Writing on the go… a mobile story project about creating new forms of literature.

A multimedia storytelling project that might just inspire you.

Could you write a story… using only your mobile phone?

A short time ago, I received an intriguing message through the Northern Beaches Writers’ Group website (which is the critique group I run in Manly, Sydney). The message was from a rather clever cookie at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), Jessica Frawley, who was working on a collaborative storytelling project. Part of ongoing research into new forms of literature, the project was to explore the telling of local stories with writing, pictures, sound and images… using only a mobile phone. Well, she had me at ‘writing’.

The project has now completed its first stage, and the stories created are up on the mStories website*. The next stage is to analyse the creation process. Well, from my perspective, it was certainly a challenge…

Writing on the go was restrictive…

Usually when I write a story, I devise a plot, characters, make notes on setting, then start writing. Occasionally I do this in my head over a series of weeks or months, until the story’s ready to burst onto the page. But more often it involves writing down my ideas and research (yes, I’m a planner).

But with no notepad or laptop, only a mobile phone, I found I couldn’t plan at all (ie. it forced me to become a pantser).

…but it also challenged my imagination.

Storytelling today involves so much imagery and visual stimulation, plus the mStories had to be inspired by our local area/lives, so I knew I wanted to incorporate photos into my story. But I found this restricted my creativity – there couldn’t be any spaceships, alternate lifeforms, or magic in my story… at least, no obvious magic. I couldn’t get away from my immediate surroundings, like I can in front of the computer at home, yet I still wanted to find some way to stretch my imagination.

When the idea behind The Voice finally came to me, I tapped through to my mobile’s text message application and started writing. I wanted to use text messages rather than email, because email would be too similar to Word and I wanted to embrace the challenge. The first paragraph of my story was three text messages. I saved them as drafts and snapped a photo. After repeating this sequence in several different locations, I had my story. Did I like it though?

Jessica Frawley and I celebrating the launch of the mStories website, with cake…

I found it hard not to write in clichés, because it took so long to write using my phone’s keypad, even with predictive text, and that tested my patience.

The story itself ended up being really short, because short bursts of creativity was all I could manage before being interrupted, one way or another.

After writing the final line, I also couldn’t self-edit in my usual way and seeing repetitions in my work makes me cringe. A copy edit would have picked those up.

…yes, cake. Yum! Thank you, Jessica Frawley!

Still, the essence of a story was there. The question now is whether that essence is enough. I’m still not sure.

Follow the links* to read the mStories that other writers created with their mobile phones, and tell me what you think. There are stories from London, Sydney and Cambridge.

Mine is called The Voice, and it’s a journey of discomfort set in Sydney. You can read it here.

*EDITED: Please note that the mStories website is now discontinued, but my story is still studied at university through the PhD thesis written by Jessica Frawley ‘mStories: Understanding the new literacies of mobile devices through a creative participatory research project‘ (as Figure 9, p.44).