Choose your own cliché

Digital is choose-your-own-adventure / open-ended / transmedia / insert-your-own-cliche.

First of all, see the earlier essay. Digital can be all of those things, but it needn’t be. If you want to create one of those formats, then go for it—you’ll learn a huge amount by doing, and trying, and falling flat on your arse halfway through. Digital can be subtle though, it can toy with little aspects of expectation and familiarity. It can pull the rug out from under our feet, just as Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds did, or The Blair Witch Project. Big ideas that come down to tiny adjustments in the rules of storytelling. It can be books, augmented by digital trickery, it can be difficult structures that require a wall full of post-it notes to make sense of while writing.

Digital can be a notebook, and a pen and an idea. It begins, as all good work does, with a spark of imagination; a ‘what-if’ that demands to be answered by unconventional means.