E-pistolary

This site is a continuation of my online novel-in-email, xo bri xoxo me xoxoxo love you christy. Call it a soap opera in email.

Saturday, September 24, 2011

My Characters on Facebook: So, if you've found this site...

...perhaps you have been friends with one of my characters on Facebook and did a Google out of curiosity and ended up here.

I created Facebook pages for my characters for a few reasons. The main one was to practice writing in their voices, in a medium that was interactive, with an element of surprise to it. Meaning: I discovered that I could only take the character emails so far. When you're a fiction writer creating epistolary works in your characters' voices, you're still "writing to yourself." So I created the character Facebook pages.

But I found, pretty quickly, that when the people who friended these characters on Facebook knew that they were fictional characters, the interactions were OFF.

I decided to take a leap. I wanted to see how the interactions would work if people thought that these characters were real people. It was, as I posted in the profile of one of the characters, "a literary experiment."

The main intention was, therefore, to try to create a new type of fiction in a new medium... to see what was possible, if it was possible, etc etc.

The other intention was to put my characters on Facebook so that, when my stories were published, my readers would find them online and get "a little something extra" that wasn't for sale. I wanted to find a way to present free, interactive content that would not be available anywhere else. I get tired of everything in the arts and in literature having a price tag. I wanted to provide my readers something free, unique, interactive and fun that they could never get anyplace else... something that couldn't be bought or sold.

It's unique to Facebook and that's where it's going to stay.

Now, if you've been interacting with my characters and feel duped that they aren't "real," well... my apologies.

Consider yourself a co-creator of this experimental fiction work. Please continue to interact with them.

And keep in mind that this sort of literary experiment is not without precedent:

On Halloween night, 1938, Orson Welles and his Mercury Theater Of The Air produced a radio drama of H.G. Wells' WAR OF THE WORLDS on the CBS Radio Network. Far from being a straight dramatization of the book, Welles' WAR OF THE WORLDS was, as described on Wikipedia (sorry, it's the most convenient reference I have on hand)...

presented as a series of simulated 'news bulletins,' which suggested to many listeners that an actual alien invasion by Martians was currently in progress. Compounding the issue was the fact that the Mercury Theatre on the Air was a 'sustaining show' (it ran without commercial breaks), thus adding to the program's quality of realism. Although there were sensationalist accounts in the press about a supposed panic in response to the broadcast, the precise extent of listener response has been debated. In the days following the adaptation, however, there was widespread outrage and panic by certain listeners who believed the events described in the program were real. The program's news-bulletin format was decried as cruelly deceptive by some newspapers and public figures, leading to an outcry against the perpetrators of the broadcast, but the episode secured Orson Welles' fame. Welles' adaptation was one of the Radio Project's first studies."


At the end of the show, Welles stepped out of character and read the following announcement:

This is Orson Welles, ladies and gentlemen, out of character to assure you that "The War of The Worlds" has no further significance than as the holiday offering it was intended to be. The Mercury Theatre's own radio version of dressing up in a sheet and jumping out of a bush and saying Boo! Starting now, we couldn't soap all your windows and steal all your garden gates by tomorrow night... so we did the best next thing. We annihilated the world before your very ears, and utterly destroyed the C. B. S. You will be relieved, I hope, to learn that we didn't mean it, and that both institutions are still open for business.
So goodbye everybody, and remember please, for the next day or so, the terrible lesson you learned tonight. That grinning, glowing, globular invader of your living room is an inhabitant of the pumpkin patch, and if your doorbell rings and nobody's there, that was no Martian... it's Halloween.

It's not Halloween, but, as with Welles, if anything was destroyed by this literary experiment, you will be relieved, I hope, to learn that I didn't mean it.

Any questions, email me (maxshenkwrites@aol.com).

And please continue interacting with my characters.

Max