Mary Panttaja

This week I am starting to post some of the materials for my next book—not the next novel, but the book on the creative process. I am starting to play with building navigational models for how to move through the material. There are so many directions to choose from, many types of material that can address many audiences. I see that there is the capacity and ability to write books—well, not books per se, but some kind of published object—-that are totally non-linear. They can be read non-linearly, but that I can also envision writing them that way.

I knew when I was writing my novel, Illumine, that linearity was something I wanted to play with, that is, it was important that the structure of the telling of the story reflect some of the ambiguity inherent in the philosophy underlying the story. And that without some ambiguity in time and sequence the novel would not properly embody the meaning. The structure needed to reflect the meaning so the reader would experience some of the ambiguity that the subject matter represents. So the threads of the novel are woven into a texture that represents the meaning of the book itself. I have chosen a sequence for the weaving, though the material could as likely be reorganized to produce a different experience.

My next book, which is to start appearing shortly on the site catchingtheupdraft.com, is even more complex. This is one reason it has taken me so long to write it. (In fact, I have already written three versions of it and hundreds of powerpoint slides.) It is very difficult to choose an optimal entry point: for who, or which topic, or which style of reading, or which interest group?

I see that this book in particular has a whole meta-structure. It looks something like this:

• The Overall Topic (which has many flavors of explanation)
• Three Key Ingredients
• Depth: Introductory to Complex Explanations
• Voice: Personal, Coaching, Very Technical, Spiritual
• Audiences: Artists, Individuals, Organizations, Philosophers
• Media Types: Fables, Discourse, Essays, Stories
• Multi-Media: Text, Images, Audio, Video

So one of the intriguing ideas percolating on the edge between my writing and my technology research is about how to build tools that help the writer and then the reader to describe, employ, and deploy the meta-text that can structure publishing objects that are inherently non-linear. What do the meta-structures look like? How could one implement them? What do the readers do with the meta-structures? How does the whole experience with the material evolve?

I believe that this model of meta-structural writing reflects the evolution of ideas as they come into being and that perhaps now we can reflect multiple approaches to complex material in one such meta-object that includes the structure and the writing. I find it liberating to not have to find “the one” linear structure in material that does not lend itself to a single line of attack. I also think that we can produce more ambient fiction—that is, where the new model of digesting the material has more flexibility, context, and ambivalence, allowing more flexibility for the writer to reflect meaning in more complex structure.

New thoughts percolating. Now I need to research to see who is doing this and what tools are arising, and see how the meta-structures arise in the work as I go.