One of the biggest transitions that I know I will continue to face as I progress through this program is the necessity to move away from my creative work in order to focus more on pedagogical, critical and theoretical discussions of literature. As a storyteller and teacher of creative writing, Twine is an intriguing piece of open-source technology that I expect will broad my conceptualization of storytelling and will find its way into my classroom teaching.

For this final project, I sought to expand upon my mini-project in which I uploaded a draft of a story that originally appeared as a part of a novella in my MFA thesis. In it’s original format (before being uploaded and enhanced in Twine), the story was much longer and had a very different starting point; however, in my attempts to revise it for submission to various literary journals, I cut the story in half in terms of word count. Although these cuts were mostly improvements, I worry that some of the original details and descriptions from the story were lost in this revision process. By going back to earlier versions of this text I was able to incorporate some of my regrettably excised material through the use of hyperlinks. One restored passage, in particular, was a description of the railroad’s plight in a town resembling Altoona that has served as the setting for much of my writing to this point. Hypertext not only allowed me to include loops that led to additional descriptions and clarifiers, but also visual images.

One of the best advantages for using Twine as a storyteller is the ability to strengthen narrative through these non-traditional means. As our reading suggested, the digital humanities are not just about digitizing text, but blending fields and expanding the scope and reach of a work. In this case, I was able to employ, in words, what movies do so effectively with flashed images. I was able to cut to images of Joel’s (the main character) perceived memories with both pictures and with text that was intentionally fragmented. These asides were intended to better understand Joel and where he came from, especially because the other two sections of the novella were not included alongside this piece.

From a pedagogical standpoint, I could see having students use Twine with both academic and creative work. I would love to see students use Twine to annotate pieces we were reading as an alternative to either a traditional powerpoint presentation or for writing a traditional explication. As I was working on this (and I must admit, I haven’t read it with as much focus as I would have liked), The Atlantic re-issued a David Foster Wallace article which can be found at http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2005/04/host/303812/ and relied heavily on Wallace signature in-text notes. The style is not specifically hypertext but more resembles windows that open without directing the reader away from the story. It’s like a self-contained hypertext not too dissimilar from what I asked about in class. it adds an interesting dynamic that may be well-suited to a classroom use as well as in creative work. As for the creative aspect of using Twine in either an upper level or entry level creative writing class, challenging students to explore multiple derivations in plot may prove to be a valuable exercise for the writer struggling with endings. Both poets and narrative writers could benefit from the use of hypertext and its potential for multi-linearity as I saw in some of the projects presented by my classmates. In this way, writers could arrive at different endings as a part of the drafting process, and by sharing these multiple endings within a workshop setting, the group could use these possibilities to help guide a writer to further developing the one that seems to hold the most promise.

The revision process for me was completely different from print or traditional writing both in my conceptualization and approach. I tend to overwrite, as I’m sure this blog post will convey by the time I’ve finished hashing out all of the necessary ideas, and my revision process usually consists of heavy cutting. I don’t hold as tightly to the 15 percent rule that Stephen King recommends in On Writing, but word economy is definitely a focal point in my revision work. From that standpoint, this revision for my final project was unique in that I was not only looking to add two new endings, I was looking to tighten up some of the way visuals were presented as well as adding more, and I was looking to add more textual loops with more flashes of memories or necessary scenes. In challenging my understanding of the potential growth factor of multi-linear storytelling, I had to resign myself to completely re-evaluate my writing process and purpose as a whole. Also, although we were given more time to revise, my typical revision process involves putting my work aside until it feels unfamiliar, so that I can more objectively rebuild it. Some stories that are still under revision in my creative stable have been works in progress for as long as ten years. I’ll admit that some should be put to bed without any more tinkering, while I believe that others are only one solid revision away from being submitted, which brings me to another point about revising with Twine. This story and its multiple endings and offshoots are no longer sitting in a drawer or secured on a thumb drive, in a sense they are published and out there for the world to see, which makes me nervous.

From a more practical standpoint, I am not great a revising on-screen. I worked for a newspaper for about a year and a half and felt much more confident editing writing on paper proof sheet than editing work for the web. I know the same principles hold true, but ironically enough, I am using some of the current research which demonstrates that both reading and note-taking on paper are far more effective to conduct a workshop in the fall. I also think that is where my reticence comes from. With this project a great challenge came from cross-referencing and double-checking the functionality of the hypertext links with the writing text in Twine’s edit mode. My revision and editing was more than just textual; it became digital. It was difficult to keep track and to backtrack through my own work, especially since I removed the back button. If I wanted to follow a particular ending, this meant starting the whole process over again and one thing I caution my students against when editing is the inherent danger in developing too much familiarity with the look of a text. Research (which I apologize is also in my workshop folder on my desk in the library of Mount Aloysius College) also suggests that readers become dulled to recognizing mistakes when they spent too much time reading over the same text again and again. I fear I fell victim to this reality due to the time constraints.

In terms of satisfaction with the product I’m putting forth, I cannot honestly call it done or  complete. As with so many other projects, it is a work in progress; however, I also now see it as a teaching tool. Because I can only work as an adjunct and creative writing is not offered every year, I do not know when I will be able to implement Twine into my own teaching, but I do suspect that there may be some uses for this technology in teaching rhetoric and potentially developmental writing. For developmental writers, I think Twine may be useful for annotating student texts with the hyperlinks leading to examples of different rules that the students are breaking. From there it may even work well to have students use it in a peer editing capacity where they will include the example from a site like Purdue OWL or some other writing center and then the peer reviewer could offer a correction with an explanation for how their effort reflects the rule. I don’t have all of the details worked out, but I am excited by the potential, especially because it could help students become more invested in their own learning. A common problem in both my tutoring and in teaching developmental writers is that too many students view me as a proof reader or as some kind of authority whose corrections are gospel and therefore, they do not actually learn to self-correct. There needs to be a major shift in student approaches to their own learning and part of the onus falls back on my institution which relies so heavily on professional programs to stay in business and ultimately, pay my salary. Too many of our students view their college experience as a means to a professional end, rather than another step in a lifetime of learning. I don’t mean to sound like an idealist, but it seems they are missing the point of a liberal arts education, and I want to help re-direct them because I believe a greater sense of self-awareness and versatility will result.

Twine may be one tool at my disposal to enact this re-direction and that is one tool more than I had before taking this class. I said it before and I will say it again, I came in to this class with something of a phobia against technology because, so often, it is implemented, seemingly without purpose and for the sake of being technology, by people who do not know what they’re doing. The end result for me was discouragement and frustration. Although the technologies discussed in this class posed some issues, at no point, did I experience the anguish previously associated with learning a new technology. I am, by no means, an expert, but I do feel competent enough to keep working with Twine, Omeka and Voyant so that I can implement one or more of them in my future classes. I appreciated the time to work, experiment and revise with all of these projects, but especially with Twine because I keep uncovering new potentials that are available if one only considers the possibilities. As a storyteller, Twine may become my new laboratory for difficult stories because it better helps me visualize and conceptualize my own work as well as giving me the opportunity to toy with continuity and multi-linear narrative issues.