A Novel Twist to the Conventional Art of Storytelling

What is storytelling? A medium of conveying experiences, thoughts and ideas that has been around since the Stone Age, when rock paintings adorned the walls of caves. Storytelling provides both, the author and the audience, with an escape into the world of “what could be”. What draws their attention is the extent to which storytelling has no restriction. For the author, it serves as a portal into a life he creates for himself, while for the readers it’s the mystery of uncovering new and uncharted territory that fascinates them.

That is what this project experience was for me. As the audience to the first few pages written by my fellow classmates and as the co-author of my group’s own page, I entered the world of storytelling.

I have always been a big fan of creative writing. While the main purpose of our English course is to learn how to read and write analytically, I enjoyed this part of creating a new story and blogging about it much more. Many believe that an analytical research paper and creative writing assignment have very little in common, and they are not wrong in thinking so. Research papers tend to dwell on precision, argument and persuasion, while creative writing allows more free flow of thoughts and ideas. However, what these two do share in common is the method by which the author would compile any one of the two. Both forms of writing require a background: something to build upon. Though what course they take thereafter may vary, but a basic outline of the story/research topic is necessary.

Moving on to more specific matters, what was different about this creative writing task was the addition of digital media to the already exciting art of storytelling. To be honest, even after spending days on end online, I have never posted a story on the web or written a blog post. Thus, initially when I started adding digital effects to the story I was a little uncertain of how to go about it. But of course, the availability of Google made things a lot easier. After seeing a number of options like inserting pictures, videos, URLs, drawings, maps etc. I was more overwhelmed than uncertain. However, once I uploaded the first picture and sound clip, I quickly got the hang of things and finished it off quickly.

A few days ago, our class read an excerpt from Alan Kirby’s book on Digimodernism. An unfamiliar term at the start, digimodernism soon linked itself to this assignment. We are in the era where storytelling is now done through digital media. Gone are the days when modern art was the new talk-of-the-town after years of understanding famous paintings, now digital storytelling is here to make its round. Don’t get me wrong, digimodernism in no way can ‘replace’ modernistic views, just as modern art has never ‘replaced’ the work of painters like Picasso and Van Gogh. These simply co-exist and augment to the rich history of storytelling. 

All-in-all, this assignment was a new learning experience for me in terms of familiarity with digital storytelling and blogging. It has also introduced me to the idea of digimodermisn as a new and upcoming era in art. This assignment has also been a good but short escape from the austere world of research papers.