Reflection

I had a lot of fun working on this Collaborative Composition project. As a writer, I jumped at the chance to submit something more creative for this assignment rather than a simple analysis of work we had already produced, such as the discussion board. When I finalized my idea to write a Choose Your Own Adventure story incorporating conscious, contributory, and unwitting participation, I immediately got to work. 

Before even beginning to write the story, I collected different forms of participation. First, I looked online for written and photographed short story prompts to generate an idea for the story—unwitting participation. The pictures used throughout the story are also forms of unwitting participation. I eventually settled on the below photo of a skeleton riding a bike and used that to fuel a short horror story (plus, it’s Halloween). 

Once I had the general idea for the story, I consulted my roommates and friends for the various directions the story would go. I gave them limited information about the story and asked them to give me character names, locations, events, decisions, and endings to the story. None of them knew exactly how their suggestions would be used, but most of them were used in some way. Hence, contributory participation. 

Throughout the entire process, I provided the conscious participation. I knew exactly how each element would be used, I wrote the short story, I came up with some of the events, I came up with a few of the endings. I knew how the story would be presented and who the audience would be. I knew everything that was going on the whole time. 

In creating this project, I used all three forms of participation discussed in the “All Together Now” article, and it was a very enjoyable experience. I really liked surfing the Internet to find inspiration for a story (I came up with so many other story ideas in the process), and my friends and I had a lot of fun coming up with different events and endings for the story. It was really cool to give them a simple prompt like, “Give me a character” or “What happens next?” and see what their imaginations came up with. There were so many ideas that it was hard to incorporate them all, and I did have to make some executive decisions and cut some of them. Still, the bulk of the story is made up of other people’s ideas. They provided the story pieces, I just had to put the puzzle together. By letting other people decide the content, I learned a lot about the writing process and when to accept and when to reject suggestions. 

Exploring these forms of participation was really interesting. It taught me that you can use unwitting participation without plagiarizing, something that can be hard to do. I was able to take something someone else had created and use it as inspiration for my own work, which is nice to remember when it comes to writer’s block. The contributory participation was engaging as well because sometimes it can be tiring to answer all the questions yourself. This is not the first time I have asked other people for characters or locations while writing a story, but this was the first where that help was the backbone of the story. It was very enjoyable, and it took some of the pressure off me since all I had to do was connect the dots. Even with all of that, though, I liked maintaining control over the project as a whole when it came to deciding the prompt, the premise, and the presentation of the story. 

This project was overall a really great experience. I learned a lot by exploring different ways of writing a story, writing in a different genre, and incorporating the reader’s choices into the outcome of the story, while still touching on multi-modality. I used hyperlinks for the reader to make their decisions, and also added pictures within the story to help the reader visualize the scene, as if the story were a print text accompanied by illustrations. I would have liked to add some sound effects to contribute to the horror tone and further embrace multi-modality, but unfortunately WordPress was not very accommodating in that area, and I did not have enough time to move the composition to a different website. I could have linked to YouTube videos or other videos containing sound effects, but I felt that that would be too disruptive for the reader, and only take away from the experience rather than enrich it. 

Even with those drawbacks, I still think this project was able to embody multi-modality and new media aspects. The entire project is presented as blog posts, which is very new media, and it includes hyperlinks and photos drawn from the Internet, also very new media and multi-modal. The composition was definitely more than just a product, it was also an instructive event that left me with a lot of insights I can use in future works.