As another school year comes to a close, I always love going through some of the different papers and writing projects that I created throughout the year, not just from this semester. In the fall of 2018, I enrolled in an Intro to Creative Writing class, which was required for my minor, and I remember being so nervous for it, for I had never really considered myself a “writer” – I didn’t write poems daily, I really only tried my hand at short stories, and I only ever completed writings for classes, never for fun.

But that creative writing class put my brain to work. We kept a daily journal where we were able to write down everything and anything that came to mind – and it was in these writing exercises when I came up with my short story, titled “Leaving.” This story is a little vignette into Rachel’s internal battle between the seemingly perfect life with her current fiancé and the life she had with her previous boyfriend, Andrew, whom readers know little to nothing about, other than the fact that he still has a hold on her.

I don’t know what it was about them, but Rachel, Sebastian, and Andrew couldn’t leave my mind. Their story about unfinished love and comfortable relationships really kept me fixed to their world, and I knew that I wasn’t quite done with what they had to tell me.

Spring 2019 arrived, and in my Writing for Digital Media class, I decided to put their story off while focusing more time on this blog, The Mod, which helped to cultivate my personal interests with the digital focus of the class. For the final project, however, we needed to create a digital narrative that incorporated several different media techniques that we studied and practiced for class projects (such projects that can be found on my blog here).

This project was the perfect opportunity for me to reinvent the static, five-page analog story that I whipped up last semester. The characters were there, the story line was there, but I wanted (and was required) to spice it up a little with hypertext, photos, location-based features, and a sense of collaboration from others.

When deciding the type of digital realm that I wanted to host “Leaving” with, the easiest way I could think of sharing this story included creating another blog. The blog posts could easily incorporate some of those aforementioned digital features, and after discussing how to plan the story out with my professor, we realized that this blog could be Rachel’s personal space where she documents everything she is going through, which also helps to make a timeline of events by backdating the posts.

Setting up the blog was easy enough, since I already knew how to navigate WordPress. Trying to incorporate the location-based feature, though, threw me for a loop at first, since I didn’t know how to separate my posts from one another (or how to make these sections stand alone).

After maneuvering with the custom theme settings, though, a light bulb flicked on over my head – I would tag the posts with the location I wanted them in. For Andrew, his story line would be in Philadelphia, so every time I wrote about him, I would first backdate the post and then incorporate the “philadelphia” tag. After fiddling with the settings, I thus created a tab on the menu bar that organized every post with the corresponding tag. The same thing then occurred with the posts focusing on Sebastian.

Part of that ingenious hack, if I do say so myself, actually came from Vogue’s website (if you haven’t realized by now, I spend a lot of time on that site – but I digress). At the end of all of their posts, it has an “In This Story” feature that basically takes the main keywords from that article and hyperlinks it to a page that shows more articles with the same keywords. Once I realized that what Vogue was doing basically organization by tags, I knew that I could do the same with my interactive blog.

Creating the stories themselves didn’t take much effort, seeing that I had been waiting a long time to get back to sharing Rachel’s stories. I think, too, that writing these stories in this interactive way helped to really make these scenes and places come to life. By incorporating real movies, restaurants, airports, bars, etc. into the hypertext, it made Rachel’s life seem as real as possible, almost as if I wasn’t the author – she was.

Even more, to get the collaboration I needed, I made this blog almost like a “seeking help” page to gather advice from anyone who happened to stumble upon Rachel’s story. Again, I tagged the advice posts so that I could create a tab for them to be organized in on the menu bar, which is placed right after the “Contact” page.

All in all, “Leaving” turned out to be something so much more than I thought it would ever be. While I don’t think I’m quite finished with the story, since I never think my stories are ever truly finished, I think that this project was a great way to create the prologue that helps to give context to the original short story.

I never thought that stories could be written this way, but I honestly think that there’s something exciting and fresh about perusing this blog and trying to piece together the nonlinear stories. It’s not your average novel, but rather, a digital one – one that takes you by surprise and throws you right into Rachel’s life. And when looking to the future of publishing and storytelling as a whole, I can only imagine what form stories will take on next.

To read “Leaving,” access the blog here.