Multimedia and Modern Storytelling

Photo credit to the author

This past weekend, I was lucky enough to go see Neil Gaiman present his newest book in what was referred to as a "multimedia presentation". 

You may be asking "A what?"

He teamed up with FourPlay string quartet and the illustrator for his newest book in order to create four shows, the likes of which I've never seen. This could easily be the path that author presentations take in the future.

The quartet knew their audience: they started off with vaguely creepy sounding music and added a base line, and to the entire crowd’s shock, they opened the show with a rendition of the Doctor Who theme song. Neil has written two episodes for the show, so it was a reasonable guess that a number of people there would at least recognize the theme.

Neil came on to finish the first half of the show with a series of short story readings. He’s been involved in a number of innovative projects, such as a social media experiment on twitter where he asked questions, chose an answer, and wrote a short story for each month of the year. I’d highly recommend reading them, they’re available here with his journal explaining the project here. He read the October piece in Edinburgh.

The piece that hit me hardest was The Man who Forgot Ray Bradbury (available to listen to here in his blog). It's about a writer who slowly loses his memories with age. More importantly, to him, is the way he slowly loses stories. As a writer and prolific reader, Alzheimer's and memory loss are terrifying to me, yet I know full well that it runs in the women in my mother's family. My grandmother hasn't recognized me as myself in years, and the early onset form is slowly starting to have other impacts in the family.

To quote my aunt, "You either have to laugh about it or cry about it," and most of the time the family has had enough of tears. Still, the way he verbalized one of my greatest fears, almost cheerfully, never taking on the impossible frustration of losing memories, brought me to tears.

The full novelette of The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains, available here is excellent, but if you’re unfamiliar with Neil’s work, there’s one thing you need to keep in mind: he is primarily a storyteller. One of the best things you can do is listen to one of his audiobooks, most of which he has read himself. The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains is based on traditional stories told about the Isle of Skye.

One of the most interesting things about the things Mr. Gaiman has produced is the variety of ways in which he has produced it and presented it to the public. He constantly interacts with fans (he has official facebook, a blog, and tumblr, as well as a twitter account he used for the months of the year prompts). The interaction not only gives fans a way to interact with him, but also ways for him to see what they want to know. In recent years, he has published short stories or prologues to pieces finished years ago, such as How the Marquis got His Coat (a companion piece for Neverwhere) and the Overture run (a prologue run for the cult classic Sandman comics). Those pieces have been released in part because his fan base has grown, but also because of the feedback from his readers.

His reader interaction is almost an art form in itself, and collaborative work has been produced from it. The Blackberry project produced a dozen short stories based on prompts from fans, which I provided a link to earlier in this post.

What are the newest ways of publishing, and how can an author grow a fan following that is so loyal, it can beat Harry Potter fans when it comes to the production of London's 51st literary bench? (That happened just recently, by the way. Details can be seen here. Neverwhere beat the Harry Potter series, most likely because of fan persistence during the voting process. It broke my heart in two to vote against Harry Potter, but...ah well.) How do you build a group so loyal, they've already started voicing opinions on the upcoming casting for the TV series of American Gods, which will be produced in the upcoming year? How can a fiction author, one who has been in the business for years, continue to widen their creative endeavors?

Those questions are being answered in different ways, but I believe that Neil Gaiman and his publishing team are certainly on the right track. His fan following has grown in recent years, and even readers that have stuck with him for a considerable time have branched out into his other work (ex: reading the Sandman comics because I enjoyed his novels so much). They turn fiction into art, and a part of how they have done it is by transforming books into stories, told on page and by mouth (Mr. Gaiman reads almost all of his own audiobooks), through radio show (the BBC produced a star-studded serial broadcast version of Neverwhere) and through TV (the upcoming series for American Gods). His stories are finding niches and cracks in almost every genre and every form of media, and the tell-tale signs in his work are like songs that get stuck in your head. You can read his work a number of times, and still take away something new each time. No matter what media source the story comes through, the seed of the story is always given over to the reader to take root and grow.

Personally, I think what they're doing is working.