(Note: This article originally appeared in the November 2009 issue of the Queensland Writers Centre's Writer's Quarterly Magazine.)

In interviews with four pioneers – Kate Pullinger, Lisa Holton, Jeff Gomez, and Peter Collingridge – in the world of transmedia storytelling, the motivations of the storytellers are as diverse as the execution of the stories themselves. Transmedia storytelling is the process of sharing a narrative through many different channels (websites, video, audio etc) at once,  often becoming an interactive process with input from the reader.

Each of these players in the movement has a different idea of what it is about. Some want the readers to interact with the narrative, some don't; some see it as commercial enterprise, some as very much a learning and educational tool. What is clear is that transmedia is an exciting process that gives new depth to traditional text-only narrative.

KATE PULLINGER

Kate Pullinger works both in print and new media. Her most recent novels include the award-winning The Mistress of Nothing (2009)  and A Little Stranger (2006). Her digital fiction projects include her multiple award-winning collaboration with Chris Joseph on Inanimate Alice, a multimedia episodic digital fiction and Flight Paths, a networked novel, created on and through the Internet.

While others view transmedia storytelling as the most viable commercial direction, and perhaps the only way to save what we know as book publishing, Kate’s transmedia work thus far has been decidely non-commercial. Kate has worked to create transmedia stories that can be used by teachers for a new kind of learning experience.Inanimate Alice

Starting out in the world of literary fiction, she is very much enjoying her new life in transmedia storytelling. "I first started working in this field in 2002 when I was given a year-long research fellowship with TrAce, an online writer’s community … naturally, I was interested to see what was happening online with stories ... I found people to collaborate with, and my work has grown from there."

Transmedia is about using more than just text to tell and create the story and it often becomes a collaborative effort between a whole team of people. For Kate, it is the collaborative nature that appeals.

"With Inanimate Alice, I write a draft of the script, then work on it with Chris Joseph, who then takes over in terms of building the work in Flash and [composes all the music too].

This is very different from writing a book and has more in common with the work I used to do in the fields of film and tv screenwriting where the script forms the architecture of the story ... there's a lot of toing and froing over ideas, images, stories, characters, etc."

Kate believes this method of storytelling has the potential for finding new audiences as well as new ways to tell stories. "Transmedia will be the way of the future, certainly for anyone under 16 currently, and I'm very interested in engaging with these new types of literacy."

Flight PathsWhile Kate does see each project she creates in a particular format as belonging within that format, she’s not adverse to transfering work from one medium to another. As an author – a role that usually affords control over story direction and outcome, it is the new possibilities of writer-reader interaction that Kate finds really exciting.

"... with Inanimate Alice we've had this very exciting recent development of students using the stories to create their own Alice episodes. I've never had anything like that happen with a book ... and that's part of what is so interesting about the new platforms, that readers can talk back in this way.

If I was working on a novel intended for print in the traditional sense, I would want to go back to the usual way of working – acres of solitude, followed by editorial input, followed by publication. I don't know when/if I’ll write another book in that fashion."

With the publishing world in a bit of turmoil, Kate's main concern is for literature.

"How can good writing find its way in the labyrinth that [is] presented by publishing dominated by bestsellers, battles over digitization, etc? In many ways the current climate is absolutely fantastic for readers, but very bad for writers; without even considering new platforms and formats, readers have incredible access to books now, online and off … so who knows what the future will bring?

I am optimistic though – mostly because I know that stories and storytelling are a deep-seated human need, part of what makes us human in fact, and that will never go away, no matter what else happens."

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Check back Monday for my interview with Lisa Holton of FourthStory Media.

(Note: Check out a great interview with Kate Pullinger and Chris Joseph in part IV of the 4-part TVO series, Empire of the Word - it's a really interesting documentary on the history and future of reading)