type: do you think/feel/view the world and your experiences chronologically, or more laterally? Do you, like Strawson and John Updike "‘have the persistent sensation, in my life…, that I am just beginning’"? It's also about whether you believe, along with many others "that self-narration is a good thing, necessary for a full human life", or whether you have doubts or concerns. One Strawson raises – but dismisses – is the suggestion that if we do story our lives, and do so, as certain writers/thinkers claim, to show ourselves in the best possible light, then we are being inauthentic. He dismisses this because evidence suggests that, in general, we don't.

Grand narrative

Overall, his argument is with the idea of a grand, overarching life-story narrative, as opposed to something less coherent, more fragmentary. As I quoted in last week's post:

"For most of us … I think self-knowledge comes best in bits and pieces".

I wrote then about the relationship of narrative, self-knowledge and wisdom, but have come back to the same subject because it's still nagging at me.

Back in the mid-90s, while working as Serpent's Tail's publicist, I was accompanying the author Pagan Kennedy while she was being interviewed by – if I remember rightly – Tim Adams for The Observer.

The story & the self

It wasn't long after Kennedy had published a graphic 'zine detailing her experiences of ovarian cancer. Adams expressed surprise and even a degree of concern about her willingness to publish such a personal experience (though I imagine he'd be less surprised in 2016). As if she was giving away part of her self.

After the interview, Pagan and I discussed this. From what I remember, neither of us felt that telling even highly personal stories gave away anything of ourselves. The act of revealing personal stories – where it was us doing the revealing, and I'm sure that's crucial – didn't feel exposing. Or like a giving up of the self. Knowing my story (or, rather, stories) doesn't mean someone knows me: self-narrative and the self feel quite different. And telling life stories can be a way of shielding ourselves, a way of keeping others at arms length, of shedding the parts we can do without, like the lizard's tail. A way, in other words, to avoid the dissipation of power.

narrative is power

Perhaps narrative – even more so than knowledge – is power. And the bigger and grander the narrative, the greater the expression of power: at least the power of the narrator over the audience. It's about what's left out, the complex, dissonant stuff. Smaller, more fragmented narratives can accommodate more dissonance.

It's about whether your story looks like this

beautifully explained by Stella Duffy here…

Or like this

Limited edition jigsaw by John Kimpton

… but perhaps with pieces missing.

Overall, the thing about narrative is that it's a function of time. Things happen over time, and that's life – and story. But the grand narrative? I agree with Strawson. That's not life. In fact, it's probably closer to propaganda^…

As for the answer to the question in the title? Nope. Don't have one. And don't necessarily want one. Don't think it matters…

* his examples aren't all male: I've just selected these three for the pithy quotes
^ or Big Fiction. Which I don't have the same objections to, at all…

On Life-Writing edited by Zachary Leader

This collection of essays edited by Zachary Leader is a lively and multifarious exploration of life-writing and reading, grounded, as his introduction explains, mostly "in individual instances" rather than surveys of "historical, theoretical, or generic fields; generalizations are grounded in particulars." (p2) This approach means the book feels rooted in a way that much academic discourse doesn't, and its earthed approach is, I think, particularly suitable for framing creative practice – in contrast to understanding and responding to its processes and products, where an exploration of airier, more purely theoretical provinces can often provide a more rounded perspective.

Because this blog is primarily about my zoeography project, rather than review the book here, I'm going to think out loud around some of the ideas, quotes and conclusions that I found most useful and stimulating.

William St Clair's essay ‘Romantic Biography: Conveying Personality, Intimacy and Authenticity in an Age of Ink on Paper’ explores the "literary and visual devices" biographers and other writers used in their "attempts to shrink the gap between the reader and the subject, to reduce the role of the middleman, to exclude outsiders from what they wanted to make and keep as a personal and intimate relationship." (pp 69-70)

In particular, he points out how letters, signatures and portraits were reproduced in books to create an illusion of closeness between subject and reader and how sketches – seemingly "spontaneous, immediate, and realistic … dashed off" appear "to offer a direct romantic transfer from the perceived reality to the representation of that reality " (p63)

This approach, St Clair suggests, proved particularly effective with Byron's young female admirers, "who felt that he was writing especially for and to them as individuals, and that they knew him personally" (p65). It works, in other words, particularly well with fans dreaming of an intimate relationship with the object of their affection. As with most illusions, the audience's complicity is key.

As Hermione Lee points out in her essay "’From Memory’: Literary Encounters and Life-Writing", "The reader’s first question of a biographer is always going to be, what was she, or he, like?". Other questions, she writes, will follow, but this is the first and most critical: "‘likeness’ must be there. Whatever form of ‘life-writing’ we are drawn to, we always greedily want moments of intimacy, revelation, immediacy, and inwardness." (p125) This renders a biographer's input tricky to negotiate: Intimacy, immediacy and, to a certain extent, revelation require his or her textual invisibility. Inwardness, however, can't be presented on the page or screen without intermediation. People, as Christine Wilks suggests, are black boxes: "One person can only infer what the other one is thinking and feeling from their outputs, from their behaviour or what they say."

IRL encounters, we have other clues to another's inwardness: body language, tone of voice, scent, for instance. But, in Blake Morrison's words, even in memoir, "Emotion on the page is always manufactured emotion—retrospective, artful, a declaration of the author’s heart but with calculated designs on the reader’s." (p206) Morrison's essay – “The Worst Thing I Ever Did: The Contemporary Confessional Memoir” – provides an elegantly-argued and provocative defence of the form. His assertions that

 "life-writing amounts to … a way of taking possession of your own life, or, where biography rather than memoir is concerned, someone else’s." (p214)

and

"though confession may play a part, it’s only there to do right by the dead, which means being honest, not hagiographical. True the dead don’t give permission, but death itself is a permission. And what it permits is elegy and homage." (p219)

are both challenging and challengeable, demanding agreement and questioning. The idea that I might be taking possession/ownership of someone else's life – even when that someone has been dead for nigh-on 200 years – isn't a particularly comfortable one, considered within an ethical framework. But it does require confrontation and exploration. How proprietorial do I feel about Hayley? And, even if death does permit elegy and homage, how far do elegy and homage permit honesty rather than hagiography?

These are issues Hayley, as biographer of his friends William Cowper and George Romney, wrestled with during the first decade of the nineteenth century: a time when hagiography was still dominant. His determination to "do right by the dead" through honesty led to epistolary confrontations with Lady Hesketh, who was unhappy with Hayley revealing details of her cousin Cowper's mental health issues and, in at least one instance, his political views.

Given the nature of HayleyWorld, the writing in On Life-Writing that I found particularly involving considers narrative form. One "of course!" moment was provided by J. David Velleman's statement in “The Rights to a Life” that "the story form is in essence an emotional cadence—an arc of emotions aroused, complicated, and resolved" (pp 222-223). This offers another dimension to ways of thinking reader journey, while Galen Strawson, whose essay “The Unstoried Life” is the book's last, unpicks narrative unity and concludes

"Consideration of the sequence—the ‘narrative’, if you like—may be important for some people in some cases. For most of us, however, I think self-knowledge comes best in bits and pieces. Nor does the concession yield anything to the sweeping view with which I began, the view—in Oliver Sacks’ words—that all human life is life-writing, that ‘each of us constructs and lives a “narrative”’, and that ‘this narrative is us, our identities’." (p301)

This is particularly interesting in that self-knowledge and, I'd add, the other-knowledge, or empathy that life-writing seeks to communicate are, arguably, qualitatively different from other forms of knowledge, which is why they're sometimes described as wisdom. Wisdom is, I'd suggest, a compound of experience, emotion and reflection. It can, therefore only develop out of/be built from bits and pieces, because that's how experiences, emotions and reflection happen. They are moments: bits and pieces of story rather than overarching narrative, in part because to construct a unified narrative, it's always necessary to exclude the pesky bits and pieces that don't fit, or that take the story off at a tangent. Wisdom, conversely, requires the full, complex picture with all its digressions, inconsistencies and marginalia.

Which wasn't remotely where I expected this post to end up when I started writing it…

Next week, I'll probably write about the New Media Writing Prize: I was one of the judges and the 2015 winners were announced this week…

The reader journey - keeping things moving

I've been a bit quiet for the past couple of months (on here, at least), mostly because there's been quite a lot of life and other work happening (including a weekly blog for Westminster Business School).

But it's now January, and I'm back, with a new take on the HayleyWorld reader journey. In case you want to follow my progress, previous posts on this subject are 1. here, 2. here and 3. here

A productive meeting with development partner Michael Kowalski of Contentment, interviewing text mining expert Dr Stephan Ludwig  and reading James Pennebaker's The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say About Us inspired me to

• redraw the journey algorithm
• change a couple of the forms I/William Hayley ask readers to complete

and

• thinking more deeply about how I frame the content from Hayley's Memoirs and other ego-documents.

Michael flagged two issues.

1. We were asking readers to choose their second batch of three subject areas (the first form currently gives them a choice of 11, the next one offers a choice of 8), before they'd exhausted the material from their first batch. This felt unintuitive and slightly confusing
2. There's nothing - aside from a changed chapter heading (they look like this in the current draft)  to indicate when a topic has been exhausted. 

As a result, the reader journey now has…

1. A contextual essay at the end of each topic. These will be in my voice rather than Hayley's, as they'll need to provide context. Their tone and content will need to complement, rather than repeat, the short marginalia commentaries. Thinking as I type, I'm wondering whether they might work even better as short video presentations. Will need to discuss that idea with Michael and my PhD supervisors (Profs Ian Gadd & Kate Pullinger), and, if it's a possible way ahead, create at least one
written and one filmed example over the next month or two, so that we can user-test both formats

This has also made me think about the number of subjects/chapters in the app. As you can see from the form below I've rounded the previous 11 up to 12 by adding sensibility. However, given the volume of work involved in creating essays/videos, I'm leaning towards rounding down to nineThis will involve merging 3 x 2 pairs of subjects, with love and marriage along with children and education being obvious start-points.

The latest iteration. There will be more…

2. A form with several free text fields. Aside from a couple of simple requests for basic info – for a reader's name, for instance – my plan was to avoid this, simply because developing a way of responding effectively to this mode of user input would be too big and complex a job.

Reading The Secret Life of Pronouns provoked a change of mind: we still won't be using readers' free text input to trigger a response from the HayleyWorld app. But we're aiming to use it to measure readers'engagement/involvement in two ways. Firstly, by the extent of their input – more words are likely to suggest higher level of engagement/involvement with the app, fewer, a lower level.

And, secondly, by using a tool – hopefully the one on The Secret Life of Pronouns website – to measure how far (if at all) a reader's use of function words (including pronouns, articles, prepositions, auxiliary words… there's a list on p22 of the book, and a brief explanation on the website homepage) mirrors Hayley's (or mine, when I'm writing as him).

Here's my first draft of this form (nb: in the app itself, there will be either nine or six options for the reader to choose from, as they will already have chosen their first three subjects)…

Um… I think that's more than enough for now. Thanks for reading. Next week I'm planning to review On Life-Writing edited by Zachary Leader.

Narrative transformation: stories and propaganda

In last week's blog – about the boundedness of books, the satisfaction of finishing them, and whether the satisfaction of completion may correlate with the number of possible endings – I started contemplating how I want HayleyWorld's audience to feel when they finish (or finish with) the app.

Overall, I decided, I'm aiming for engaged, amused and informed.

Then marketing specialist and data modeller Dr Stephan Ludwig suggested that what I'm really going for is narrative transportation, and suggested I read The Extended Transportation-Imagery Model: A Meta-Analysis of the Antecedents and Consequences of Consumers' Narrative Transportation*.

Marketing and literary theory

Narrative transportation is a concept adopted from literary theory by academics exploring marketing techniques and developing theories and frameworks to underpin business practice. It describes what happens to readers  – or "consumers", who interpret stories, where interpretation "constitutes an act of consumption through which a story is converted into a narrative." (p799). In other words, the story is what the author creates, the narrative is what the consumer/reader interprets the story into.

For the marketers, it's about how you use story to induce changes in consumers' feelings, thoughts and beliefs so they buy your product. As the authors of the above essay write: "Given the implications of stories for the narrative persuasion of consumers, nothing is less innocent than a story." (p798). In fact it's surprising that the word "propaganda" fails to appear anywhere in their paper…

That's a digression that I may follow at a later date (in the meantime, Eliane Glaser's Guardian article "The west's hidden propaganda machine" is worth a read). For, now, I want to concentrate on the aspects of Stephan's analysis and the paper that helped me think about how I can make HayleyWorld good enough to enable readers to achieve narrative transportation.

Encourage/manipulate readers to suspend disbelief

 Hayley's story (/stories) needs to be structured, written, edited and delivered in ways that are seamless and persuasive enough influence my readers' feelings, thoughts and beliefs. And to make them want to be influenced. For that to happen, I need to create, edit and deliver the content in ways that spark both their empathy and their imaginations (p799).

In Winning Minds: secrets from the language of leadership, speechwriter Simon Lancaster lays bare the techniques that people devising and delivering persuasive communications use to help/manipulate their audiences to achieve this. The word "minds" in the title doesn't refer only to the plurality of audiences. It also relates to what he defines as our "instinctive", "emotional" and "logical" minds. At each level, we respond better to particular approaches than to others: some metaphors, for instance – those invoking nature, family and journeys – tend to resonate more positively than others invoking, say, war, cars or computers. Repetition helps, rhythm and rhyme impact, as do flattery, humour and alliteration.

Walking the walk

Now it's time for me to put all this into practice. Which means it's likely my next few blog posts will focus on what I'm writing about, rather than about how I'm doing it…


* In the Journal of Consumer Research, Vol. 40, No. 5 (February 2014), pp. 797-817, published by the University of Chicago Press

How will it end? Boundedness, the satisfaction of completion, and never finishing the internet

After a short hiatus (I won't bore you with why*) I've had a chance to catch up with Michael Kowalski and review progress on the HayleyWorld zoeography app.

He's (hopefully) about to finish both implementing the algorithm and optimising the way the app works. And I'm going to continue writing commentaries, adding other content and thinking through the big question he asked me: How does it end?
 

When is a book a book?

Back in 2011 I interviewed Theodore Gray, author and co-founder of Touchpress, Wolfram Research and Wolfram Alpha for a feature in the Independent on Sunday about digital literature. Theo listed three characteristics that mark a book out as a book. If

"it’s bounded and user-paced and it’s narratively directed, then you can call it a book. Otherwise, it might be an encyclopaedia or it might be a website."

Theo Gray talking about books and apps back in 2011

By user-paced, he meant that it's not like a linear video,"that you are forced to watch at a certain rate. It’s a piece of text that you choose to read at whatever speed you want to read it at." He also states that the choice of navigation through the material should be entirely at the reader's discretion, while an author "takes you by the hand and shows you the things that [s/he thinks] you should read in a reasonable length of time, to get a good introduction, or a good overview, or a good in-depth analysis or whatever of this topic."

The boundedness of books is key to what I'm pondering in this post – and to how this digital biography of William Hayley will finish. Books, says Gray, "have a beginning and an ending and a discoverable way of knowing that you’ve read the whole thing. By which I mean that you can start, you can consume and finish it and say I’ve read this book.

This is typically not the case with websites. It’s an important and valuable and good thing about websites that they’re open-ended and they keep going. You don’t finish a website. You don’t finish the internet. That’s a wonderful thing. But it’s not a good thing in the case of a book. Because the valuable sense of accomplishment that you can have that I’ve read this book. And you can tell your friends. Part of it is the sense of satisfaction of completion."

Reading vs not reading endings

Tim Parks wrote a fab essay in The New York Review of Books on whether it's important for readers to read to the end of (good) books. One conclusion he reaches is

"even in these novels where plot is the central pleasure on offer, the end rarely gratifies, and if we like the book and recommend it to others, it is rarely for the end."

 And,

"it’s worth noting that stories were not always obliged to have an end, or to keep the same ending … It was only when myth became history, as it were, that we began to feel there should be just one “proper” version, and set about forgetting the alternatives."

A paradox?

Perhaps offering readers the opportunity to feel that "sense of satisfaction of completion" involves communicating the range of possible endings which would

a) explain my invarible dissatisfaction with forking path narrative
and
b) much more significantly, signal a paradox: to experience that a feeling of completeness, the work needs to we need a sense of incompleteness. Of potentials untapped, perspectives beyond the protagonists' storyworld…

 Tim Parks again:

"With novels, the endings I’m least disappointed with are those that encourage the reader to believe that the story might very easily have taken a completely different turn."

The conclusions Tim Parks draws concerning the relationships between reader, writer and text link neatly with a realisation Michael Kowalski's question provoked. The way we bound and/or end HayleyWorld needs to take into account not only how biographies finish, but also how, in general, relationships finish and, in particular, how William Hayley's key relationships finished.

How relationships end

While both his marriages ended badly, and his first love dumped him, most of Hayley's friendships either ended with the death of one party (his university friends), or with an illness that disabled communication – George Romney and William Cowper. A few others petered out over time. Only one or two – that with George Steevens, for example – terminated in high dudgeon. His professional relationships tended to follow similar patterns. Even though William Blake's three-year stay in Felpham ended in a colossal row, later communciations between the two men, if not overly intimate are courteous and amicable.

This also raises the question of how I want HayleyWorld's audience to feel when they finish – or finish with – the app. Overall, I'm aiming for engaged, amused and informed. But do I want them to feel about William Hayley and other key players in his story as I feel about them? Or do I want them to make up their own minds? What do I feel about William Hayley and co?

And how do I ensure that these questions – and all the others that pop up when I'm thinking about relationships between protagonists, narrative journeys and the user experience – inform both content and technical development rather than simply running along on a parallel track…


* oh, all right: work, ill teenager, divorce and building work demanding the Movement of Many Things. All on-going (although most of the Things have now been Appropriately Moved)…

Happy 270th birthday, William Hayley

As it's Hayley's 270th birthday today, I thought I'd write a quick celebratory post on why – despite his relative obscurity– he's both worth writing about, and an appropriate subject for the new approach to biography I'm attempting

Hayley…

• was the first person to publish any of Dante's work in English translation
• wrote one of the late eighteenth century’s bestselling self-help books: The Triumphs of Temper, advising young women on how to attract and keep a husband. Composed in rhyming couplets, it was modelled on Pope’s The Rape of the Lock
• supported and championed writing by women, reputedly praising Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and negotiating book deals for Charlotte Smith
• persuaded William Blake to leave London for Sussex, and probably saved his life by providing both financial and personal support before and during his trial for sedition – a capital offence. He also provided inspiration (but not in the way he hoped) for Blake's prophetic poetry
• turned down William Pitt's offer of the poet laureateship in 1790 because of "the absurd duties annex’d to the office" and "the very shattered state of my own Health & Faculties"
• was an amateur doctor with an active and practical interest in the relationship between creativity and mental illness, who provided medical assistance to the villagers around his home in Eartham and both supported and attempted to cure William Cowper, George Romney and Joseph Wright of Derby of their mental health problems. He had much less success with his wife Eliza's "marvellous mental infelicities".
• was an early adopter of medical technologies: particularly the "electrical machine" and the cold shower bath
• had an interesting personal life: whilst supportive of women professionally, his behaviour in his most intimate relationships with his wives Eliza and Mary (Wellford) and the mother of his child (Mary Cockerell) wasn't as blameless as his Memoirs show he'd like us to believe
• was a consumate networker who understood that by assisting and advancing the careers of his friends, he would also do no harm to his own
• was realistic about the extent and limitations of his own talents
• was probably instrumental in saving the manuscript of Christoper Smart's Jubilate Agno

It was this last  point that first sparked my interest in William Hayley: according to the first editor of Smart's poem – William Force Stead – Hayley and Thomas Carwardine, both friends of Cowper

"regarded this manuscript by the demented Smart as a fair specimen of the nature of poetic insanity, and therefore of some value when they were dealing with Cowper, who had been attacked by the same disease."

Some twenty years on, I'm still fascinated by him, his relationships and the way he worked.

Happy 270th birthday, William Hayley.