Epistolary Entanglements in

Film, Media and the Visual Arts

Edited by
Teri Higgins and
Catherine Fowler

Amsterdam University Press

The publication of this book is made possible by a grant from the Division of Humanities at
the University of Otago.

Cover illustration: Photo by Nicolas Thomas on Unsplash

Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden

Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout

isbn 978 94 6372 966 6

e-isbn 978 90 4855 511 6
doi 10.5117/9789463729666
nur 670

© The authors / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2023

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of
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advised to contact the publisher.
 Table of Contents

Acknowledgements 7

Doing (Audio-Visual) Things with Words– From Epistolary Intent

to Epistolary Entanglements: An Introduction 9
Teri Higgins and Catherine Fowler

1. Performance and Power: The Letter as an Expression of

Masculinity in Game of Thrones 39
Louise Coopey

2. ‘My dearest little girl,I just got your letter and I hope that you
will continue to write to me often’ 55
Epistolary Listening in News from Home (Chantal Akerman, 1976)
Catherine Fowler

3. Dead Letters 71
Epistolary Hauntology and the Speed of Light in Personal Shopper
(Olivier Assayas, 2016)
Shiamin Kwa

4. Attention to Detail: Epistolary Forms in New Melodrama 89

Teri Higgins

5. The Spiritual Intimacies of The Red Hand Files: How Long Will I
Be Alone? 105
Sean Redmond

6. Video Authenticity and Epistolary Self-Expressionin Letter to

America (Kira Muratova, 1999) 125
David G. Molina

7. Epistolary Affect and Romance Scams: Letter from an Unknown

Woman 139
Hito Steyerl

8. Delivering Posthumous Messages: Katherine Mansfield and

Letters in the Literary Biopic Leave All Fair (John Reid, 1985) 157
Rochelle Simmons
9. The Interactive Letter: Co-Authorship and Interactive Media in
Emily Short’s First Draft of the Revolution 173
Jenna Ng

10. Epistolary Distance and Reciprocity in José Luis Guerínand

Jonas Mekas’s Filmed Correspondences 191
Emre Çağlayan

11. Instagram and the Diary: The Case of Amalia Ulman’s

Excellences & Perfections (2014) 207
Susan Best

12. Civil War Epistolary and the Hollywood War Film 225
John Trafton

13. Epistolarity and Decolonial Aesthetics in Carola Grahn’sLook

Who’s Talking (2016) 241
Christine Sprengler

14. Epistolary Relays in Fatih Akin’s Auf der anderen Seite (On the
Other Side/On the Edge of Heaven) (2007) 259
Sunka Simon

Index 275
9. The Interactive Letter: Co-Authorship
and Interactive Media in Emily Short’s
First Draft of the Revolution
Jenna Ng

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, specifically
through the reader as co-author in a triangulation of reading, writing, and
interactivity. This triangulation upends epistolary confidentiality 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.

Keywords: interactive; First Draft of the Revolution; letter-writing; trans-

mission; confidentiality; 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/firstdraft/> [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

This chapter discusses the writing and transmitting of letters in Emily

Short’s award-winning 2012 interactive work, First Draft of the Revolution,
self-described as ‘an interactive epistolary story’.2 Hosted and played on a
dedicated website, (https://www.inklestudios.com/firstdraft/), First Draft
is a story told almost entirely through letters written by and sent amongst a
crew of characters set in eighteenth-century revolutionary France. It begins
with a correspondence by the protagonist, Juliette, to her husband, Henri,
who has banished her from Paris to ‘a village above Grenoble’ in the Dauphiné
countryside. The work also features letters by Henri; Henri’s sister, Alise,
who does not like Juliette and approves of her being sent away; and Mother
Catherine-Agnes, Juliette’s Mother Superior at an unnamed convent where
Juliette grew up before getting married. Together, their correspondences
reveal Juliette’s discovery of a plot by the friar in the country village to
manipulate Henri’s recently found illegitimate son (also at the same village!)
in an effort to overthrow the Lavori, an order of magic-using noblemen to
which Henri belongs.
First Draft is by no means unique as an interactive epistolary story. There
are many examples of interactive letters used to advance gameplay and
narrative particularly in recent years. For example, Sara Is Missing is a
game where the player interacts with the interface of Sara’s ‘found’ mobile
phone, including reading her emails and text messages as epistolary texts
to work out the story.3 Similarly, in Gone Home the player moves around
an empty family home to discover the family’s story from notes, letters,
and journal entries left in the house. 4 The acclaimed game Dear Esther is
another example.5 The player explores a deserted island whose geographi-
cal features trigger unseen narrations of letter excerpts addressed to Esther,
the narrator’s presumably dead wife. In December 2019, a ‘Correspondence
[Game] Jam’ on ‘epistolary games’ was organized on itch.io, a popular game
hosting website, calling for ‘any game where the main mechanic is players
writing letters back and forth’.6 The epistolary form as a strategy to advance

2 Emily Short, ‘First Draft of the Revolution: Author Statement, Liza Daly’, <https://lizadaly.
com/pages/first-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 active Letter 175

narrative and develop character is as vibrantly employed in interactive work

as in other media forms.
First Draft’s striking feature is its placing of interactivity at the core of
letter writing and transmission as two seldom discussed yet crucial processes
of bringing the letter into meaningful existence as a medium of com-
munication. The process of writing does not usually feature prominently
in epistolary texts.7 In novels, letters are generally presented as complete
products for the reader to connect with the character, other parts of the
story, and/or other letters.8 Any processes of their writing have to be read
between the lines. In f ilms, letter-writing typically receives truncated
treatment, such as edited shots of pages being scrunched up and tossed
into wastepaper baskets to signify a frustrated writing process, or shots
of typed sentences being deleted and re-typed to show characters’ inner
feelings or second thoughts. In this respect, First Draft is unique as an
epistolary work which markedly presents to the reader interactive draft
letters. The reader has to revise each draft letter to a point where it is
deemed complete and sent so that the story may proceed onto the next
letter. The interactivity of First Draft thus turns the epistolary story inside
out, staging front and centre not just the letters but also the processes of
the letters in their operations of drafting, editing, and revision. The fraught
chaos of authorship as scored with self-doubt, arcs of character change,
varying levels of detail of account, and conflicts between the private and
the public become fully visible. Just as importantly, the external reader,
usually the passive co-recipient of epistolary correspondences, doubles up
as co-author by participating in drafting each letter. The epistolary work
thus also showcases letter writing as an amalgamated product co-produced
with the reader/co-writer, carrying ghosts of their voices in their selections
of sentiment, tone, and content.
Similarly, the transmission of a letter does not usually receive much
critical attention in films, books, or theatre, even as the letter turns up in
myriad forms and contexts, such as being delivered by hand (Cyrano de

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

Bergerac);9 or arriving in the post through various routes (normally (Dear

John, Lasse Hallström, 2010; 84 Charing Cross Road, Helene Hanff, 1982; Mary
and Max, Adam Elliott, 2009); with guile (Dear Frankie, Shona Auerbach,
2005); posthumously (P.S. I Love You, Richard LaGravenese, 2008); in the
throes of war (Letters from Iwo Jima, Clint Eastwood, 2006); through a time-
travelling letterbox (Il Mare, Lee Hyun-seung, 2000; and its US remake, The
Lake House, Alejandro Agresti, 2006)). Or the letter may arrive via a piece
of clothing (The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, Ken Kwapis, 2005); via a
tourist trap (Letters to Juliet, Gary Winick, 2010); or via email (You’ve Got
Mail, Nora Ephron, 1998; Love, Simon, Greg Berlanti, 2018; The Perfect Man,
Mark Rosman, 2005), to give just a few examples. However, with attention
usually focused on the letter’s content, its transmission is almost always
glossed over, such as with a breezy shot of a stamped envelope popped into
a mailbox or a close-up of a mouse arrow hitting ‘send’. The more important
point is that the letter arrives (and/or is read, exchanged, deceives etc). In
contrast, First Draft leverages its central plot point of magic whereby the
letter is a ‘charmed’ object which ‘appears’ instantaneously as an ‘enchanted
double’ on the receiver’s end. As an epistolary work, it thus draws an unusual
spotlight onto the letter not in terms of its contents, but its work as a medium
of communication across space and distance. This commentary gains further
irony and resonance in light of First Draft’s actual form today as a digital
website accessed in the age of high-speed Internet access.
In these ways, the interactive epistolary form in First Draft becomes a
self-reflexive device shedding light on the letter as a medium which, so to
speak, truly is the message.10 Through a close reading of the work, this
chapter will discuss these two threads of letter writing and transmission
in First Draft. The main analysis will be on how interactivity becomes and
is used as commentary on the letter’s process of becoming, specifically
through the reader as co-author in a triangulation of reading, writing, and
interactivity. A shorter analysis will examine the letter’s crossing of space
and time, and how that transmission contributes integrally to its meaning
as a communication medium. In this two-pronged exploration of ‘epistolary
interactivity’, the chapter further interrogates the nature of media itself,
and how interactivity shapes letters as media in terms of being, becoming,
change, and potential for change.

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 active Letter 177

Writing and Reading the Interactive Letter: Co-authorship,

Confidentiality, Change

Writing does not fully capture words, words do not fully capture meaning.
Zhou yi11

To revise each letter in First Draft, the reader f irst identif 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
offense’; 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

the ‘implied reader’,12 the ‘writer-as-reader’,13 or the theoretically possible

reader,14 among others. In that respect, scholars also note how the epistolary
work highlights the role of the internal reader (qua addressee within the
fiction) as a co-producer of the letter by their reading and interpretation
of it. As Altman writes, the epistolary story

… is unique in making the reader (narratee) almost as important an agent

in the narrative as the writer (narrator) […] the letter is by definition
never the product of such an ‘immaculate conception’, [i.e. of writing
without regard for the reader] but is rather the result of a union of writer
and reader.15

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 affect 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 Definition 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 active Letter 179

creator’s expression of Alise’s letter as a correspondence that focuses on

her words to Henri about Juliette.
The majority of revision choices in First Draft nevertheless does allow
the reader choice (or illusion of choice)17 in finalizing how the letters sound,
appear, and otherwise turn out between the story’s characters. For example,
Juliette’s first letter to Henri contains a draft paragraph whose revision
is also mandatory: ‘The society here is very bad. I do not know how I can
have offended you to be exiled in this wretched place’. Juliette’s letter
cannot be sent until those sentences are re-written, for key information
is revealed in its revision such as the introduction of the character of
the friar. Yet, while the reader must choose to ‘rewrite’ the letter so as to
introduce the friar, the work presents options to the reader on how they
wish the introduction to appear. For instance, the more demure option
of ‘I should just mention the man is a friar’ modulates the letter’s content
onto a more decorous tone: ‘I believe he is some sort of friar, though we
have not been introduced properly’. Choosing the starker option – ‘No, let
him [Henri] be jealous’ – changes the letter’s content into mention of how
‘the kitchen girls talk of nothing but his looks’ and a lengthy description
of the friar’s ‘striking face’. As the letters progress and their stakes amplify
with increasing strain between Juliette and Henri, the choices of revision
for the reader correspondingly grow starker. In a particularly cross letter
from Juliette first broaching the subject of Henri’s potentially illegitimate
son, the reader has the option of revising Juliette’s sign-off to ‘[y]our wife,
Juliette’, which until that point had been ‘[y]our obedient wife, Juliette’.
As their tensions ratchet up, Juliette’s sign-off no longer becomes editable,
instead automatically becoming just ‘Juliette’. Hence, where the external
reader’s role is usually limited to reading and interpreting the letters,
here they adopt a relatively active role in how the letter turns out – how
warm; how cold; how truthful? The production of the epistolary text takes
a radical turn here as First Draft’s interactivity directly engages the reader
in the writing (or, at least, the selections of offered options for revision) of
its letters substantively beyond the reading of them.
First Draft further involves the reader with its letter writing via revi-
sions which need not be made (i.e. for the letter to be sent and the story
to proceed), but could be, should the reader be so curious. Typically, these
changes do not reveal key information but, rather, additional information

17 See Andy Cameron, ‘Dissimulations: Illusions of Interactivity’, Millennium Film Journal, 28

(Spring 1995), <http://www.mfj-online.org/journalPages/MFJ28/Dissimulations.html> [accessed
7 April 2021].
180  Jenna Ng

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 offered 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 define 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 active Letter 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 confidentiality 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 confidence 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 confidentiality in letters that enables them to effectively play
out the opposition between ‘confiance/non-confiance’, 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 confidentiality.22
The interactive writing of letters in First Draft upends this conventional
conveyance of epistolary confidentiality. Rather, in First Draft confidential-
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-confidential 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 – specifically, the effort of deliberating over and deciding
word choices, and the revelations of private sentiment in the letter drafts
against the public front of their f 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

interactivity of First Draft delivers the writing process in full visibility by

emphasizing its mechanism of draft revisions to not only, as mentioned,
place the task squarely on the reader, but also self-reflexively underscore
its laboriousness and challenge. As many writers (and academics!) attest,
writing is difficult, long-drawn, finicky, emotionally exhausting, and lonely
work.23 At its heart, letter writing is as much a labour of reaching outwards
to the addressee as it is inwards unto the writer themselves. In this same
sense, Kafka writes of letter writing as ‘an intercourse with ghosts’ – partly
as an exercise of address to an absent counterparty (i.e. with ‘the ghost
of the addressee’), but also because letter writing is a process ‘with one’s
own ghost, which secretly evolves inside the letter one is writing’.24 Of
the letter, then, as a medium reaching across multiple parties (fictional
addressee; f ictional letter writer; the work’s author; 25 external reader),
First Draft, unusually for an epistolary work, literalizes this tenet of its
production process in bringing the reader/co-writer’s voice into the mix of
voices merged between character, creator, and reader. More significantly, it
exposes the letter not as a product but as a process of words, through which
what is just as secret as its contents are the internal conflicts, choices, and
struggles of the reader/writer. The confidentiality of the letters in First
Draft is thus as much about their contents as it is about the journeys of
arriving at them.
Each letter’s draft sentences further indicate in conf idence not only
the writer’s inner sentiments, but also the distance between the private
and the public as the revisions take place, particularly in correspond-
ence with rising emotional stakes in the story. For instance, as Juliette’s
suspicions of Henri’s illegitimate son grow, her draft sentences reflect her
distress about her marriage: ‘I suppose I should not be surprised [about

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 effaced 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 active Letter 183

legitimizing the boy]. There is no risk of my giving you an heir while we

live so many miles separated’. The re-writing of those sentences, with
thoughts of self-restraint via ‘calm, calm’ accompanying the option, turns
them into the more moderate version which is then sent: ‘It is sensible.
Your family would welcome a son of known ability. His manners are rough,
but I dare say he could be trained’. Conversely, one particularly agitated
letter from Henri on his jealousy of Juliette’s relationship with the friar
offers relatively few revisions for re-writing, so that the f inalized letter
resembles a hastily wrought letter in almost draft-like form, without
even a sign-off. Hence, the labour of the reader as co-author in First Draft
not only shifts attention to the process – and diff iculties – of writing
the letters, but also exposes the tellingly relative distances between the
draft and the re-written sentences which the reader’s revisions, or lack
of, correspondingly bridge and reflect.
The interactivity of revision in First Draft thus belies the facile clicking
across the work just to change words in its letters. Specifically, it exposes the
letter as a medium in the way John Durham Peters argues for media: com-
munication ‘as disclosure of being rather than clarity of signal’, understood
‘not only as sending messages […] but also as providing conditions for
existence’.26 Coupled with the opening quotation of this section – an ancient
Chinese saying which refers to the gap between writing and both thought
and intention – writing, and written letters, as a medium thus express
something else, namely, a fundamental state of being in change between
action and intention, being and thought. It is the space of contingency
which all active agents (including writers) necessarily inhabit in life.
The epistolary interactivity of First Draft translates this axiom directly,
demonstrating the letter as being much larger than its contents. More than
message or mask, the letter, laid bare in its mechanisms of drafts, choice of
revisions, and revelations of inner thought, is instead about the potential
of change – of words that could have and/or should have been against the
words that finally are. Across the large range of permutations of revisions
to be or which could be made by the reader, the interactive letters of First
Draft are not communication media by way of conveying fixed or stable
messages, but by being fluctuations of change and potential of change
as a state of existence that reflects the (co-)writer’s own cognitive and
emotional flux.

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

Sending the Magic Letter: Distance, Speed, Paradox

Any genre is fine but keep in mind the effort 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 offers an option to ‘send the letter’ which, when clicked,
produces the letter in its post-revised form, final 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 fiction 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 off. 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 finite 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 first letter, he writes of
how ‘[w]hen one first 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 active Letter 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 f 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 different 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 off on elaborately embellished pages, further
emphasize the juxtaposition against and anachronism of their fictional
‘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

Dauphiné to Paris somehow arrive instantaneously across all its miles by

the magic in its f iction, as with messages across the Internet 200 years
later in the late twentieth century across even greater distances globally.
First Draft thus self-reflexively works its dual levels of fiction and fact to
converge magic and the Internet as an underscoring of the plasticity of
time and distance in the letter in radically different eras of communication
technologies.
Yet even in all the ‘magic’ of instantaneity of its transmission, time
and distance endures in the letter. There is still distance between the
two parties across which the letter needs time to travel. The reader still
needs to take time to refresh the webpage for the next letter draft. Across
‘magic’ and webpages, First Draft ensures this fundamental nature of the
letter rings clarion: that spatio-temporal separation, indeed, constitutes
the letter. 28 Somewhat like Zeno’s dichotomy paradox which posits the
impossibility of motion (by virtue of how travel over any f inite distance
cannot ever be completed or even begun because the traveller must run
an endless sequence of fractions of the total distance), the complete
bridging of that separation is similarly impossible in theory and logic. 29
First Draft’s purported collapse of space and time through ‘magic’ or
otherwise thus brings these issues of the letter’s transmission to the
fore. The paradox is that communications, as do letters, must necessar-
ily separate even as they connect. Moreover, this is a separation that
endures – perhaps is even intensif ied – in or despite the instantaneity
of digital technologies. The letter is bound to chase the ghost separated
from its body. As the directive, per the opening quotation in this section,
from the ‘Correspondence Game Jam’ indicates, there is always yearning
in its words.

Conclusion

This chapter has argued how the interactive epistolary work of First Draft
adopts an unusual yet effective 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 confidentiality (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 active Letter 187

transmission. Firstly, letter writing becomes a co-authorship between the

creator, character, and reader, and as a result shifts the confidentiality – as
one of its most important qualities – of the letter from its contents to its
process of writing. In so doing, First Draft thus underscores not only the
difficulty of writing, but the criticality of writing as a process in relation to
creating a letter in terms of change, flux, becoming, and being.
Secondly, the sending of letters in First Draft leverages a clever juxtaposi-
tion of eighteenth-century ‘magic’ of instantaneous transmission against
twentieth/twenty-first-century technology of Internet communication. It
calls attention to the axioms of spatio-temporal separation which constitute
the ontology of the letter, and, indeed, of communication technologies in
general. In turn, the physics of reaching across space and time which direct
all communications generates a paradox of separation and connection that
translates directly into absence and spectrality. Enduring as one of the
last communication forms to still straddle the analogue (as handwritten
on paper)30 and the digital (in the form of emails, text messages, etc.), the
letter thus becomes possibly the most poignant exemplar of this paradox
of distance and linkage, formality and intimacy. As Morwenna Ferrier
writes, ‘to write on paper felt correct, and true. From the paper, to the stains
and the handwriting, it is impossible to send an impersonal letter’.31 The
interactive letter in First Draft underscores its digitality with its message
on the essence of communication: at its heart, it is about fending off ghosts,
even as it speaks as one.

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188  Jenna Ng

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One

About the Author

Jenna Ng is Senior Lecturer in Film and Interactive Media at the University of

York, UK. She is the editor of Understanding Machinima: Essays on Filmmak-
ing in Virtual Worlds (Bloomsbury, 2013), and the author of The Post-Screen
Through Virtual Reality, Holograms and Light Projections: Where Screen
Boundaries Lie (Amsterdam University Press, 2021).