Why you need an app to understand my novel

I began Arcadia – a novel conceived and written for an app – over four and a half years ago when a lot of people were musing about digital narrative. After working my way through three publishers, two designers, four sets of coders and a lot of anguish, I am no longer surprised that few others have done anything about it. I also understand why the NHS database could go five times over budget and not work. What should be a simple task – write story, create software, publish – turns out to be anything but in practice.

I do not even have any natural enthusiasm for computing, which now perplexes me even more than it did when I began, and I certainly did not want to thrust myself into the vanguard of digital innovation. Rather, I undertook the project because I had reached the limit of my storytelling in book form and needed some new tools to get me to the next stage. I have always written novels that are complex structurally; in An Instance of the Fingerpost, published many years ago now, I told the same story four times from different points of view; The Dream of Scipio was three stories interleaved; while Stone’s Fall was three stories told backwards. All worked, but all placed quite heavy demands on the readers’ patience by requiring them to remember details often inserted hundreds of pages before, or to jump centuries at a time at regular intervals. Not surprisingly, whatever structure I chose there were some who did not like it.

As I wanted to write something even more complex, I began to think about how to make my readers’ lives as easy as possible by bypassing the limitations of the classic linear structure. Once you do that, it becomes possible to build a multi-stranded story (10 separate ones in this case) where each narrative is complete but is enhanced when mingled with all the others; to offer readers the chance to structure the book as best suits them. To put it another way, it becomes fairly straightforward (in theory) to create a narrative that was vastly more complex than anything that could be done in an orthodox book, at the same time as making it far more simple to read.

So, the reader can begin with the character of Henry Lytten, an academic, and follow his route as he takes time off writing a story to catch a possible spy; as he writes, the reader can switch to the story of Jay, one of his characters, and the order of reading determines whether Jay’s actions are caused by Lytten’s writing, or the other way round. Or the reader can follow Rosie, who looks after Lytten’s cat until she meets Jay. Or perhaps Angela, a minor character for much of Lytten’s story, who Rosie finally meets and simultaneously never meets. Minor characters can become major ones at will, and central characters become bystanders equally easily.

Keeping control of all these plot lines was difficult, and when moulding them into the software it was vital to keep a strict discipline, making the technology the servant of the story rather than its master; the worst outcome would have been a sort of techno livre d’artiste that generated visual shock-and-awe to the point that the actual story became almost irrelevant. The app was conceived to help the business of reading, not to make the reader go “wow”. Arcadia is ultimately just a story; a tale of three worlds, historical, ideal and dystopian, with a cast of characters whose actions and decisions change and affect their surroundings and interconnect endlessly. It is also about memory and storytelling, and the possibility of drawing together fragments of all the great tales of the world as they are remembered by one or other of the characters.

Ebooks are now quite venerable in computing terms, but it is striking how small an impact they have had on narrative structure; for the most part, they are still just ordinary books in a cheap format. An analogy is the early days of cinema, when film-makers did little more than plonk cameras in front of a stage and film a play. It took some time before they realised that by exploiting the new possibilities the technology offered – cutting, editing, closeups, lighting and so on – they could create a new art form that did not replace theatre, but did things theatre could not. Computing power properly understood and used can perhaps eventually do something of the same; not supplant orthodox books – which are perfectly good in most cases – but come into play when they are insufficient.

Writing Arcadia did produce odd effects in ways that an ordinary book or ebook could not; scenes became more episodic and vignette-like; the demands of shifting from one point of view to another, and then to multiple ones in different worlds, required different ways of writing. Most peculiarly of all, I found that the story was most easily structured by looking at it visually; whole strands were expanded or even deleted simply to create a more pleasing shape in the writing program I was using. On every occasion, the more satisfactory the appearance, the better the story read, and I still haven’t quite figured out how that works.

As the story evolved, so did the design of the app and that, in turn, influenced the story, even though I decided early on to be rather conservative. It has minimal graphics, no music and no animations. The reader does not choose outcomes or influence decisions, and there are no prizes or levels. You read the text; how you see characters depends on how much of it you read, where you start, and whether you read strand by strand, or hop from one to the other.

Above all, the way the strands of story could be mixed or kept separate offered a liberation from those shackles known as genres. It is inevitable that authors, consciously or not, slot themselves into some category or other, and if they do not, others will do it for them. Writing Arcadia loosened those restraints. It is a spy story, a fantasy, a historical novel, a romance, a mythology and a work of science fiction. It is a meditation on literature and narrative, or just a light-hearted romp. Naturally that means that one strand or another, one theme or another, may displease. But you can always leave that bit out.