The Solitary Spinner

Stories now are open-ended, branching, hyperlinked, cross-media, participatory, exploratory, and unpredictable. And they are told in new ways: Web 2.0 storytelling picks up on these new types of stories and runs with them... - Bryan Alexander and Alan Levine

Runs with them... right into the ditch. From what I've seen, many of these collaborative endeavors don't work. There's a problem with both quality and quantity (like going to a vast, steaming buffet -- the food's dismal but there's plenty of it).

The round-robin approach to storytelling is like a game -- something you'd find in an improv class or in an elementary schoolroom ("I whisper something in your ear, then you whisper it to the next person..."). I can't (and maybe shouldn't) take it seriously. It's an amusement, a distraction -- often uneven, meandering, clumsy, inane. It's not art.

I realize that, with the web, authorship is being redefined, that there's a blurring between expert and amateur. But, for me, the difference is stark. It's the difference between the published professional and the aspiring acolyte. For the latter, I think of fan fiction and, in an earlier incarnation, fanzines. (When I was growing up, I knew people who churned out fanzines in their spare time -- one guy would laboriously typeset each issue.)

Like fanzines, much on the web appeals to a minute audience. It's easy to access but largely irrelevant (the "long tail" at work). It may be meaningful and pleasurable... to you. But to somebody else (i.e., me, who's studied fiction writing), it's stultifying. It goes against the principles -- the rigor, the commitment, the talent -- that buttress a quality piece of work.

Art is perception -- seeing, citing, shaping. I don't see that in much of what I read on the web. What I do see, to misquote Hannah Arendt, is "the banality of drivel" -- literary evils perpetrated by oh-so-ordinary people.

Millennia ago, when I was in college, I was struck by two things:

• A professor who told me, "Life is about editing." Because we all have limited time, we have to spend it carefully, decisively. With so much else -- responsibilities, errands, demands -- clamoring for my attention, I don't have extra time for material that isn't astute, insightful, and well crafted. (I still can't figure out how guys get away with spending the better part of a day watching sports.) As for anything open-ended or sprawling -- uh uh. I take my entertainment finite and confined. With everything that's going on, I have a hard enough time getting through a magazine article let alone a sprawling, multi-part web extravaganza. (I struggle to sit through a two-hour movie.)
  
• Writing classes in which we had to review dreadful attempts at storytelling. I'm no Dostoevsky, and I'm not trying to sound elitist or insensitive, but sitting through some of those classes is the closest I'll come to waterboarding. That sense of asphyxiation as the class plods through a tortuous line-by-line accounting, debating the finer points of something that has none. Reading amateur fiction on the web triggers a flashback -- hurling me back to those times, writhing, trapped, assailed by a droning dissertation of the absurd.

I also don't understand the anonymous nature of some of these web contributions. Personally, I spend enough of my life living anonymously. If you "own" and stand behind your work, if you're proud of what you're doing, you want credit, a byline. That may betray an antiquated mindset, an old school mentality, but it speaks to one's investment in what you've nourished and birthed.

Certainly, there's legitimate and respectable art produced through collaboration -- filmmaking, theater, a performance piece. By the same token, I have no quarrel with a multimedia presentation or a video essay. All of these can be poetic, provocative, revealing. But when it comes to writing...

To paraphrase Neil Gaiman: "We write and die alone." Writing is not a communal activity, a group project, a mass undertaking. The more, the messier. As the frequently evoked adage goes: "A camel is a horse designed by committee."

When you spin a web, you should do it on your own.