The Angler

by Donavan Hall

There used to be a little bookshop called Prospero's in Long Neck right next door to the Funky Café.  A few years ago I wandered into Prospero's on a Saturday afternoon. (I have a weakness for book browsing.)  I saw this book on the shelf published by Soft Skull Press (it's an imprint that I respect).  The book was called Exit Strategy by Douglas Rushkoff.  On the back cover I read: "Available on the web, Exit Strategy is America's first open source novel..."  Open source novel?

Being a bit of an information technology geek I had dabbled in writing software and had participated in a few open source projects.  The basic idea was simple.  The software and the code that made it work was available to anyone who wanted to tinker with it, add to it, improve it, adapt it, anything.  Improvement would be shared with the community of users and over time the program would become better and more useful.  But how does an open source novel work?

The more I thought about the open source novel -- as a concept -- the more I wondered who would be interested in such a thing.  Why would a writer want to open source their fiction?  Most writers dream of having some prestigious publishing house mass produce thousands of paper copies of their book for sale in bookstores across America (and the world).  Posting your fiction on the Internet was the same thing as a vanity press -- so it was said -- and it was the best way to ensure that your novel would never be published.  But wait a minute, I thought.  If your novel was on the Internet, then it was -- in effect -- published, right?  Anybody who wanted to could, in principle, read your novel.  But therein lies the rub: who is going to read a novel posted on the Internet?  Have you ever read one?  I haven't.  There's no shortage of stuff to read and your average reader is not so hard up that they have to resort to dredging up stuff on the Internet.  Besides, a web page is not really the ideal medium for displaying a text.

I put the idea of open source novels behind me as unworkable.  A couple of years passed.  Prospero's closed.  You couldn't even buy books in Long Neck anymore.  You had to drive to Lake Grove to the Mall where there was an enormous Burns & Nobbles to cater to your paper reading needs.

Last year, I read an article in The New Yorker about cellphone novels -- evidently a phenomenon in Japan.  Millions of people were reading novels written for and displayed on the screens of their cellphones.  The most popular of these cellphone novels jumped the media tracks and became national print best sellers.  Interesting.  As technology changed, the way people used their portable electronics changed.  I could easily imagine reading a novel on the screen of an iPhone while lying in bed.

Just because screens to read from were getting smaller and more portable didn't necessary connect with the open source novel, just the online novel.  To come back to this idea of open source fiction took one additional nudge: open source cinema.  I saw a trailer for the documentary RiP: A remix Manifesto.

The scales fell from my eyes.  The only people who benefit from copyright are the people that profit off the creativity of others.  Copyright was killing culture.  Unless we freed art from the chains of the corporate/industrial/manufacturing complex, then we would be cut off from our cultural birthright.

I decided that from now on I would open source all of my creative projects.  And the heavens opened and the angels sang.

One thing that bothered me about other open source novels was that each appeared to have a principal author who was responsible for important things (like the plot) and collaborators who could add stuff like footnotes, commentary, even whole chapters, but this didn't seem like open source to me.  A real open source novel would be one that could be copied in whole by someone other than the principal author and adapted and rereleased as something new.  Effectively, new derivative works could be spun-off by new principal authors.  Open source novels could be remixed and mashed-up and re-presented.

To participate in this open source cultural revolution I'm open sourcing my continuous novel Into the Labyrinth.  You can read it, add to it, change it, remix it, publish it, quote it, whatever.  The only thing you need to do is respect the Creative Commons license.

Which brings us back to the problem of why you would want to.  And I'm not going to spend a lot of words trying to convince you to enter Into the Labyrinth and work with it's structure, it's characters, it's premise; but I ask that you give open source some consideration.

By open sourcing your own novel, you break down all barriers to its distribution.  You encourage people to copy it, email it, print it out, give it away, etc.  You increase interest in your novel by making its characters and scenes available to other writers to use and adapt in their novels.  Why is this good for you as a writer?  Most people are honest.  Most people will want to give their sources the credit they deserve.  Through these connections and references your work will be found.

All well and good, you think, but how do you get paid?  How do you achieve that dream of staying at home all day and writing in your pajamas?  I'm still working on that one myself, so I'm not the person who should be giving out advice.  However, consider the open source "shareware" model -- if you like this novel consider making a donation to... -- or put out a virtual tip jar.  That might only get you enough change to buy yourself a pint of beer occasionally, but as our online culture becomes more open source savvy, those writers that are really good at what they do will start seeing some return.  That return will probably come in ways that we cannot yet imagine.  Through cross-collaborationn with other artists that work in other media -- your novel adapted for the small screen, perhaps.

Open source is one weapon we can use to fight corporate control of culture.  We can reclaim our cultural heritage, work to make culture more diverse, start building a strong, innovative culture built on the principles of (social) democracy and community.

One more thing.  Corporate globalization of culture through commodifying and commercializing art leads to a mono-culture -- a culture that relies on the efforts of a few who have been anointed as the creative chosen.  These chosen may be the best of the best, but by throwing all the talent into the global bin, many creative people get shut out of the creative process and are relegated to playing the role of passive consumer.  We can say no to globalized corporate mono-culture, say no to being consumers, and start building "local" cultures based around either geographical or virtual borders -- diverse communities of people who create art for each other.

If these ideas interest you, consider joining the community here at The Angler, or get together with your friends and establish your own creative cooperative.  The future is ours.  All we have to do is work together and take ourselves seriously while we have a little fun.