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Think Digital
BAFTA award-winning, writer, Tim Wright is co-founder of the interactive web design company XPT and writer and producer of In Search of Oldton. Sarah Weatherall, herself an emerging playwright, drills down to hear
Hi Tim. What exactly is a digital writer?
I use the term digital writer, because I write stories for various digital mediums, for example we did a campaign for mobile phones for Channel 4, and we also produced Online Caroline which was one of the defining interactive dramas on the internet in the late 1990s and won XPT a BAFTA.
I’ve signed up to Online Caroline and made a new friend
Online Caroline became the site by which the industry measured other interactive dramas. You can sign on and receive emails from Caroline, and then log onto the site and see an update of the story daily.
Online Caroline came as a result of an approach to Channel 4 interactive, and a chance meeting with an executive at Freeserve who said, ‘our chairman might be interested in something like that’.
Have you always been into digital media?
After graduating from Cambridge University in English I worked as an editor in the magazine world, and edited Which Computer?. Before then I’d never really touched a computer, but I was into music technology and there are a lot of similarities. Then Rob Bevan, another friend and I set up a new-media ad agency called Noho digital. We were bought out in 1998 and founded XPT. I adopted the term ‘digital writer’ after answering an advert for a digital writer in residence at trAce at Nottingham Trent University. trAce was set up to explore digital writing by Professor Sue Thomas, who is now at Leicester de Montford University. It’s no longer active but they have a useful archive.
How technical are you?
Rob Bevan, my XPT partner, is a coder – he designs and programs. He went to art school so he integrates his sense of design with his knowledge of software. We used to say Rob did the visuals and I did the words but the boundaries aren’t as clear cut now. The software has got easier, and I can do more, for example In Search of Oldton, my project developed with trAce, is created with hyperlinks which I did myself. Now you can build a website without any serious knowledge of coding.
How do you start out writing for the web
Blogging! It’s simple and cheap. I use typepad.com, or there’s blogger.com, livejournal.com and then the other obvious sites like myspace or bebo. Start interacting with your readers and go to other forums. Guardian Comment is Free is stimulating, they set up highly opinionated features. But like anything you need to have discipline and consistency to recruit your audience.
Oldton… a town that disappeared…. is it really true?
The project Oldton, in a sense sprung directly from working interactively. I heard a lot of criticism about people who interacted in cyber worlds. I don’t understand why people see that there’s something wrong with engaging in on-line worlds that aren’t real - as if going to the theatre or cinema was somehow OK make-believe, but entering into a fictional world online was for saddoes who had nothing better to do. Plus, people would criticise the internet for its ephemeral qualities. One week the website’s there, the next week it brings up an error message. But when you look back at our lives, friends come and go, trees get cut down, buildings are demolished. Is it so different?
In the opening of WG Sebald’s book The Emigrants he writes about Hingham in Norfolk in the 1970s, where I’d been living at that time next to the graveyard. In Sebald’s book, he includes a photo of the tree in the churchyard which looked completely unrecognisable to me. So I started searching on the internet for pictures of my home village. I found one of the village green which had the wall of our house in the corner of the frame….
This photo had great resonance for me because, for a long while, the time I spent in that house was the happiest in my life. After we left the house my father committed suicide when I was 22.
So I put up the photo in the trAce chat room at Nottingham Trent University and asked people to comment and slowly the project Oldton, about a town that disappears began to take shape. And because the Oldton website uses hyper-links, it isn’t linear, so someone could click on a button that says ‘we left the old house’ and then on the next button which says ‘my father committed suicide’ and the two events become linked.
Readers click here to listen….
After reading about the project in the Guardian newspaper, BBC radio producer Pam Marshall contacted me. As she said, ‘this sounds like a radio project’ so we recorded it for BBC Radio, writing a narrator which was meant to be my father, and then Tim going about my life. In hindsight I realised that both figures were me, the inner one full of demons – like my father – and the outer one which does the laundry and gets the kids to school.
Sorry I missed your recent Playtime seminar…..
We’re hoping to organise another one for the London Games Fringe festival this October 2007. We had guest speakers; Pat Kane about our work ethic being replaced by a play ethic, Jamie Cason from the BBC and the corporations new online plans and Stuart Nolan on…. Lego…. You can read our day’s seminar Playtime in a couple of blogs.
Don’t leave space to the professionals…. to see Tim at his best, click here.
Useful Links:
http://timwright.typepad.com
www.xpt.co.uk
www.oldton.com
www.onlinecaroline.com
Tim’s bookmarks including articles about his recent seminar Playtime at the London Games Fringe Festival: http://del.icio.us/timwright1964/playtime?page=1
The trAce Archive can be viewed at : http://tracearchive.ntu.ac.uk
School of media and cultural production at Leicester de Montford University www.dmu.ac.uk teaches creative writing as well as new media.
The life and writing of WG Sebald are summarised in his obituary at the Guardian: http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,6109,619971,00.html
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