How I made my monster - Part 3

I presented Profile Books with a shortlist of classic novels that would be suitable for an interactive makeover. Far from favouring Frankenstein, if anything it was probably the one I was most reluctant to take on because of my company Spark Furnace’s own Frankenstein’s Legions project. That's a very different take on the source material (science fictional and picaresque rather than literary and tragic) by author John Whitbourn, but even so I was a touch concerned about possible confusion.

Luckily, Profile picked Frankenstein anyway, and it is unquestionably the ideal work for this treatment. There are even moments in Shelley’s original when Victor Frankenstein speaks directly out of the page: “I cannot tell you how my process works,” or, “If I die, swear that you will kill the fiend.” He’s talking to Captain Walton, of course, but Walton is our surrogate. There couldn’t be a better fit for what I wanted to do in building a relationship between reader and character. You get to influence Victor Frankenstein, not merely in building up trust between the two of you, but in encouraging his obsession or, alternatively, in helping him to reconnect with his friends and family. You are not merely his confidant; you have the ability, if you choose, to be his mentor.

At first I thought that Spark Furnace would have to hire the coders too, but by luck Michael met up with an app development company called Inkle. They had written a markup language which means that authors can write an entire gamebook as a text file, including all the variables and conditional links, and that can just be poured into the engine and immediately you have a working app. This was particularly useful to me, as I’ve done so many gamebooks that I mostly keep the flowchart in my head and just write everything straight down on the page. (Warning: if you’re thinking of writing an interactive book, don’t try this at home.)

While I was writing, Inkle laid it all out beautifully and added dozens of 18th and 19th century images to create the kind of luxurious coffee-table look that readers expect of book apps. The only picture that is actually illustrative is the one of a solitary figure in a bare wood, used as the “book cover”, which was designed by Profile’s art director. I specifically didn’t want any pictures that depicted scenes from the story because – well, are we children? A good novel is already 100% immersive, and even if it’s Phiz or Paget or Shepard, I’d just as soon see the scene the way my imagination renders it, thanks. That’s why Inkle’s decorative images and textures are so perfect; they subtly enhance the mood without pointing an intrusive finger at specific details.

Returning to the medium in which I started out, after a long detour through videogames, television, comic books and novels, was a little daunting. Would I emerge as the triumphant master of my (much more than) 10,000 hours, like Odysseus dispatching the upstart suitors, or would I merely reveal that I couldnae hack it anymore? With some relief I can announce that Penelope’s honour is safe: Frankenstein reached the Top 10 in App Store books on both sides of the Atlantic and has garnered some glowing reviews. Et voilà:

• Laura Miller on Salon.com
• Helen Bagnall on The Literary Platform
• John Higgs on Books Versus Apps
• Gabrielle Malcolm on Popmatters
• Dalya Alberge in The Independent
• Chris Welch on The Verge
• Emily Short’s Interactive Storytelling
• The Gothic Imagination
• Guys Can Read

You can buy Frankenstein, for iPad and iPhone in the App Store here.

How I made my monster - Part 2

Thus it was all change on my next project, an animated drama called Dilemmas in which the lead character narrated her life and occasionally turned to look out of the fourth wall to ask your advice. You could earn her trust (by showing that you understood her and knew which suggestions would work for her) and her friendship (by showing you were in tune with her). The overall plotline didn’t alter drastically, but the subtle variations were what mattered. Did Cathy get a lost gold pen back by standing up for herself or by lying? She’d walk away from that with very different feelings – about herself and about you – depending on the advice you gave.

But who are “you” in an interactive story like that? I deliberately didn’t want to define it. You’re Cathy’s imaginary friend? Her conscience? It doesn’t matter. You’re you, the viewer, the same you that Michael Caine addresses in Alfie, or John Cusack in High Fidelity. The effect is to draw you right alongside the character, with the added benefit that you don’t have to know any Crimean marching songs. You are most emphatically not a “player-character”.

I applied this model of interactivity in various other projects, including the Sims-type PC game I designed for Microsoft at Elixir Studios, and in a Law and Order Xbox game for the American Film Institute’s digital content lab in 2006:

Characters learn whether to trust the player. This occurs in the context of adventure-type gameplay, either when advising the character what to do or when interrogating a character. Advice that goes against a character’s nature or that turns out to have a bad effect will cost you trust. You might get to a point where Detective Stabler has found some evidence but he won’t show it to you. So if that happened you’d have to find a way to earn back Stabler’s trust.

Around 2009, Jamie Thomson and I started thinking about what we could do with our old gamebooks as apps. Pretty quickly, we realized that apps were a game-changer because we could pack all the nerdy stuff like hit points and inventory under the hood. A few minutes later, we realized that meant that the most interesting things we could do would be all-new gamebooks, where the variables wouldn't be hit points at all, but things like trust and compassion. We could write gamebooks that weren’t games any more but could now legitimately be called interactive literature.

(As an aside: why “interactive literature” not “interactive fiction”? Because I’m talking about books, while fiction includes TV, movies, comics, plays.)

Okay, so all that remained was to get a publisher interested. Read that last sentence as dripping with irony – I had about two years’ worth of publisher meetings with Spark Furnace’s long-suffering but indefatigable agent, Piers Blofeld. We pitched the idea of ghostwriting digital books for brand name authors, of interactive nonfiction, and original interactive novels to be released in serial form. Finally, in July 2011, I met with Michael Bhaskar at Profile Books and unveiled my plan for rewriting classic novels in interactive form:

There are two options for handling the interactivity. The traditional gamebook style is second person: “Tongues of flame dart round the bed: the curtains are on fire. In the midst of blaze and vapour, Mr. Rochester lies stretched motionless, in deep sleep. Do you try to wake him ●, call for help ●, or attempt to extinguish the flames ●?” Alternatively there’s a first person approach, which I favour, in which the narrator asks the reader for advice. This lends itself especially to epistolary novels: “‘Can it be that the count sleeps when others wake, that he may be awake while they sleep? If I could only get into his room! But there is no possible way. The door is always locked. Unless – Mina, dare I attempt to climb the castle wall, as I have seen him do, and enter by his window?’ Yes ● or no ● ?”

The concluding part of the making of the Frankenstein book app is on Wednesday.

How I made my monster - Part 1

Writers just can’t help making stuff up. Terry Nation claimed he got the word Dalek from the spine of an encyclopaedia, a story he stuck to for years, because the only other response to “where do you get your ideas?” is to punch the questioner in the face. Mary Shelley said that her monster bounded ready-made into a dream:

My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie. I saw—with shut eyes, but acute mental vision —I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion. Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world. His success would terrify the artist; he would rush away from his odious handywork, horror-stricken. He would hope that, left to itself, the slight spark of life which he had communicated would fade; that this thing, which had received such imperfect animation, would subside into dead matter; and he might sleep in the belief that the silence of the grave would quench for ever the transient existence of the hideous corpse which he had looked upon as the cradle of life. He sleeps; but he is awakened; he opens his eyes; behold the horrid thing stands at his bedside, opening his curtains, and looking on him with yellow, watery, but speculative eyes.

I’m not saying it’s impossible, but she did write that fifteen years after the event, and when she adds her realization that “I have found it! What terrified me will terrify others; and I need only describe the spectre which had haunted my midnight pillow,” I think we can all detect some artful revision going on. People want a simple story. The truth is that invention is rarely so clear-cut.

My own Frankenstein creation, appropriately enough for a branching narrative, came about via an untidier route with many side paths. I wrote a lot of choose-your-own-adventure type books through the ‘80s and early ‘90s, and towards the end I was chafing at the restriction that the second-person narrative imposed on my storytelling skills. As a game designer, I am willing to switch off my authorial side – in fact, I insist on it – so I was happy in the Fabled Lands books to just create a sandbox world and let players loose in it. But in more story-driven gamebooks like Heart of Ice and Down Among the Dead Men, you will be able to see me trying to enrich the narrative beyond the “which door do you pick?” level by creating a bevy of fully developed secondary characters with whom the reader (the player-character, so to speak) develops a relationship.

If there was a eureka moment, it came when I was developing a few interactive drama ideas for Flextech and Endemol in 2001. No, there wasn’t a monolith, but the Damascene flash came as one of Flextech’s producers started talking about his idea for some kind of steampunk adventure thing. “We want to encourage the viewer to play a role,” he said, going on to list choices such as Crimean war veteran and Ottoman trader. But all I was thinking at the time was, “We’ve got to get our heads out of this box. I’ve been thinking like a role-player, and most people do not want to role-play.”

Part 2 of the making of the Frankenstein app on Monday.

Strictly no sparkles

Walpurgis Nacht in Germany and Eastern Europe is the time for witches and spectres to roam abroad. Halloween might seem a better time for that than the spring, but the principle is the same. As seasons change, there’s the chance for unnatural things to slip between the cracks.

In the deleted opening chapter from Dracula, Harker has already sent his coachman away with the rash assertion that, “Walpurgis Nacht has nothing to do with Englishmen” when he finds himself outside a tomb in the woods near Munich:

"Walpurgis Night was when, according to the belief of millions of people, the devil was abroad - when the graves were opened and the dead came forth and walked. When all evil things of earth and air and water held revel. This very place the driver had specially shunned. This was the depopulated village of centuries ago. This was where the suicide lay; and this was the place where I was alone - unmanned, shivering with cold in a shroud of snow with a wild storm gathering again upon me!"

Chin up, Jonny boy. At least you’re not in Transylvania. Yet.

The images here come from Mirabilis episode sixteen (“The Dark Side”) back from the days when we were running in The DFC in 5-page episodes rather than the 25-page issues we have now. It was timed to appear in print in the week of Walpurgis Night (although in story chronology the action there is still only mid-January) but, of course, The DFC was already buried in unconsecrated ground by May 2009. Never mind - we kept right on going with all the crazed energy of one of Dracula's Szgany servitors and are now working on what would be episode forty-nine in DFC reckoning.

Turning to a whole other continent of vampiric lore, here’s a little bit of bitey action with an Indian flavour that I wrote years ago for the bright young film-making team of Dermot Bolton (producer) and Dan Turner (director). Turn down the lights, draw your chair closer to the screen, and shiver at the story of A Dying Trade part 1 and part 2.

Where’s Mr Pointy when you need him?

A thing of bolts and stitches?

How do you create a monster? Victor Frankenstein isn’t telling. His excuse, eminently reasonable in light of how things turned out, is that he wants to prevent others from rediscovering the process. We're not sure if he's giving life or restoring it; we're left in the dark as to whether it involves sparks or smells or both. A possible clue: recounting his early influences, Victor mentions Paracelsus and other practitioners of alchemy and occultism. Benjamin Franklin and Luigi Galvani don’t get a look in.

“I pursued nature to her hiding-places. Who shall conceive the horrors of my secret toil, as I dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave, or tortured the living animal to animate the lifeless clay? […] I collected bones from charnel houses and disturbed, with profane fingers, the tremendous secrets of the human frame. […] The dissecting room and the slaughter-house furnished many of my materials; and often did my human nature turn with loathing from my occupation.”

As John Sutherland wrote in his essay “How does Victor make his monsters?” there is nothing in the original novel that says the monster is a patchwork of body parts from rifled graves:

“It remains unclear whether [Victor’s] motive has been research into primal tissue, or the kleptomaniac filching of limbs and organs with which Fritz’s midnight forays in the films have made us familiar.”

Fritz (the inimitable Dwight Frye) is of course a creation of the movies; in the novel, Victor has no assistant, hunchbacked or otherwise. The location he chooses for his second laboratory is a tiny island in Orkney, and he goes there alone. Unless he brings with him a stack of coffins, we can safely assume that no corpses are harmed in the making of the second (female) monster. Certainly the island’s population cannot provide Victor with raw materials – there are only three cottages, one of which he rents. No cemetery or morgue is mentioned, supporting the theory that he constructs or even grows the bodies before animating them.

Mary Shelley may have drawn her inspiration for Victor from her husband’s enthusiasm for amateur science. Three or four years before Percy Shelley met Mary Godwin, his friend Hogg described his room at Univ:

“Books, boots, papers, shoes, philosophical instruments, clothes, pistols, linen, crockery, ammunition and phials innumerable, with money, stockings, prints, crucibles, bags and boxes were scattered on the floor and in every place, as if the young chemist, in order to analyse the mystery of creation, had endeavoured first to re-construct the primeval chaos. The tables, and especially the carpet, were already stained with large spots of various hues, which frequently proclaimed the agency of fire. An electrical machine, an air-pump, the galvanic trough, a solar microscope and large glass jars and receivers, were conspicuous amidst the mass of matter.”

It seems that Victor is a (bio)chemist, not an engineer or physicist. The only reference in the original text that justifies the leaping, coiling, thrilling bolts of electricity that arced above Colin Clive and Boris Karloff is where Victor says, “I collected the instruments of life around me, so that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet.” The rest of the passage describing the monster’s birth is tragic rather than climactic. He seems to slip reluctantly into the land of the living, and Victor has no exultant shout of “It’s alive!” His mood is one of anxiety, hopelessness and disgust.

Disgust is a big part of Victor’s relationship with the monster, a disgust evidently born of self-loathing. Novels are not literal, of course, so we need to remember that on another level the monster is Victor – the side of him that leers with “a ghastly grin” when he shapes the female creature’s flesh under his hands. Victor even describes him as “my own vampire, my own spirit let loose… forced to destroy all that was dear to me.” He is a proud, lustful, physical creature who makes a stab at pretending to be civilized. As do we all.

And what about that grin? How exactly is it “ghastly”? There’s no spare part surgery in Mary Shelley’s book; if Victor isn’t a physicist, still less is he a surgeon. And, however Shelley envisaged the monster, she surely meant him to be stranger and more disturbing than Robert De Niro criss-crossed with catgut sutures:

“His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion, and straight black lips.”

I don’t think an actor in make-up is going to cut it. People who encounter the monster react with fear and loathing – not, “Look at that poor chap,” but “Kill it! Kill it!” He must be terrifyingly deformed. In my version of the book, his skin is grown on frames similar to the ones that Victor’s cousin/fiancée uses for needlework, and it is literally transparent - a bug that Victor decides is a feature, as it will make it easier for anatomists to study the internal organs of his creation.

My Victor is a chemist and physicist - not terms that were actually used in English until the mid-1800s, but it’s all a translation, after all. He studies a little anatomy, and later has the chance to practice surgical techniques under the tutelage of Dr Robert Campbell. (If you convince Victor to do that, it means he is able to make the second creature far comelier than the first.) When we meet him, he’s collecting guillotined heads – but not to bolt onto his monster. He just wants to study the structure of a larynx so that he can replicate it:

“I need the small cartilages of a human voice box – a very intricate structure, much too time-consuming for me to build by hand. If I can find one fresh enough, chemicals can be used to stimulate its growth to suit the creature’s scale. Or perhaps I’ll use it to make moulds in which I can nurture bone cultures. There are a thousand excruciating details like this.”

Soon after, Victor talks about the monster’s brain:

“The structure of the brain is far beyond my power to replicate, so I implanted tissue from the brains of several unborn children, bathed in certain internally secreted chemicals that appear to stimulate growth, and grafted this to a fully developed brain stem. Thus the creature will be born with an infant mind, but the mind should mature at a greatly accelerated rate. As to the nature of its thoughts and feelings – they may be like yours or mine, or they may be something entirely new.”

“So it will learn?” you (it's an interactive novel) may ask Victor.

“It is learning already. The brain is active, though sleeping as in the womb. Perhaps it can even hear what we're saying.”

I have provided more details of the monster’s creation than Mary Shelley did. Readers today will expect some flesh on the bones. The story has become very familiar, from books and movies and plays, and so it’s necessary to push a little if it is still to have power to surprise and shock, but hopefully I’ve kept some of the ambiguity and mystery. I want you to read into the creation process your own private horrors. James Whale made the moment cinematically exciting, but in doing so he lost the most important aspect of Victor’s solitary act: the fact that it is unbearably sad and rather squalid. The desperate loneliness of the staring animal eye, the sudden intake of breath, the reflexive shudder – all for something that can be achieved more wholesomely outside the workshop of filthy creation.

Frankenstein is published by Profile Books. Now on sale in the App Store.

When is it right to reboot a classic?

Like most writers, I could probably use more exercise. And I wouldn’t get even as much as I do if not for Luke Navarro and Kevin McGill, who host a books podcast called Guys Can Read. It’s easy to spend an hour listening to Luke and Kevin, and then you look up and realize you’ve run ten miles without going anywhere. With them, workouts are (almost) fun.

The idea behind Guys Can Read is to look at books from a guy/geek perspective. If you’re worried that means they only review genre stuff, not a bit of it. They might discuss an SF novel, but they’re just as likely to be talking about Steinbeck or Dickens. What they care about is great storytelling, and I haven’t yet heard any of their shows where there wasn’t at least one really profound insight that made me pause my MP3 player, slow down the treadmill, and have a good long ponder.

This morning, with glorious sunshine beating down on southern England, I couldn’t face a couple of hours in an air-conditioned gym, so instead took Luke and Kevin for a walk around the verdant lanes of Great Bookham. They were talking about Sherlock Holmes, and how the BBC television version in particular may have seemed like a terrible idea to purists, but has actually turned out to be a very good way of making the characters relatable for a modern audience. (And, sure, I apologize for using the word relatable, but this stuff does matter.) Asked which was best for a modern audience, the Conan Doyle originals or the Moffat/Gatiss revamp, Kevin didn’t miss a beat before replying, “Sherlock, hands down.”

It’s not just a question of putting the characters in a present-day setting. The recent movies also managed to make people care again about Holmes and Watson, and they did it (like the TV show) by letting character drive the storyline. As Luke and Kevin point out in their show, the breadth of knowledge with which Holmes astounded Victorian readers doesn’t look quite so impressive now we have Google, so it’s important to find new ways to make us gasp at his genius – and to see how being that kind of remarkable genius affects him as a person.

But, more than that, nowadays we want stories that take us on a journey of discovery through characters and relationships. J J Abrams did more to develop the core Star Trek characters in one movie than had been attempted in the seventy-nine episodes of the original series. Abrams's story wasn’t just an intriguing science fictional problem, or even a challenge of morality and courage. It got personal. And suddenly these characters mattered again.

Not every old story needs a new telling. Nobody need rewrite Pride & Prejudice or Great Expectations; they’re just fine as they are, and still selling strong. The rip-roaring adventure rides of yesteryear, though, do tend to date (look at John Carter) . More generally, the problem comes when an old, much-loved story was built around the motor of plot or high concept. Then, over time, the grand idea becomes familiar – too familiar. As Erica Wagner said recently in The Times of Sherlock Holmes and Frankenstein, those works “escape the bonds of literature and take on a life of their own”. When the surprise value of the core idea is already disseminated into public consciousness, and if the work has no real development of character to give the story structure compensatory support – that’s when you need a reboot.

And that’s where I came in with Frankenstein. What a powerful idea it is. An ingenious, obsessively driven man creates artificial life. It has become almost the defining archetype of runaway science – never mind that it’s not actually a novel about runaway science, at least not in the original 1818 version.

But that was then. Take a look at it with the core idea extracted. There’s very little expatiation of character, still less actual character development. Victor Frankenstein is highly strung and brilliant, but those are just ticks in boxes. Despite spending the whole novel inside his head, we barely know Victor well enough to recognize him at a party, as we would Lizzy Bennet or Long John Silver, unless he came over and started telling us about his plans for creating life.

The Mary Shelley novel hardly concerns itself at all with personality. We are introduced to Victor’s friends and family as types. He has “a great friend”, Henry Clerval, who is “of singular talent and fancy” and who invariably “exerts himself to amuse” while expressing “the sensations that fill his soul”. (Whatever those sensations may be, we are left to guess.) We are shown very few concrete scenes between Henry and Victor. There is no banter. The relationship never changes. Henry exists – as most of the characters do – merely to tell Victor not to mope quite so much.

This is why you’ll find a lot of people who have read Mansfield Park or The Pickwick Papers, near-contemporary works, but not so many who’ve done more than dip into Frankenstein. I hadn’t read it myself before I began working on the interactive version. And I didn’t want to stick it in a modern setting and get sidetracked by stuff about cloning, but I did feel that it needed a complete overhaul on the level of the characters. How they feel about things, and how the events of the story change them, is given much more emphasis in my version. For instance, when the monster finds a hat and a bag full of clothes, he ventures out at sunset and waves to a farmer on the far side of a field. And the farmer waves back - which, as you can imagine, is a pretty big deal if you’ve only ever been chased, persecuted and pelted with stones.

At 155,000 words, my Frankenstein is more than twice as long as Mary Shelley’s. Partly that’s because, in an interactive book, the reader weaves through different story threads and necessarily doesn’t get to read everything. But even a single read-through of the interactive Frankenstein should produce a longer novel than the 1818 version. In much of the new material you’ll get to know Victor, and observe (and influence) his relationships with his father, his fiancée, and the monster. You’ll understand his friendship with Henry, and you can see how that develops as Victor changes under the pressure of old unburied demons closing in.

It is the old story remade - as stories have been throughout history, in fact. It’s only in the era of publishing that we started to think of them as something to lock down. My intention in remaking Frankenstein like this is that you’ll be able to come to it with the fresh interest and wild surmise of those readers of 1818 who opened the pages to find something both modern and timeless. Now you tap your fingers on the glass instead, but otherwise little has changed.

Frankenstein was conceived, designed and written by Dave Morris and is published by Profile Books. Buy it here in the App Store, and listen to Luke and Kevin review it here.

When a character asks you for advice

About ten years ago, Leo and I developed a show called Dilemmas for Flextech. It was an interactive cartoon for 9-12 year-olds featuring a teenager called Cathy who would often break the fourth wall by turning to ask the viewer for advice.

Dilemmas arose out of adventure games, but it always bothered me the way those games would focus on things like how to stack up the crates in the right order to reach the rope that you could tie to the hook... You know, puzzle stuff. It treats a story as a problem to be solved. The really interesting choices in a story are the personal ones: white lies, temptations, keeping your promises, letting down a friend, etc.

Not that Dilemmas was about picking the right moral path. That's just another kind of puzzle: "Well done, you score 20 Niceness Points". Instead, in Dilemmas, you had to build a relationship with Cathy. She would almost always take your advice (unless it was really dumb) but the outcome often depended on how well you knew her. Things could go badly wrong if you hadn't judged the course of action that suited her best. She was actually quite an effective liar, for example - so suggesting the fast-talk option often worked. But she didn't always feel good about lying, and that would have an effect too.

Some of the outcomes might appear better or worse, but the important thing was that whatever you suggested for Cathy to do, you'd get a story. There was no fail-and-start-again stuff like in a game. And she remembered the advice you gave her, and whether it got her into trouble, so there was that sense of advising a friend rather than steering a puppet-like character through the hoops of a plot. Over time, you could earn Cathy's trust and then she'd open up to you more.

As I said, Dilemmas was targeted at 9-12 year old girls - not, in 2001, considered a very big potential games market. And it suited a style of play where a bunch of viewers would sit watching on the sofa, calling out suggestions or letting Cathy get increasingly impatient till she did something off her own bat. Back then, not a chance. Flextech asked us to work on a steampunk thing called Dr Mysterio instead. But I always liked the idea of interacting as confidant to the lead character, and in the end I got to use it in a very different kind of story: Frankenstein.

The images above are not from Dilemmas, however, but from the game I designed at Elixir Studios, Dreams. That too was about making relationships with the characters. Our design motto was: "This is my town. These are my friends. Here are our stories." And the scene here (a snippet from a longer story arc involving a love triangle that you could nudge, chivvy along and generally meddle in) is not a faked-up sequence; it was a genuine, working part of the game. More about Dreams next time.