I have always been drawn to adaptation. There’s something about using existing patterns to spin new ones, like a spider compelled to make its web just that specific shape, that I find incredibly satisfying. My creation process is primarily visual. Sometimes, I will read/see/hear a story, and the adaptation to another form/time/style will burst fully-formed into my head. On the truly knee-buckling ones, I’ll spend the following year trying to recreate that initial burst of vision on paper. For the past several years, I’ve been primarily writing screenplay adaptations. But I find that I have burned out on the screenplay format. I no longer find it a particularly effective vehicle for telling story. It’s not designed to be. Screenplays are, first and foremost, sales documents, crafted for gatekeepers who are looking for any moment of ambiguity or confusion as a reason to stop reading.
So, putting on my best Carrie Bradshaw voice, I couldn’t help but wonder if there was another way I could tell my stories, getting around the gatekeepers. Novelists, filmmakers and musicians are using the Internet to go directly to their audience, but in those media, they can post work online without changing the essence of what the material is. Dramatists work in an intermediate form. Our work needs some sort or translation or embodiment to come to life.
I thought about alternate reality games. In ARGs, every available medium online and off is used as a vehicle for story elements. The main interactive component centers around players solving complex puzzles to get their next bit of story, like mice hitting their levers for a tasty food pellet. Like many other players, I was rubbish at the puzzles and would wait for the crypto-nuts to solve them so I could follow in their wake to find out What Happened Next. In the really good ARGs, the story was the reason I kept playing.
What burst in my head then was so overwhelming, that before I knew it, I had written a three-page manifesto for a new storytelling direction to explore. I could make ARGs with no puzzles, only stories. Using stories adapted from classic and public domain sources, I could update, rework and recontextualize them for the new forms of media that come into existence online every week and wed a particular story to an online medium that had particular thematic resonance.
That’s when I read this quote from Warren Ellis: “The hurdle to credible publishing on the web, now, is the nine dollars it costs to buy a domain name from GoDaddy, which can be mapped on to a free Tumblr or Blogger space.”
And then there was no good reason not to do it.
So, gentle readers, The Loose-Fish Project is my attempt to bring these elements together. It will be a storytelling hub with online distribution via the medium that best suits the particular qualities of the given story.
As new forms of online media continue to develop, new story concepts will become apparent. My goal is to use every conceivable method of transmitting information on the web as a vehicle for delivering story. I’m hoping this will lead to interesting collaborations with artists across many different disciplines: graphic designers, software developers, writers, musicians, performers, whomever.
In chapter 89 of Moby-Dick, Melville describes the doctrine of “Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish,” which governs possession of whales on the high seas. A fast-fish is one which is claimed, or fastened to a ship. Any fish that isn’t fastened, is up for grabs, or loose.
These stories, and the future, are now one big loose-fish.
-Jay Bushman. November 1, 2007.
