July 8, 2024

Art Has a Frame and what's possible with ebooks and fiction

Hello.

The two most notable things to happen since I last emailed you are:

1. I attended 4th Street Fantasy (which is not only the perfect SF&F convention for me, but just so happens to be local for me) and made my debut as a panelist (more on that below). You all should attend next year.

2. I wrote the first draft of a science fiction story in one day. It’s been a long time since I’ve written a story in a day. Although it has some meta-fictional elements that might make it a tricky sell, my plan is to revise it and hit up the SF&F short fiction markets, which I also haven’t done for awhile.

I’ve published several tracks (as Will Esplin) on Bandcamp, but given their genres (ambient drone and glitchy techno), most of you can skip them. I’ll be sure to let you know when I have a release that’s for a wider audience.

I also got pulled into the University of Chicago Press’s book sale. The good news is they had titles on steep discount that were germane to my interests and potentially useful for future writing projects. Here’s what I picked up:

• Critical Lives: Thomas Mann by Herbert Lehnert and Eva Wessell

• Menswear: Vintage People on Photo Postcards by Tom Phillips

• Athene Palace: Hitlers “New Order” Comes to Rumania by R. G. Waldeck

• Imaginary Cities: A Tour of Dream Cities, Nightmare Cities, and Everywhere in Between by Darran Anderson

• Gramsci’s Fall by Nora Bossong (this one is actually a novel)

If you’ve read any of those books—or have strong feelings on which one you’d like me to read first and report back on in the next newsletter, hit reply, and let me know.

Now on to the main show…

Some further thoughts on Art Has a Frame

One of the cool things about the current incarnation of 4th Street is that if you register early enough, they ask you if you’re interested in being considered for any panels. I usually just say no. But one of the panels this year was called Art Has a Frame, and I decided to put myself up for it because I felt like I might be able to contribute in a unique, and (hopefully) interesting way because this is a topic that I have long had an interest in (going all the way back to college, where, among many things, I took a class on the 19th century German novella, which often used frame stories and other overt narrative devices, and wrote a paper that used meta-fictional fiction pieces about the daughter of the author of one of the novels I was writing about traveling to New York to meet the author of the other novel I was writing about).

Oh, and also I wrote a science fiction story in the form of an accident report that uses accordion text so that the reader has the choice on how they read the story: Safeforge.

Here’s the panel description:

ART HAS A FRAME

Elizabeth Bear (M), C.D. Covington, Arkady Martine, Wm Henry Morris, Samuel T. Weston

“The difference between art and real life is that art has a frame.” Stories come with narrative, stylistic, and chronological boundaries, which take on a different tenor depending on where the teller chooses to start and stop, or whose perspectives they highlight. They also have out-of-frame inclusions, whether deliberate choices like real-life epigraphs, or inadvertent incursions by the unexamined assumptions of a writer – or a reader.

As both writers and readers, what can we do to be aware of our frames and use them as a tool—and how much should we want to? What difference is there between a serendipitous theme and a disastrous meta-fictional blunder, except for extending the author the benefit of the doubt?

I won’t try to reconstruct all that we said. But will mention three points I brought up:

1. I talked about The Book Eaters by Sunyi Dean and how the chapter epigraphs in that novel rotate between in-world fictionalized texts about the book eaters and quotes from our world fantasy novels. This has the effect of putting the novel, and the core conceit of vampires who subsist on books rather than human blood, directly in conversation with the field of fantasy. NaN. I noted that all of the elements that go into the idea of art having a frame—from things like epigraphs and TV show themes and titles to the point of view—have an effect on tone, or, if you prefer, vibes and thus how the audience experiences your story. I then, of course, mentioned Tone by Sofia Samatar and Kate Zambreno.

2. I mentioned how, while this is completely anecdotal, I was seemed to be seeing more use of prologues, epigraphs, descriptive chapter titles and other in text but outside of the main body text in SF&F and floated the theory that that might have to do with the rise of ebook reading where the traditional frame of the book doesn’t set the tone/vibes as strongly. For example, with many ebooks, you might not see the cover at any larger size than a thumbnail because when you tap on it, the ebook opens up to page one, skipping the cover and all the front matter.

3. I also mentioned how I’d love it if more SF&F authors engaged with and borrowed ideas from experimental fiction, and, especially, with the idea of playing with the frames—textural, extra-textual, and meta-textual—that can be used to present fiction.

I want to expand on one of these ideas…

Ebooks and ways of presenting text

During the panel (and one of the interesting things about 4th Street is how much audience interaction there is), Lynne M. Thomas, Publisher/Editor-in-Chief of Uncanny: A Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy, rightly pointed out how much a nightmare ebooks are for editors looking to be able to present the work they publish in the best way possible.

Ebooks are basically really dumb web pages. They lack basic typesetting (like kerning). They don’t render typefaces uniformly. They don’t do proper pagination. Formatting for them is a nightmare, and you can even take the time to do all the html tricks to make everything look like it should, and whatever app or device is rendering the ebook may very well strip all your hard work out or just not recognize the workarounds and special coding you’ve put in place.

The best looking ebook, actually, is just a web site. If you want to dive deep into this topic, check out This is not a book by Tom Abba & Baldur Bjarnason.

I didn’t bring this up on the panel, but the situation is even worse for poetry, especially any poetry that relies on nonstandard line spacing.

Now, there are some advantages to this—specifically for folks who use screen readers or need large text sizes, specific text contrasts, special fonts, etc. to be able to read the text.

But overall, for all their convenience, ebooks don’t offer the best reading experience, especially if you want to use formatting as part of how you’re telling the story.

A few people brought up hyperlinks as an advantage of ebooks, and that’s sort of true. But I’d say:

1. There already have been a lot of experiments with hyperlink fiction, and almost all of them have remained in the realm of experimental fiction/web programming curiosities

2. Hyperlink fiction doesn’t work very well on eink devices and tends to be more successful as a website (or something that runs in a game environment)

I’d suggest that any innovations that have happened or will happen in this space are more likely to fall specifically into the realm of interactive fiction, a discipline/form in its’ own right.

So what if we limit ourselves to the classic modes of the novel and the short story collection or anthology. What’s possible in ebooks? What could you—the SF&F or literary fiction author or editor—play with in ways that are feasible but may have some affect on the reader?

What is available is the core set of ways that HTML allows for the presentation of text.

Here are some ideas based on that:

DESCRIPTIVE CHAPTER TITLES, IN WHICH OUR AUTHOR PROPOSES SOMETHING WHICH HE HAS YET TO DO HIMSELF

Chapter titles, like prologues and epigraphs, exist within the main structure of the ebook. Perhaps authors should be more aggressive in using them as a way to set tone/vibes, mislead, reinforce, entice, explain, set expectations, etc. You risk alienating readers, of course. But at the very least, it’s worth thinking about you could have more fun with/put more thought into chapter titles.

THE CODE BLOCK/ALTERNATE TYPEFACES

In the middle of Tim Maughan’s near future SF novel Infinite Detail, the manifesto of the group of hackers who successfully bring down the internet permanently is reproduced. It uses a typeface that looks very anonymous website. In fact, it looks to me like the same typeface that is the default when using Markdown or HTML and you enclose something in a code tag. This exists so that you can view (and copy and paste) code easily.

It looks like this

What if you were to use code blocks (or alternate typefaces, which also should be possible in most ebooks even if the ebook reader overwrite which specific typefaces you designate) more regularly in the text? Perhaps in the way comics will have a specific typeface for a character or narration.

Italics are sometimes use for this. But italics are more difficult to read on a screen at length and so best used sparingly.

PULL/BLOCK QUOTES

I don’t know that I’ve ever seen pull/block quotes used in fiction.

It’s more of a nonfiction/journalism thing. But it’d be a way to insert text within the text. Sort of like epigraphs within the chapter itself instead of only at the beginning. Or if you wanted to go gonzo, a way to really emphasize a line of dialogue or a piece of action.

LISTS (ORDERED AND UNORDERED)

One of the core ways HTML can present text is via ordered (1, 2, 3) or unordered (bullet points) text. Lists are limited in what they can do. And there are scores of shorts stories told in the form of a list. I’d be interested to see how they could be successfully used in novel form.

• Perhaps as interstitial chapters?

• Perhaps in novels where pros/cons, inventories, attributes of a character, clues, vehicles involved in a convoy or battle, etc. are listed?

• Perhaps in others ways for worldbuilding/infodumping?

SPECIAL CHARACTERS

I’ve done this one: It Is a Rare Thing the Emperor Requireth

I think it’s difficult for readers. And it can come across as gimmicky, especially when used for the names of aliens or cosmic horrors or whatever.

But I bet there’s more that could be done.

!@#$%^&*=~`

I’m not swearing at you here—I’m just listing out the most common special characters. But all of the unicode symbols should show up in an ebook, although how they look will vary.

Here’s what I’ve started using at the end of the essays I post on my website—it’ll be interesting to see how they translate to email: ❀ ⚔ ❀

And the advantage these have over the use of images is that unless you get fancy with the code, the images don’t work well when the user switches to dark mode in their ebook reader (or vice versa).

TABLES

Tables can be tricky, but if you stick to basic code, they should render properly on most devices. You’d have to be careful to not put too much text in each cell or have too many columns, which limits what you could use them for. Although you could also have a one column table and use the rows as a way to separate out text. Perhaps as a way to indicate things happening all at the same time or to play with how you’re presenting dialogue. Perhaps to indicate other things.

Such as how much I hate PDFs:

Presenting Text	Fixed Format	Unfixed Format
Inconvenient Format	PDF	Ebook
Convenient Format	Print Book	Website

STRUCTURED/CASCADING HEADERS

This is the one I’ve been thinking about the most. One of the few things HTML is good at is structuring text, especially with headers. H1 is the document title. H2 is used for major parts. H3 is used for subheads/section heads. H4 is used for smaller sections (like the headers used in this very list!).

This is more useful in nonfiction, of course, and when used heavily comes across as rather textbook, but it might be interesting to play around with headers in fiction.

FOOTNOTES

The problem with footnotes in ebooks is that most often they are hyperlinks, and you have to click on them, the page where the footnote lives loads, and then you have to click another link to go back to where you were. And sometimes when you click that link back, the text you were reading is on a different line on the page (or sometimes on the preceding page if the link is near the end of the page).

But what if—and I’ve seen this used successfully in some ebooks, although I don’t recall if they’ll work correctly on eink readers—the footnote is instead an overlay that pops up over the text when you click/touch it and then disappears when you click/touch it again?

If you could do that, you could provide a running commentary on the story or tell a parallel story or provide extra-textual glosses, details, and other elements. This also has the advantage over footnotes in print text in that it doesn’t interfere with the page until the reader decided to open it up.

I think there’s a lot of promise here, although I’ll need to investigate if it can be done in a way that most ebook apps/readers support.¹

So that’s my expansion on just one aspect of the discussion we had on the Art Has a Frame panel at 4th Street. And that’s the beauty of that convention—every panel sprouts additional panels and conversations.

I don’t know if I’ll be playing with any of these elements in my own work, although I’m tempted to. The reality is that what you as an author most want is for the reader to get immersed in the flow of the text, and all of the text treatments I mention above would interfere to a lesser or greater degree with that.

But there may be works for which they augment the reading experience. And I do think that the ebook is rather underutilized as a frame for art. There are many reasons for that, some of those good reasons, some of those not [I’m looking at you Amazon]. I’ll spare you that rant (and the associated one about web standards).

What do you think? What are you interested in experimenting with? What did I forget to include? What are examples of works that use any of the above or other text treatments in interesting and effective ways?

1. I’ll let you all know if I find anything interesting, but really this is just an excuse for me to learn how to use the footnotes function in Buttondown.