Rob Wittig chats with William Gillespie about working with constraints and word plays, all the while emphasizing the netprov’s community building potential (a particularly big ellipsis needed, anyone?)
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
unknown, people, book, writing, projects, games, question, call, play, single, computer, exquisite corpse, stories, text, paper, create, memories, poetry, world, fun
SPEAKERS
William Gillespie, Rob Wittig
Rob Wittig
What’s your personal story behind getting engaged with real-time, collaborative writing, and with Netprov?
William Gillespie
When Roland Barthes talks about the ecstasy of the text,1See Barthes, Roland The Pleasure of the Text, trans. R. Miller, Hill and Wang 1975. I don’t know what Roland Barthes means by that, but I know what I mean by that. And I think you do, too. It’s that joy of spontaneous improvisation with another writer greatly facilitated by the network, though I’ve also done it in straight-up, paper-based, Exquisite Corpse style. My earliest such work probably would be my friend Jason and I as youngsters in calculus class, which we couldn’t stand. Every time our teacher turned around to make equations on the board, which was probably three quarters of the class, we would pass a piece of paper back and forth. We wrote MathTime Stories for the Insane. Many, many sheets of paper! This would have been the mid-‘80s. Is this about when Invisible Seattle2See record in ELMCIP Knowledge Base: https://elmcip.net/creative-work/invisible-seattle-novel-seattle-seattle was happening?
Rob Wittig
Early 80s was Invisible Seattle.
William Gillespie
So you were doing that and we were working on an early computer network called PLATO,3More on PLATO: https://distributedmuseum.illinois.edu/exhibit/plato_impacts/ probably of interest to computer historians, here in Urbana-Champaign at the University of Illinois high school. I don’t know what other kids were doing on PLATO, playing Zork maybe. But I would just engage them in collaborative writing games. I’d create prompts and beg people to come in and contribute. And I printed them all out on this very wide format paper that I was not able to keep forever.
So, that is what I thought of when I first heard about Invisible Seattle, and how fun that is. Especially at that time — computer stuff was really ephemeral. We didn’t know that it was going to actually outlast paper. So that gave it a more of an intimacy.
Rob Wittig
The stories in your calculus class — how were they done technically?
William Gillespie
In the case of that particular project, MathTime Stories for the Insane (that would be italicized, Anna [Nacher]. Just kidding!) [laughs]
Rob Wittig
[laughs]
William Gillespie
That’s what I call the Exquisite Corpse technique as invented by the surrealists for drawing. You fold the paper down so only the last line is available, and that creates some freewheeling pivots that are just exhilarating as heck and very hard to do on one’s own.
Rob Wittig
Do you think that that PLATO computer experience prepared you for jumping right into The Unknown?4See record in the ELMCIP Knowledge Base: https://elmcip.net/creative-work/unknown
William Gillespie
Oh, yes! The Unknown was itself, first, just another of the Exquisite Corpse games Scott [Rettberg] and Dirk [Stratton] and I would play every time we got together in Cincinnati. The Unknown was one that wouldn’t die. It just kept growing. And it was so much fun! So: yes, I see a direct line. And I can point at other projects along the way that either gave people a fun prompt, or dragged people into collaborative writing projects, people who wouldn’t otherwise have done such a thing.
Rob Wittig
What is it, do you think, that led you to this practice of collaborative writing, which is relatively unusual in the history of literature?
William Gillespie
It is weirdly unusual in the history of literature. I think it was my preferred way to socialize with friends. It was never like a professional thing. I didn’t want to ‘share a byline with this esteemed person.’ It was more of an outgrowth of riffing with friends, that little magic — whether it’s two people doing voices, sharing texts, or a Netprov — that is so, so wonderful! I admire the attempts to reproduce that magic and create formulas that can do it.
Rob Wittig
So, I remember sitting around with you, Scott, and Dirk, and literally passing a single writing machine — not a laptop as we know it, but strange little electronic writing machines — around in bars and coffee houses. How, how did that develop? And what are some memorable moments from that period?
William Gillespie
There are so many! By the way, one of the devices you’re referring to (in case it is of interest to other nerds) was an HPC, which was sort of a miniature IBM PC with an actual miniature keyboard. Afterwards I could connect it to my computer and share text files. And that was a blast! I literally spilled a beer on it and destroyed it. [laughs] It was disposable tech anyway. But it was great while it lasted. I mean, think of all the beers I could have spilled on it, when we were together!
Rob Wittig
[laughs]
William Gillespie
So many great, esteemed scholars were in a position to have spilled a beer on that HPC!
Netprov, by its name, seems to be predicated on the use of a computer network. As we’ve talked about, this sort of thing can also happen with paper. So, the specific role of the network in the case of The Unknown would be the ability to use electronic mail that allowed a single person to compile texts — which was at first Scott, later me. And it allowed rapid-fire long-distance exchanges. (Those long-distance memories aren’t as fun as the ones where we get together though.) I’m remembering moments where I’m at home alone, thinking of ways to torture Scott by writing him into situations that are embarrassing, and asking him to put them on the internet.
Rob Wittig
[laughs]
William Gillespie
Do you remember that photo that’s really grainy and it’s you and me and Scott and Dirk, and there’s a lot of bald head going on, and we’re all clustered around a computer? (I can find that and you can put it in your interview.) There are many memories like that! Laptops were brought out, completely inappropriately, in drinking establishments or hotel rooms.
Rob Wittig
This business of putting co-authors in a pickle within the story — talk a little about that as a creative strategy and a dynamic among three friends.
William Gillespie
You know, the fact that it is a hypertext — although that is of particular interest — is not the only remarkable thing about it to me. I’m not saying it’s not a flawed, shambling beast of a text object. It is.
Rob Wittig
[laughs]
William Gillespie
There are reasons that made that necessary. I’ll close this ellipsis.
We were in, I’ll call it, the ‘rock band model of authorship.’ And unfortunately, it was about that short-lived. We lasted about as long as Nirvana. We weren’t quite as tragic, but it wasn’t a happy story arc all the time. But it was so much fun! And I tried to think of precedents for that, in the literary world, in the book world, I saw nothing. Not in America. Maybe the OuLiPo, but not really. That’s more still about the individual authors’ books.
But look at the comedy world: we had Monty Python and the Firesign Theater. These collaborations are both pretty successful, well documented phenomena with people who are mostly still alive. In music, lots of models; I always go to The Beatles, not necessarily because they were the greatest band of all time, which they may have been, but because you really can get into the Abbey Road Studio notes and see the back and forth and how they interacted with machines. The Abbey Road Studio journals are pretty clean, but nonetheless you can see the influence of drugs a little bit, like when John Lennon has a headache and takes the wrong pill and has to go sit on the roof in the middle of a session. This is rare documentation of the collaborative dynamic between more than two people and how magical it is when it cooks! There must be examples of that all over the place now. TV series have teams. But I’m guessing that maybe the way those creative teams work is cloaked in secrecy for proprietary reasons.
But again, in book culture you’d think you’d have heard more about more than a few one-off projects. Of course, Invisible Seattle produced a city-written novel, and a bulletin board right? That was more than a one-off. There were three bound volumes designed by the great Tom Grothus. That’s an example from the book world but that was also that that was different — maybe you can speak to this — I don’t think that was as much like a team, like a band—Invisible Seattle was more open.
Rob Wittig
Crowdsourcing is the word that I’ve been using for the Invisible Seattle projects in recent years. Interestingly, I think both the screenwriting teams and Invisible Seattle’s novel of Seattle, by Seattle, as we first conceived it, are multiple people producing a single thing. But what we saw when we started playing online with In.S.Omnia5A literary electronic bulletin co-founded in 1983 by Rob Wittig and later called “legendary” by Howard Rheingold. See Wittig, Rob. Invisible Rendezvous: Connection and Collaboration in the New Landscape of Electronic Writing, Wesleyan University Press, 1994. — and then I saw that you in The Unknown were really taking advantage of this, too — was the fact that you don’t have to combine it into a single, consistent text! You can be completely contradictory. In different styles. And it works! Each of you seemingly just was writing exactly what you wanted to write, contradicting the others, but then because it’s structured as a dialogic media environment — where even when people are talking about serious things, nonfictional things, they contradict each other with parallel accounts — it just seemed normal. It’s how social media works. There was no need to turn it into a single thing.
William Gillespie
I teach in University of Illinois’ nascent Game Design Studies Minor and I’m doing a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book class, which may happen only once, but is a blast! That class is allowing us to look at story independent of medium, because I’ve got students who aren’t necessarily on an English track. So they’re teaching me games; I’m teaching them books.
As I talk with these students about story and about what a story is — independent of any manifestation of it, including video games — we’re noticing that there’s a lot about continuity in the way fiction is taught and described. You have Freytag’s pyramid of dramatic structure,6Freytag, Gustav. Freytag’s Technique of Drama. An Exposition of Dramatic Composition and Art. The Ohio State University, 1969. Full book available via Internet Archive: https://ia801302.us.archive.org/31/items/freytagstechniqu00freyuoft/freytagstechniqu00freyuoft.pdf which is just a single line. Or you can look at Harry Stephen Keeler’s diagrams,7More on Keeler’s theory of plot: https://site.xavier.edu/polt/keeler/onwebwork.html which also show a continuous, linear melody of characters moving in and out.
Discontinuity is not taken seriously as part of fiction. I mean by discontinuity: vast changes in status, scale, and point of view… and contradictory evidence. Granted, texts like that are hard to read and digest and know how to manage from a single-writer-fiction point of view other than saying: ‘this is kind of off topic, but it’s interesting.’
But I want to say that this massive, contradictory babble is closer to my experience of life than a single continuous narrative and also closer to my experience of cognition. I don’t know what other people’s brains are like, but I have like a committee with one beleaguered spokesperson in here and it’s, it’s, it’s a crowd.
Rob Wittig
[laughs] I couldn’t agree more! I think that’s a beautiful way of saying it!
William Gillespie
Dirk once said that the project of contemporary poetry was to come closer and closer to cognition. And part of contemporary poetry would be the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry movement and the use of parataxis or jarring juxtapositions. So, maybe the poetry community has gotten farther with exploring types of contradictory information that are actually more like real life than single-line stories with heroes.
Rob Wittig
Excellent! I’d love to hear more about your own writing with constraints. And then, how has participating in digital collaborations, Netprovs, impacted your own creative work and your own scholarly practice?
William Gillespie
Working with constraints, trying to develop Oulipean-style constraints, I wrote a book under the name, Dominique Fitzpatrick-O’Dinn, called Table of Forms8See https://shop.spybeambooks.com/product/table-of-forms where I tried to combine word games taken from A. Ross Eckler9See record in Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._Ross_Eckler_Jr. and people like that in the journal Word Ways, the Journal of Recreational Linguistics,10Word Ways: The Journal of Recreational Linguistics was published since 1968 until 2020. All issues available here: https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/wordways/all_issues.html with traditional poetic forms, and then forms taken from the Oulipo. I tried to create systems with them. It’s collaborative because there is a system people can follow. It actually creates opportunities for people to write together — especially people who may not have a big personality or poetic intuition to write.
This goes back to my old high school, which was mainly a math and science school at that time. I asked: what kind of poetry assignments would be good for students — sort of timid people with really good math and analytical minds, who don’t have the personality to step into a poem? How can I give them a form to follow so they can express themselves? That is when I started to invent, use, and assign constraints. Then we would ask the students to stand on their desks and read these very strange things. It was fun! So I started working with constraints because it was a for collaboration purposes and for teaching purposes.
Rob Wittig
What are your thoughts about the possible community building potential of Netprov, and/or Netprov as a tool to build bridges in a polarized society?
William Gillespie
You’re asking me about the potential for community building of Netprov and the potential of Netprov to build bridges in a polarized society? God damn, I’m going to need an ellipsis!
Rob Wittig
[pretending to shout at Anna] Canwe get can we get William an ellipsis please? The big one, the big one, he needs the big one!11Note from editor [AN]: ellipsis granted!!!
William Gillespie
Perhaps some parentheses while you’re back there? This is gonna get digressive! Well, it’s a darned good question. I mean, building bridges in a polarized society is something we ought to all be tending to in our spare time when we aren’t writing Netprov, especially in post-2016 USA.
Well, let me ask you: social media, Facebook, how it’s caused problems and democracy and the election and misinformation and weird fringe groups and hating… Let’s just back off that point for a second. Put the parentheses in the corner for now. Do you think that social media is a Netprov, because we have people engaging in free spirited writing together synchronously?
Rob Wittig
I guess I personally define Netprov as having a conscious, artistic goal. And then and I would say, a purpose for being fictional like: ‘I’m going to write something that I know isn’t true, but uses fiction in the tradition of storytelling in society,’ in a good way.
William Gillespie
In the sense of the classic American dilemma of the awkward Thanksgiving dinner table conversation between cousins who are on different sides of the political aisle, I’d have to think harder about how to deploy Netprov. Because my cousins are not interested in creating art objects. However, if we look at the roots of how we end up on our side of the aisle, using Netprov as a pedagogical tool in a classroom, or really in any environment where people are agreeing that they’re going to participate in good faith in creating an art object, I think it has tremendous potential to heal. Precisely because of the ability to hold contradictions and perhaps even work them out a little bit.
Rob Wittig
How has Netprov and this kind of collaborative, networked writing changed over the years?
William Gillespie
You and Mark have made it accessible and done your best to legitimize it as much as you can legitimize something like this without ruining the fun of it. And I’m trying to think about whether collaborative writing as a legitimate pursuit in the world of book literature has budged at all. There was an ancient beat-era collaborative manuscript that was released. But, no, I’m not seeing anything in the book world that shows that it has had an impact. So keep trying!
In the poetry community, exploring the kinds of contradictions and odd juxtapositions that are the connective tissue of Netprov is gaining traction. And from that, we’re going to talk about the ecstasy of the text in other domains just to bring it full circle. In the past 20 years, we’re seeing good television of the sort that simply did not exist in the previous millennium. That is not something anyone saw coming: good television, like really, really, really good cinema quality with massive stories that would fill bookshelves. That involves collaboration, and I’m guessing a lot of fun is had in isolated moments between all the stress of putting a putting together a precisely timed episode by deadline. A whole massive crew. That’s happening.
And games — the students in my class, when they talk about games, they also talk about the studios that made them and, and the studios have teams and stories, and some of them are more “indie” than others. And it’s very familiar to me from being a rock music snob, but at the same time not at all familiar, because when I was coming up video games were anonymous. We just thought Pac-Man wrote his own game.
Rob Wittig
[laughs] Thanks so much!