Bus Station Unbound is an interactive 'choose your own adventure' novel created by Jenn Ashworth and Richard Hirst, set in the Brutalist masterpiece that is Preston Bus Station. The novel is published by Curious Tales, the literary collective which bought us the winter-themed ghost story collections Poor Souls' Light and The Longest Night. Here, they discuss the challenges of bringing their project to life, the freedom of working as a collective, and the strange allure of the bus station.
Preston Bus Station provokes strong feelings, positive or negative - what does it mean to you?
Preston Bus Station provokes strong feelings, positive or negative - what does it mean to you?
The station is contentious amongst Preston folks, with
locals forever calling for its wholesale destruction or demanding it be granted
heritage listing (something recently achieved). We both have mixed feeling about
the place: on the one hand we love it and spent a lot of time there as
teenagers. It’s an amazing building, enormous and labyrinthine and filled with
enough oddball characters, architectural nooks, grotty crannies, locked
doorways, endless corridors and deserted shops to make dorks like us want to
set an interactive book in it. At the same time, it’s unwieldy and poorly
maintained for its purpose, to the point where it’s actually rather surreal –
at nights it can feel like you’re wandering a gargantuan abandoned alien
spaceship, then your remember it’s actually only meant to be a bus station.
How did the way you approached writing Bus Station Unbound
differ from the way you would approach a traditional novel?
The novel is about 100,000 words long, but no reader will
encounter the full text in one sitting. They’re not likely to even encounter
most of it. They will most likely experience something the length of long short
story or novella. Then, hopefully, they’ll read it again but find everything
different and make some different choices and get a different story. And then
they’ll do it again; and then again; and so on. When writing the thing, we had
to keep this end-result experience in mind, and that any scene we created would
change, take on a stronger or lesser significance or disappear entirely
depending on the paths our readers choose. Allowing all this to happen whilst
keeping the story flowing naturally and the narrative voice consistent and all
the other things expected of a piece of fiction is a lot to keep in your head
and it gave us persistent anxiety nightmares.
How many different paths through the story can readers
find?
It’s very hard to say. Ordinarily as a writer you decide A
will happen, which will lead to B, eventually leading to the denouement
that is C. But in this novel, it’s more like A happens which can then lead to B
or C, each of which can then take you to F or T but also R and H, and then
suddenly you’re back at D and E and then C again, but it’s a slightly altered
C, and then that leads you to W and Q and possibly K… and so on. In addition to
that, there’s a feature in Inkle, the software we used to write the book,
called ‘shuffle text’. This lets us have a sentence which runs, let’s say, ‘It
was a dark and stormy night’ in which we can make it so certain words change
every time the reader revisits the passage. So the next time they read it, we
might make it read ‘It was a cold and stormy night’, and then the next time, ‘It
was a snowy and windy night’, and then maybe even ‘It was a cloudy and blustery
evening’. There were restrictions on the amount of words or even the length of
text we could apply this to, meaning that the novel is packed with great
swathes of prose which, on the next reading, will be replaced and not
encountered again for the next ten, fifteen, thirty readings. So the number of
different permutations the book can take on is, if not exactly infinite, a lot
higher than we could count.
What attracted you to the format of choose your own
adventures?
I always loved Choose Your Own Adventure books when I was
younger – there’s a thrill in learning the main character is YOU, and not only
that, you get to decide what happens. But I also remember many of them being
rather leaden in how they operate. Often there’s a dilemma such as ‘Do you want
to run away? Or do you want to run back into the haunted cave and bravely save
your best friend from being eaten by cannibals?’ If you chose to save your
friend you’d escape together and ‘win’, naturally. If you ran away you’d be hit
by a car and ‘lose’. I often thought it would be interesting to apply the
format to a more grown-up novel – one about choice and fate – in which the
decisions don’t on the face of it seem quite to carry so much significance,
morality is a greyer area, and the notion of there being a way to ‘win’ is much
more abstract.
Did you have to learn a lot to be able to bring Bus
Station Unbound to life, technically?
We both have an interest in computer games, not just playing
them but the way they operate and are perceived. We knew, when we began, that
we would be required to come up with the ‘logic’ which would dictate the game.
What the reader is told by about the protagonist needs to remain consistent, so
is a lot of formulae which either restrict or reveal text depending on what’s
gone before: ‘only show this section if the character has been to the bathroom
and has bought a chocolate bar but has not been to get a haircut’. It took us a
while to get to grips with this way of thinking –it’s fairly second nature for
those used to writing games, but for dum-dums like us it was a lesson which was
absorbed only with the tearing out of hair and the banging of heads into desks.
Does publishing as a collective give you greater freedom
to experiment then you would find with a traditional publishing approach?
The book we published this Christmas, Poor Souls’ Light, was
an anthology of ghost stories inspired by Robert Aickman to celebrate his
centenary. If we’d opted to do this through a traditional publisher the process
would have taken well over a year to finalise, and the chances of a publisher
even wanting to back an ornate book celebrating the 100th birthday of a fairly
obscure short story writer would have been rather low. Likewise, if we’d
approached a mainstream publishing house with the pitch ‘A novel-length choose
your own adventure style novel about waiting for a bus’, we would have received
only a weary look and a request not to get in contact again. Which is precisely
as it should be. Curious Tales is a self-publishing venture: we aren't really
interested in replicating or competing with traditional publishing.
As a collective, you are very pro-active about reaching
out to readers in different ways - is that something you think will become
increasingly important for writers?
Our two previous books, The Longest Night and Poor Souls’
Light – both print-only collections of ghost stories – were only available
through us and accompanied by reading tours. There’s something very authentic
and very intimate about both selling the books directly to our readers and
performing the stories in full to a live audience. That level of engagement is
important for us because our readers and our reputation are essentially all we
have. That’s why we make our print books high quality objects with lavish
artwork from Beth and our e-books elaborate constructs which can be revisited
again and again. There’s also a link in each book to a hidden part of our site
where you can gain access to whatever extra bits and pieces we can add:
recordings of us reading the stories, initial drafts for rejected cover
designs. For small publishing outfits like Curious Tales things like this are
as important as social media and newsletters.
What are you working on next, both personally, and for the
Curious Tales collective?
The next thing will be The Barrow Rapture, an interactive online
graphic novel which Jenn has been working on with Curious Tales’ Tom and Beth
and Brian Baker, one of our guest authors. We’ve also recently finished our
reading tour to promote Poor Souls’ Light, our limited edition collection of
Christmas ghost stories, so are beginning to think about what we’ll do for our
collection for next Christmas. We intend Bus Station: Unbound to be the first
in a series of Unbounds: interactive novels set in real-world locations, so
once the Bus Station smoke has cleared we’ll get to work on that.
Read more about Bus Station Unbound and the Curious Tales Collective here
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