Category Archives: Digital

Making D.H. Lawrence videos in Canva

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In January 1921, D.H. Lawrence and the ‘Q-B’ left Sicily for Sardinia. Six weeks later Lawrence penned his infamous travel book in which he puts forward a series of fanciful claims about the country he spent a total of nine days in. Lawrence is literature’s number one mard arse, raging against everyone and everything. He has made moaning an art form. The late Kevin Jackson described him as ‘the John Cleese of literary modernism’ in an essay I commissioned for Dawn of the Unread and Geoff Dyer applied what can only be described as ‘method writing’ when he imitated Lawrence’s restlessness in Out of Sheer Rage. Lawrence, however, is also incredibly perceptive, intelligent, and poetic, a writer quite like no other – though not for everyone.

Having read Sea and Sardinia numerous times, not least to mark the centenary of its publication, I created the above video which references Lawrence’s comical raging. There are eleven references to rage in the book, most of which are triggered by impudence – which gets fourteen references.

The video was created in Canva, a graphic design template programme which has a simple drag and drop interface. It has lots of themed templates for bespoke use – such as thumbnails for YouTube or banners for Facebook. It can be a bit clunky at times, but if you grit your teeth and think of the hours it would have taken you to come up with a layout, it’s worth it. My favourite feature is the fonts. There are so m-a-n-y…

Canva uses a fremium model, so you might want to subscribe to unlock some of the special features, but so far, I’ve managed to cobble stuff together via the basic subscription. You can upload your own images if you can’t find anything in their database and these can be animated, too.

In some respects, Canva is starting to have what I call the Wikipedia effect – I’ve used it for free so many times that I feel obliged to support them. Let’s hope I can actually get around to filling out an Arts Council form again…

In terms of identifying patterns in literary texts, this has become a lot easier with digitisation. The book is out of copyright and available online so you can copy and paste it into Word to find key words. To think that once upon a time, I used to go through a book with a highlighter pen…

This video is the 35th on the YouTube channel D.H. Lawrence: A Digital Pilgrimage.  

The Medium is the Message: What’s yours?

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During his keynote speech at the 2010 Writing Industries Conference, Graham Joyce warned that writers would need to be more flexible if they wanted to carve a successful (paid) career as writers. The days of a large advance to pen your magnum opus were becoming more infrequent and so it was time to consider other formats and mediums such as mobile phones, gaming platforms and podcasts.

Fundamental to his call for versatility was technology and how this is radically transforming every aspect of lived experience. Fast forward eleven years and his advice has become more prescient. Social media platforms function as mini-publishing studios that can be monetised and immersive technology, such as augmented reality and A.I, are transforming how we tell and experience stories.

It’s with this in mind that I’ve been developing new modules at Nottingham Trent University to help equip emerging writers with the skills and knowledge needed to flourish in this ever-changing digital landscape.

One such module is Digital Storytelling, currently available to 2nd year Creative Writing students. This is very much built around experimentation, with students asked to adapt their story to fit the grammar of different platforms and mediums. It quickly becomes apparent that what works well as interactive fiction on Twine does not translate well to a visual medium like Instagram. Understanding the relationship between technology, audience and story is vital if you are going to produce engaging and innovative digital work.

Another benefit of this module is the practical skills it provides. The visual essay at the top of this article was produced using the Werner Moron ‘real-imaginary’ path (you’ll have to join the module to learn more about this method). The visuals were sourced from copyright free material and produced using free online tools. In creating a visual essay for YouTube, students learn to write a script, record audio, select images that reinforce the narrative, upload, tag, publish, share and promote. This provides a broad range of skills, all of which go some way towards helping them kickstart their digital writing careers.

The appeal of digital storytelling is the challenge of having to constantly adapt your writing to fit a medium. From interactive fiction on itch.io to Twitterature, each medium has its own form of constraint. A limited word count forces you to think carefully about what you want to say whereas interactive fiction places greater emphasis on the experience of the reader (user). Constraint is fundamental to creativity which is why I love jumping between mediums and platforms. It’s what maintains my motivation to write.

To see what other types of writing are going on in Nottingham and at Nottingham Trent University see nottinghamcreativewritinghub.com

Further Reading