Public Domain Stories, Wikipedia and the Creative Process

Yesterday’s story, “Going Straight,” seems incomplete to me. It’s better than mediocre, but it doesn’t feel exactly done.

If you click on the Perry County link embedded in the story’s text and scroll down to the bottom, you’ll see that the plot is something I opened sourced from folk tales/true stories about the characters as chronicled by associates and kin. If the details of John Troxell’s story as told there are true, the only thing fictive about “Going Straight” is the narrative voice and the dialogue, so it’s on an interesting line between creative nonfiction and historical fiction.

Something else I like about this story as it sits on the web: the links to Wikipedia and the Perry County website embedded as part of the text are as much a part of the story as they are of the physical (virtual?) post. Lines between genres and types of information don’t really exist in your mind as you interact with a story; you don’t need to know where you learned about Gulf Coast pirates (years ago in school or just now from the links) to make the fictive parts work as you read. Publishing interactive text on the web lets you read (and write) as you think – hyperlinks are streams of consciousness and word associations and they’re sources and citations and pedagogies, too. The point here isn’t that media is message, but that our experience of message is naturally, internally diverse. Web lit can participate in that process in ways old media cannot. Yes, I think there’s something to that.

I’m not holding up “Going Straight” as a prime example of what I mean, but in it’s own, accidental way, it is. I added the links after I posted the story because part of what made it feel incomplete was my guess that readers with no knowledge of the story (that is, most readers…it’s an obscure tale I only came across while researching my family tree) wouldn’t take much from it as it is. The links don’t lift the onus off of me to deliver something better, but I realized as I sat down tonight and rolled over them and watched them Snap a preview over the text that that’s pretty much how we encounter images, ideas, and other information all the time: a stimulus and then a spark here, a pop, an incomplete thought, a name we don’t know and then a person with a similar name that we do…associations and streams and then focus. And then it starts again; even when we work hard the noetic structure is unruly. This is why googling and wiki-ing are verbs and why those verbs are pastimes. And because language and the flow of information is never going back inside convenient, modern boxes, neither can our art, albeit incomplete. And maybe always will be.