Good writers: the web needs YOU!

It is not given to everyone to write The Great Best-selling Novel. Yet if you own up to earning a living from writing, that is what everyone assumes you do. What's your name?, people ask eagerly, as if they're going to have heard of you, and their faces visibly sag when you start to describe what you actually write. It's at that point that you blow the conversational dust off those unfinished novels. They snap to again: oh, but you're a published author so your novel must be good; why are you wasting your time when all you have to do is sit down and knock off one of them. The reality, as most of us know, is that writing is hard work. To write a novel you need to give yourself a year or two of undivided time. Few can afford that. You might be able to tick over with relatively undemanding supplementary writing projects, but something that absorbs creative energies would eat into the tranquillity needed for The Great Novel. And I took out 'Best-selling' because that's another reality - most novels are supported by publishers to the flattering tune of 2000 copies or so. And what use is that, apart from the dubious pleasure of seeing your soul laid out between two boards? Even amongst writers, there's a tacit assumption that only writing The Novel carries kudos (and I've taken out 'Great' now, let's be pragmatic). So when I say - I've written school books, general interest books, done lots of journalism and even have some published poetry as well as those abandoned novels, but now I'm writing web pages - then even other authors' eyes glaze.

Why should that be so? I should like to explain why I think writing web pages is a new form that uses writerly skills; that it is genuinely creative; that it requires writers, not programmers; editors, not graphics designers; that authors who glaze over at the words 'web' or 'internet' should reconsider. Over the last few years I have been responsible for a dozen or so websites. Some are quite compact, like my own . Some are extensive, like the Guildhall School of Music & Drama (which I no longer maintain). The others include sites for a bookbinder, a photographic book prize, a film documentary award, ICT in education and various rights groups and projects. The people who commissioned me did so because I am a writer. Assessing and capturing their essence requires logical structuring, sensitivity to character and an ability to tailor the writing style according to the medium: the skills a novelist employs. It also requires visual sensitivity. I did the design myself. Not unusual. Many writers are multi-skilled; all children's writers are used to thinking about illustrations and novelists must have a good visual imagination so consideration of design has long been part of authorship. You don't have to invent stories or characters, but plotting, planning and imagination are fundamental. Although web design houses are now springing up all over the place, hardly any of them see the content - i.e. the text - as being the most important element of the site. That is because, up to now, creating a website, a set of home pages, an internet presence, or whatever you like to call it, has been a relatively young industry. Technical buzz and design wizardry have ruled. Now that individuals and organisations are beginning to see that not having a website is beginning to look as laggard as not having publicity materials and a telephone number, they want to ensure that hard-learned values are not forgotten. This is a publishing medium and there are the same imperatives in electronic publishing as there are for paper. The first is the supremacy of the written word.

But you quite rarely see that on the over-crowded, over-graphicsed and over-animated sites now available to the world's 150 million wired-up users. Even when sites have text that pays lip-service to the rules of grammar and spelling, few show an understanding that writing for the screen is not the same as writing for paper. Press-release-speak doesn't work on a scrollable rectangle of light digits. Chunks of unbroken texts are indigestible. For example, readability studies show that there is an optimum reading line length of, typically, 10-12 words. At high screen resolutions, with a browser set full-out, you might get a line length of 20 words on the default reading typeface. This leads to what are known as 'regression pauses' while the reader struggles to make sense of the text. Even with optimum line length, reading on screen is 25% slower than on paper. An author, knowing this, will write appropriately - using short sentences, line breaks or the much-maligned bullet-point. The main thrust must be at the top of the page and the text will probably be 40% the length of its paper equivalent. There is a place for discursive writing, but it's best tucked at secondary levels within the site. The writer needs to bow down to the household god of editing: Consistency. Copy-editing isn't prized on the internet, so the writer must fulfill that nit-picky role. It's all to do with getting the message across and making sure the reader understands. The site visitor irritated by a typo, ambiguity, PR-speak or inconsistency is not a well-disposed reader. Of course, it's hard to monitor on the web as it's a dynamic medium.

A web author also needs to decide when to keep the visitors concentrating on the matter in hand and when to allow them to jump off at a tangent. This is another skill the novelist cultivates. It is far from easy in the internet world of click-links, which you could liken to an elastic sub-plot, but I believe that is because we have too little experience. Our ability to control and contain the proliferation of sub-plot will mature. Perhaps the website is an art form rather like the documentary - narrative without story. But narrative - and point of view - are, and always will be, as important on a website as anywhere else. I haven't solved the problem of deciding when you keep your users on the main-line track and when your message is secure enough to let them go off on a branch line, and I don't think anyone else has either. That's why the internet needs writers like all of you to get interested in it as a writing opportunity that is valued and respected in the same way as novel-writing is respected. So don't glaze over next time someone owns up to being a web writer, but not a novelist. It's just as challenging.

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