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Abstract
This chapter discusses the writing and transmitting of letters in Emily Short’s
2012 interactive epistolary work, First Draft of the Revolution. It argues how
interactivity commentates on the letter’s processes of becoming, specifijically
through the reader as co-author in a triangulation of reading, writing, and
interactivity. This triangulation upends epistolary confijidentiality and the
tension between private and public in terms of the writing process. The
chapter also examines the letter’s crossing of space and time in how its
transmission contributes to its meaning as a communication medium.
Through this two-pronged exploration of ‘epistolary interactivity’, the chap-
ter interrogates the nature of media itself, and how interactivity shapes letters
as media in terms of being, becoming, change, and potential for change.
Introduction
Juliette has been banished for the summer to a village above Grenoble: a few
Alpine houses, a deep lake, blue sky, and no society.
Now she writes daily to her husband.
First Draft of the Revolution1
1 Emily Short, First Draft of the Revolution (2012), inkle studios, <https://www.inklestudios.
com/fijirstdraft/> [accessed 7 April 2021].
Higgins, T. and C. Fowler (eds.), Epistolary Entanglements in Film, Media and the Visual Arts.
Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023
doi 10.5117/9789463729666_ch09
174 JENNA NG
2 Emily Short, ‘First Draft of the Revolution: Author Statement, Liza Daly’, <https://lizadaly.
com/pages/fijirst-draft/statement.html> [accessed 7 April 2021].
3 Monsoon Lab, Sara Is Missing (2015), Android; iOS; Classic Mac OS.
4 The Fullbright Company, Gone Home (2013), PlayStation 4; Nintendo Switch; Xbox One. See
also Daniel Reynolds, ‘Letters and the Unseen Woman: Epistolary Architecture in Three Recent
Video Games’, Film Quarterly, 68.1 (2014), 48–60, for analysis of the structures of letters in Gone
Home and other epistolary games.
5 The Chinese Room, Robert Briscoe, Dear Esther (2012), Microsoft Windows.
6 Annie, ‘Correspondence Jam’ (2019), itch.io <https://itch.io/jam/correspondence-jam>
[accessed 7 April 2021].
THE INTER AC TIVE LE T TER 175
7 This is also a direct inspiration for First Draft, as Emily Short writes in her author statement:
‘For a long time I’ve wanted to create an interactive piece about the process of writing. That’s
partly a reaction to the completely unrealistic way movies portray writing: the writer either
‘has writer’s block’ and stares angstfully at a typewriter, or else she is touched by the muse and
types all night, and the result is a manuscript of instant brilliance.’ See Short, First Draft: Author
Statement, n.p.
8 In this respect, Altman also notes how it is ‘the use of the letter’s formal properties to
create meaning’ that is of interest: see Janet Gurkin Altman, Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form
(Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1982), p. 3.
176 JENNA NG
9 See Edmond Rostand, Cyrano de Bergerac, trans. by Carol Clark (New York: Penguin, 1897;
2006).
10 As taken from Marshall McLuhan’s famous phrase, ‘the medium is the message’, from
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Berkeley, CA: Gingko Press, 1964; 2013).
THE INTER AC TIVE LE T TER 177
Writing does not fully capture words, words do not fully capture meaning.
Zhou yi11
To revise each letter in First Draft, the reader fij irst identifij ies sentences
that can be changed. Editable sentences appear in regular font; sentences
that cannot or can no longer be changed are greyed out. To make the
revision, the reader clicks on an editable sentence and is presented with
one of two options: to ‘erase’ the sentence, whereupon the text simply
disappears; or to ‘rewrite this’, whereby the text changes according to
the reader’s chosen sentiment. Every option is accompanied by wording
within quotation marks which reveals an inner thought, fear, doubt,
or intention from the character writer to contextualize the suggestion.
Hence, an option to ‘erase’ might be attended by words of cautionary fear:
‘Omit any comment on this topic at all. One never knows what might give
offfense’; or of self-censorship, such as ‘Mother at the convent always said
not to ask a question if you do not want the answer’. ‘Rewrite this’ may
come with thoughts of intention (such as ‘The boy might be Henri’s son.
Might as well sound him out’); or fears (‘Put it more tactfully’); or content
(‘Tell Henri about the handsome friar’; ‘There is more to this story; might
as well tell all’); or tone (‘Conclude with something a little conciliatory’).
Occasionally, the ‘rewrite’ option presents not only a revision but also a
pointing hand which, when clicked, would present other suggestions of
revision. Sometimes, those suggestions eventually lead to an ‘erase’ option,
where, if chosen, all previous revisions disappear. The reader may only
choose the option of ‘rewrite’ or ‘erase’. All resulting text which appears
(or disappears) in the letter out of the reader’s choice remains authored
by the game designer.
In setting the interactive reader their central task of choosing how and
when to revise each letter, First Draft thus foregrounds the process of writing
the letter, whereby the role of the reader also blends into being the letter’s
co-author. Of course, the role of the ‘reader’ in terms of their response and
participation in a text is writ large throughout literary theory, be that as
11 Zhou yi jin zhu jin yi, ed. by Nan Huaijin and Xu Qinting (Taibei: Taiwan shangwu yinshuguan
gufen youxian gongsi, 2007), p. 408. Translation mine.
178 JENNA NG
To that extent, the role of the external reader as a co-reader of the letters is
likewise underscored where they mirror the internal reader in reading ‘over
the shoulder’ of the character ‘whose own readings – and misreadings – must
enter into our experience of the work’.16
This role of the ‘reader’ radically changes in First Draft, where its interac-
tivity extends the role of the external reader beyond reader and interpreter.
Here the reader becomes a literal co-writer of the letters in their direct
selection of revision choices to afffect the letters’ content, wording, and tone.
Their freedom of choice does not apply in every case: a small proportion
of revisions in First Draft are mandatory in that the reader must make
that particular revision or else the story cannot proceed. One example is
a paragraph of gossip in Alise’s letter to Henri which was otherwise about
keeping Juliette out of Paris, and whose suggested erasure is accompanied
by expression of her intention: ‘Best not to distract Henri from my advice.’
The erasure – with no other option – is mandatory: Alise’s letter cannot be
sent until the reader ‘chooses’ to delete the paragraph of gossip. Much as
the reader might like an option to rewrite that paragraph to reveal more
gossip, the imperative for its erasure thwarts that desire and asserts the
12 See Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961); and
Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to
Beckett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974).
13 See Roland Barthes, ‘On Reading’, in Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language, trans. by
Richard Howard (Berkeley; Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989): pp. 32–43; and
Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. R. Miller (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990).
14 See Gerald Prince, ‘The Diary Novel: Notes for the Defijinition of a Sub-genre’, Neophilologus,
59 (1975), 477–81. See also Altman, pp. 87–116.
15 Altman, p. 88.
16 Altman, p. 112.
THE INTER AC TIVE LE T TER 179
which adds colour and detail to the story world.18 For example, while Alise’s
letter to Henri, as mentioned above, mandates the erasure of the paragraph
of gossip, several other non-mandatory revisions in her letter draft reveal
further details of Juliette’s character (at least in Alise’s eyes). On Alise’s
draft sentence, ‘[b]ut [Juliette’s] piety is more than a person can bear’,
a ‘rewrite’ revision is offfered with the thought: ‘Perhaps a few examples
would illustrate the point.’ On curiosity of what those examples might be,
clicking the revision rewards the reader with the following: ‘Juliette is always
taking me aside in quiet moments and asking if I think that my attire is as
modest as it should be; whether I have submitted myself to the authority of
the church; whether I am obedient to my husband, if you please!’ A further
revision to the last clause adds the following to the paragraph: ‘I do not think
François would understand what had happened if I did become obedient
suddenly, poor man. He requires conflict to keep the sap up. Without it he
wilts.’ While Alise’s letter could have been ‘sent’ without these revisions,
by choosing to ‘write’ more of the letter, the reader reaps dividends of the
narrative in acquiring information about Alise’s husband as well as a flash
of Alise’s acid tongue.
While these multiple opportunities for revision highlight the vicarious
forming of the letter as a text by the reader/co-writer, it is also important
to understand the extent of the impact of these revisions. Notwithstanding
the range of revisions which the reader may choose to form the letters, Short
makes it clear that the reader does not fundamentally create or change the
epistolary story: ‘By helping to revise their letters, the reader exposes who
the characters are. She doesn’t defijine or change them. Juliette, Henri, and
the others are meant to have consistent personalities, and there’s nothing
the reader can do to alter this fact.’19 The relationship between Juliette and
Henri – tracing Juliette’s growing assertiveness against Henri and proving
her worth to him, and Henri’s corresponding agitation and jealousy about
his wife’s ambiguous relationship with the friar – would always run their
course per the story as created by Short. The reader’s co-authorship of the
letters thus does not relate to changing the story. Whichever way they
choose to revise each character’s letters is irrelevant to the story’s course
and outcome.
18 Emily Short categorizes such options as ‘expansion’ which provides depth and explanation,
including ‘the choice to dramatize an issue, a character relationship, or an emotion that would
otherwise remain opaque to the reader’. ‘Expansion’ options can be compared to ‘advancement’
options which ‘tell the next thing that happens’: see Short, First Draft: Author Statement’, n.p.
19 Short, ‘First Draft: Author Statement’, n.p., emphasis added.
THE INTER AC TIVE LE T TER 181
What the reader’s role of authorship does largely determine is the tone
and content of the letters, thus colouring the letters and the character rela-
tions they prescribe. In this sense, the writing process of the letters in First
Draft is not so much about authoring the letters as it is about articulating
a critical privacy, namely, the writer’s internal tensions and conflicts which
are always a part of writing. Letters in epistolary texts are almost always
vehicles of confijidentiality through which, as Higgins puts it, the reader or
audience gets ‘to know the details about their lives through their writing’.20
Hence, letters often highlight the secrecy of their confijidence by deliberately
counterpointing characters’ ‘lives through their writing’ against their lives
outside their writing. Such counterpoints can be seen in, for example, the
private thoughts and frustrations of Bridget Jones in her diaries as she careers
through her life. Or, more poignantly, the letters of nine-year-old Frankie to
his father in Dear Frankie as his ‘voice’, humorous and intelligent, against
the child’s otherwise world of silence due to his deafness. It is also due to
this quality of confijidentiality in letters that enables them to efffectively play
out the opposition between ‘confijiance/non-confijiance’, or, as Altman puts
it, ‘the letter’s dual potential for transparency (portrait of soul, confession,
vehicle of narrative) and opacity (mask, weapon, event within narrative)’.21
Letters thus succeed as choice vehicles with which to convey deception,
misconception, misunderstanding, and masquerade, all as prime subversions
of their inherent confijidentiality.22
The interactive writing of letters in First Draft upends this conventional
conveyance of epistolary confijidentiality. Rather, in First Draft confijidential-
ity lies in the writing of its letters by way of their drafts – with the revelations
they present – and the private thoughts, fears, and doubts which accompany
their options of revisions. Conversely, the letters themselves, post-revision,
are utterly non-confijidential products, polished and smoothed over as if –
indeed – for public display. The tensions of the letters in First Draft are not
those of the letters’ contents against other letters or external events in the
story world, per convention. Instead, they lie in the internal strife within the
letter’s world itself – specifijically, the efffort of deliberating over and deciding
word choices, and the revelations of private sentiment in the letter drafts
against the public front of their fij inal revised form. On the former, the
20 Teri Higgins, ‘Attention to Detail: Epistolary Discourse and Contemporary Cinema’ (un-
published doctoral thesis, University of Otago, 2013), p. 3, emphasis in original.
21 Altman, p. 186.
22 While not discussed here due to space constraints, First Draft also contains epistolary
deception, where, at one point, Juliette masquerades as Henri and writes a letter in his voice.
182 JENNA NG
23 The recent revelation of Douglas Adams, as one of our most accomplished writers, noting to
himself on how torturous writing is only serves to accentuate this truth: Mark Brown, ‘Douglas
Adams’ Note to Self Reveals Author Found Writing Torture,’ The Guardian online, 22 March 2021,
<https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/mar/22/douglas-adams-note-to-self-reveals-author-
found-writing-torture> [accessed 7 April 2021]. Emily Short also comments on writing vis-à-vis
her creative intentions for First Draft: ‘[T]he real nature of writing – as a process of revising,
weighing word choices, evolving a text gradually over a long period around changing expectations
of what it should even be saying – is really very hard to narrate. It involves small, particular
choices and a great deal of nuance.’ See Short, ‘First Draft: Author Statement’, n.p.
24 Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena , trans. with intro by Philip Boehm (New York: Schocken
Books, 1990), p. ix, emphasis added.
25 Note also the efffaced voice of the epistolary creator ‘who disclaims authorship [only to
reclaim] it elsewhere – in the very joint work that structures the epistolary mosaic as art’,
Altman, p. 183.
THE INTER AC TIVE LE T TER 183
26 John Durham Peters, The Marvellous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media
(Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press, 2015), p. 14.
184 JENNA NG
Any genre is fijine but keep in mind the efffort of writing and sending a letter, the
yearning that might be trapped in the words.
Annie27
Besides the drafting and revision of its letters, the interactivity of First Draft
contains another element. Once the reader has made the requisite number
of changes, the work offfers an option to ‘send the letter’ which, when clicked,
produces the letter in its post-revised form, fijinal and uneditable. On one
level, this seemingly innocuous process ‘sends’ the letter to the reader who,
after all, in being a co-writer of letters by all the characters also doubles up
as each’s co-addressee. On another level, the reader’s clicking of the icon,
if factually a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) request to and response
from the server to load and render the webpage’s text and images onto the
browser, within the fijiction of the story also ‘magically’ ‘sends’ the letter to
its addressee character. As mentioned in the Introduction, the sending of
letters in First Draft is conveniently facilitated by its plot point of magic.
Its letters are ostensibly penned on charmed papers which enable them
to ‘appear’ instantaneously to the addressee as an ‘enchanted double’. As
the preamble explains: ‘[Juliette] plans her letters on ordinary pages, but
when they are ready, she copies them on paper whose enchanted double is
hundreds of miles offf. The words form themselves on the matching sheaf
in her husband’s study. No time is wasted on couriers.’
Through the letters, the reader learns more about these magic papers
and their properties. Firstly, they are also called ‘linking paper’ and are in
seemingly fijinite supply. In a letter to her Mother Superior at the convent,
Juliette writes of how Henri chides her about ‘the waste of linking paper,
and asks me what I will do if there is a matter of urgency and all the pages
are used up. I have told him, then, to send me a fresh supply, but he only
tells me to be more careful.’ Secondly, sending letters, if not written on
enchanted papers, may also be delivered by performing magic (albeit no
further details are furnished). Thirdly, there is an element of encryption
and decryption in these ‘magic’ letters: in Henri’s fijirst letter, he writes of
how ‘[w]hen one fijirst learns to see the correspondences in the world, it is
like seeing a sheet of letters one cannot read’. When Juliette sends to Henri
a copy of a letter written by the friar as a clue to his revolutionary plot, the
author’s narration describes how Henri has to correspondingly decrypt the
27 Annie, n.p.
THE INTER AC TIVE LE T TER 185
letter with magic: ‘The shape of the words [in the letter] is like poetry; the
lines doubled like a psalm. Henri tries one psalm after another against the
original text. It takes patience and the most delicate magic to separate the
layer that is King David’s from the layer written by the friar.’ In this twist,
the reader’s revisions of the friar’s letter are thus not to rewrite the draft,
but to ‘decrypt’ its ‘magically’ coded words into intelligible content. Finally,
there is also an issue of speed in the sending of the letters. Some letters
arrive more quickly than others. For instance, Short’s narration describes
how ‘Juliette receives, on the same day but by a much slower conveyance,
the answer to her letter to the Mother Superior of her old convent’.
The parallels between the fij ictional and factual transmission of the
letters (via, respectively, ‘magic’ for the story’s characters and the Internet
for the reader) are too obvious to miss. The linked papers echo the hyper-
linking of webpages, as do the ostensible varying quickness of First Draft’s
letters’ conveyance resonate with diffferent Internet connection speeds.
Similarly, the encryption of the letters, particularly by superimposing
texts against each other, mirror the request and response protocols of
HTTP between web browser and server (whose message structure requires
both protocols to satisfactorily answer each other). Their decryption,
particularly of Henri’s process with the friar’s coded letter, likewise eas-
ily stands for the browser’s rendering of Hyper Text Markup Language
(HTML) into readable text and images. The letters’ careful designs of late
eighteenth-century Romanticism, with each correspondence formally
addressed, dated, and signed offf on elaborately embellished pages, further
emphasize the juxtaposition against and anachronism of their fijictional
‘magic’ – read electronic – transmission.
‘Sending the letter’ in First Draft, if only via the rather blunt yet im-
mediately understandable juxtaposition between an elaborate plot point
of ‘magic’ correspondence and a clickable web icon, thus draws attention
to the other oft-overlooked aspect of the letter – its transmission, or how
the letter travels from writer to addressee. This spotlight also commentates
on the discombobulating natures of letters’ space and time. As with all
communicatory devices, the letter’s raison d’être is the actual distance
between two parties which takes time to connect, no matter how short.
The constant plugging of ‘magic’ in the immediate transmission of letters
in First Draft across (and against) their corresponding near-instantaneous
conveyance of the Internet brings home the inherent discontinuities of
space and time in sending letters. In particular, with respect to First Draft’s
story world of late eighteenth-century France, letters which should have
taken days, if not weeks, by foot, horseback, or stagecoach to cross from
186 JENNA NG
Conclusion
This chapter has argued how the interactive epistolary work of First Draft
adopts an unusual yet efffective approach in its interactivity of draft revi-
sions to expose unique properties of the letter, namely, its writing and
28 Hence, letters are choice receptacles for facilitating deception, misunderstandings, and
masquerade due to not only their inherent confijidentiality (per the last section), but also their
inherent discontinuities across bodies, space, and time which become prime ground for error
and misconception.
29 Aristotle, ‘Physics’, trans. by W.D. Ross, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. by J. Barnes
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984).
THE INTER AC TIVE LE T TER 187
Bibliography
30 On the return of the popularity of the letter, particularly in Covid times, see Morwenna
Ferrier, ‘“A Letter Tells Someone They Still Matter’: The Sudden, Surprising Return of the Pen
Pal’, The Guardian online, 23 March 2021, <https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/
mar/23/a-letter-tells-someone-they-still-matter-the-sudden-surprising-return-of-the-pen-pal>
[accessed 7 April 2021].
31 Ferrier.
188 JENNA NG
Barthes, Roland, ‘On Reading’, in Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language, trans.
by Richard Howard (Berkeley; Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1989), pp. 32–43
Barthes, Roland, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. by R. Miller (Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
1990)
Booth, Wayne, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961)
Brown, Mark, ‘Douglas Adams’ Note to Self Reveals Author Found Writing Torture’,
The Guardian online, 22 March 2021, <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/
mar/22/douglas-adams-note-to-self-reveals-author-found-writing-torture>
[accessed 15 June 2022]
Cameron, Andy, ‘Dissimulations: Illusions of Interactivity’, Millennium Film Journal,
28 (Spring 1995), <http://www.mfijj-online.org/journalPages/MFJ28/Dissimula-
tions.html> [accessed 15 June 2022]
Ferrier, Morwenna, ‘“A Letter Tells Someone They Still Matter”: The Sudden, Surpris-
ing Return of the Pen Pal’, The Guardian online, 23 March 2021, <https://www.
theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/mar/23/a-letter-tells-someone-they-still-
matter-the-sudden-surprising-return-of-the-pen-pal> [accessed 15 June 2022]
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Higgins, Teri, ‘Attention to Detail: Epistolary Discourse and Contemporary Cinema’
(unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand, 2013)
Iser, Wolfgang, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from
Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974)
Kafka, Franz, Letters to Milena, trans. with intro by Philip Boehm (New York:
Schocken Books, 1990)
McLuhan, Marshall, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Berkeley, CA:
Gingko Press, 1964)
Peters, John Durham, The Marvellous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental
Media (Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press, 2015)
Prince, Gerald, ‘The Diary Novel: Notes for the Defijinition of a Sub-genre’, Neo-
philologus, 59 (1975), 477–81
Reynolds, Daniel, ‘Letters and the Unseen Woman: Epistolary Architecture in
Three Recent Video Games’, Film Quarterly, 68.1 (2014), 48–60
Rostand, Edmond, Cyrano de Bergerac, trans. by Carol Clark (New York: Penguin,
1897; 2006)
Short, Emily, ‘First Draft of the Revolution: Author Statement, Liza Daly’, n.d., <https://
lizadaly.com/pages/fijirst-draft/statement.html> [accessed 7 April 2021]
Zhou yi jin zhu jin yi (周易今註今譯), ed. by Nan Huaijin (南懷瑾) and Xu Qinting
(徐芹庭) (Taibei: Taiwan shangwu yinshuguan gufen youxian gongsi, 2007)
THE INTER AC TIVE LE T TER 189
Ludography
First Draft of the Revolution (2012), Emily Short, inkle studios, <https://www.
inklestudios.com/fijirstdraft/> [accessed 15 June 2022].
Sara Is Missing (2015), Monsoon Lab, Android; iOS; Classic Mac OS
Dear Esther (2012), The Chinese Room, Robert Briscoe, Microsoft Windows
Gone Home (2013), The Fullbright Company, PlayStation 4; Nintendo Switch; Xbox
One