Thirteen years ago I published my interactive version of Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein. Reviews were mixed, largely because many critics simply didn't know how to respond to an interactive book, but gratifyingly the five reviewers I respected most, Laura Miller, Dale Townshend, Helen Bagnall, Mark A. McCutcheon and John Sutherland, all liked it. (Laura Miller: "it singlehandedly renewed this critic’s hopes for interactive fiction"; Professor Townshend: "a nuanced take on monstrosity [...] done with enormous sensitivity to Shelley's narrative"; Ms Bagnall: "a bold attempt to wrestle with a classic and create a book that can work for a new audience"; Professor McCutcheon: "often yields lyrical prose interludes"; Professor Sutherland: "a very clever bag of tricks". That's good enough for me.)
The following interview by Lottie Chase comes from a magazine called InPrint, and the main interest in reading it now is to see how the future of interactive books looked in 2012. And the app is still worth reading today, incidentally. Whether or not you care for my interactive take on the work, it also includes Mary Shelley's original 1818 version.
LC: This new book app brings the reader further into the classic gothic tale of Frankenstein than ever before. How did you first become involved with the project?
DM: I've had a foot in the two camps of writing and game design for most of my career, so it was a natural fit for me to do something for the iPad that combines the two. Putting it like that, it sounds so easy, but in fact I had multiple meetings with half a dozen publishers to pitch this. After a year of that I was about ready to give up. I was lucky enough to meet Michael Bhaskar at Profile Books, and he got it right away.
LC: How did you approach writing the side-stories that accompany the main narrative?
DM: The sensible way to do it is to meticulously flowchart the entire book so that you can see all the branching narratives and how they fold back into the main storyline. That's how I'd recommend doing it – and if you're flowcharting on paper buy a big pad; Frankenstein has about twelve hundred separate 'story chunks'. But I just wrote it straight onto the page and kept all the multiple story threads in my head. This is essentially the Ray Bradbury writing method: jump off a cliff and build yourself a parachute on the way down. (The caveat is that this method may not work if you're not Ray Bradbury.)
LC: How much control does the consumer have over the direction of the story?
DM: A great deal of control, but not in the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style of actually steering the main plot points. The key moments of the story happen regardless of your decisions. But take for example the death of Victor Frankenstein's friend Henri Clerval. In Mary Shelley's version, he is murdered by the creature, his body left on a beach in Ireland, and Victor is arrested as the murderer. In my version, that sequence of events is only one of several possibilities. The monster might be blameless, in which case Henri is murdered by someone else, either in Ireland or in Scotland; the crime is investigated differently, and Victor's degree of innocence depends entirely on how the reader has advised him up till that point. The death itself is inevitable, like all the major plot points, but the way you get there and the interpretation of events can be very different.
LC: Do you think more book apps will take on this interactive formula?
DM: I hope writers will become more willing to pioneer interactivity rather than leaving it to the app developers, because most of the interactivity we've seen in book apps up to now has been fairly pointless. You can have hidden text that only highlights when you tap on it, or words that blow away, or light that flickers out before you finish reading a note. Those seem to be trying to simulate a kind of narrative art installation in app form, but they end up being poor art and unengaging narrative. The first question writers must ask is not, 'How do I make the reader interact?' but 'How do I make the reader want to interact?' And that comes from the emotional connection to the characters, as with all stories.
LC: People seem less willing to pay for apps because there are so many free apps on the market. Do you think there is a stigma attached to apps?
DM: The difficulty with e-books and book apps is that you can't easily see what you're getting. Quite apart from the quality, I mean – the actual amount of material. My version of Frankenstein is twice as long as Mary Shelley's, and my app includes her version as well. If it were a lavishly illustrated hardback in Waterstones, people wouldn't balk at a £15 price tag. Put it in the App Store and they'll expect it to be less than a third of that, even though it looks more gorgeous on an iPad than it ever could in print. I can only conclude that all those people collecting hardcovers have been putting a distorted value on paper all these years.
I've been a regular cinema-goer tor years, probably spent more on the cinema than on books. Yet I have no physical item to show for all those movies. I valued the pure entertainment content there, not the artefact, so why should books be any different? We must try to establish that there is a genuine value to be placed on quality content or the whole business will fall apart.
If that's only whetted your appetite for things Man was not meant to know, you can also read a much longer and more in-depth discussion of the book with Professor Townshend and Dr Padmini Ray Murray here. (And while we're talking about digital gamebooks, here's the latest on the Blood Sword CRPG.)
