Author Stephen Marche discusses his interactive novel for walrusmagazine.com

Lucy Hardin’s Missing Period is an interactive novel, created exclusively for walrusmagazine.com, with hundreds of possible storylines and multiple outcomes. It uses a web format to capture the reality of a young woman in Toronto in the early 2000s, allowing the reader to explore different aspects of Lucy’s life and times and the city in which she lives, while following her through the labyrinth of her various futures. Lucy’s fate, like our own, is up in the air, open to negotiation and sudden change. Author Stephen Marche (Raymond and Hannah, Shining at the Bottom of the Sea) spoke to The Walrus’s managing editor about the development of the idea.

Jared Bland How did this project start for you? How did it evolve, both over the course of the drafts, and once it began to live in an electronic environment?

Stephen Marche The project began with Lucy, with her character. I was trying to get at the reality of a thirty-year-old woman living in Toronto, the kind of woman that I have more or less been surrounded by my whole life — urban, bookish, conflicted. It seemed to me that the fundamental lie behind any fictional character is the conclusion and the idea of a single continuous course to their existence. That’s not how people are. They contain, at any given moment, many possible futures. So I wanted to find a way to express that plural reality. Everything really flowed from that idea.

What is the relationship between this novel’s subject — a precarious moment in the life of a young woman — and its form?

I think Lucy, who’s thirty, would have remembered Choose Your Own Adventure books. And of course she would live online like the rest of us. So the form is particularly appropriate to both her past and her present reality. (more…)

Tags: choose your own adventure, experimental fiction, interactive fiction, interview, Lucy Hardin's Missing Period, stephen marche
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