Day 2: Planning

My aim this year is to pay more attention to narrative qualities and the experience for readers. What can generated writing do that is unique to the form? Are there overlaps to traditional problems of literature? What kinds of creative questions and affects can I explore?

To support this, I want to change my usual digital-first approach to target both digital and print formats. I’ve gotten more and more fascinated with the idea of producing a set of limited edition zines. Unlike my previous generated writing projects, this will require more emphasis on preproduction and guiding the project with a focus on graphic design and typesetting.

I wasn’t convinced at first that NaNoGenMo would be a good fit for what I want to do here, given that the 50K wordcount is fairly unhelpful when it comes to zine production and an emphasis on generating readable books. I came back around thanks to Liza Daly who explained to me her process of doing two editions: one to hit the word count and touch the limits of the generative space and the other being shorter and curated to be interesting.

To balance all these different goals and constraints, I’ve decided right from the outset that I’m not going to focus on ideation or developing a project from scratch this year. I’m constantly coming up with new ideas for creative projects and I have a very long list of ideas, sketches, experiments and prototypes to draw from. Digging into this list reveals a very obvious favourite that I’ve been wanting to do for a long time, but have never quite gotten right.

Concept

Each zine will contain the collected cosmogeny and myth cycles of an alien civilisation, starting from a fictional exoplanet with its own unique chemistry and conditions. These mythologies will be presented as a patchwork of poems, song verses, fairytales and vignettes.

Ideally, each piece will work as a standalone chapter or section, while also combining together to form an overall story of that planet and the rise (and fall?) of its inhabitants.

A longer NaNoGenMo entry can be compiled from a larger set of multiple planets and stars, zig-zagging between different civilisations and archetypes to cover the full range of the generative space.

If possible, it would be good for the long form digital book to incorporate an overall story or structure in a similar way to the zines though I’m not going to push this too far as a requirement. If it gets too tricky or time-consuming, I will reduce the scope and complexity by stitching a long list of standalone vignettes together.

Preproduction

A quick planning sketch of the worldbuilding requirements:

Outline of the star system/planetary system generator
Definitions of each type of planet that can host a civilisation
Outline of chemistries/alchemical archetypes and their combination rules
Outline of the different archetypes for civilisations and cosmogenies and rules for how they combine with planets and chemistries

There’s also a bunch of narrative design and writing work needed to produce a set of poem and story templates that can be combined together into a patchwork myth cycle. I don’t know exactly what this list is going to look like yet, so sketching out a cohesive set of exemplars and samples that match the cosmogenic archetypes is probably going to be one of the highest priority tasks once the worldbuilding has coalesced.

Writing & Editing

This is where most of the effort will be needed. I plan to use top-down grammars for most of the poem and story structures, although I will also consider using a more intricate narrative planner system with logical predicates to specify causal links between possible plot events if it seems like that would add value in terms of producing a more cohesive and understandable story effect.

Graphic Design

Because this is a generated book rather than a hand-crafted one, a lot of the design work is going to be very abstract. Rather than dragging things around in InDesign or Illustrator, I’ll need to write each choice down in a list so that it’s easier to transfer into code.

Templates and typesetting elements to consider:

Cover (illustrations? use of colour? duotone?)
Frontspiece, title pages, colophon etc
Layout structure for chapters and section headings
Main body text for fairytales and stories
Alternative text and whitespace variations for poems and verses

I’m not totally clear at this stage how much extra work it will be to handle all this in separate editions for print and digital and I’m almost certainly going to make a few mistakes doing this. If nothing else, what I learn here will be useful R&D work for future publishing projects as well.

Production Pipeline

The main part of the technical effort is setting up an automated pipeline to run the world and story generators and transform their output into PDFs with print-specific and digital-specific variations.

The NaNoGenMo and Itch.io submissions can be handled via manual uploads. For print, it’s a little more complicated. I may have to look at doing some test runs, and rearranging things a few times until I figure out a structure that works.

Because I won’t have access to technology that enables single copies of unique editions to be printed on-demand, I’ll most likely take the approach of generating a bunch of potential variations and making a curatorial decision as to which editions get chosen for the final print run.