David Emery Online

Storytelling

29 January 2007

Diamond Geezer is one of the better and more widely read UK-based blogs. Normally, it deals with the reality of living in modern London; tube trains, museums the 2012 Olympics – always bordering on the boring but always coming out interesting (even if you’d be ashamed to admit it).

This week however, he’s doing something very interesting – something I’ve never seen done before, and something that really works.

Starting with this post Diamond Geezer has started posting from the future. Shod of the purely informative with a dab of editorial, he’s now moved straight into fiction with rather brilliant effect.

The story he’s weaving is a captivating tale of what appears to be a major terrorist attack on London, told in real time via the blog. Every few hours another post comes down the RSS feed, detailing his survival so far – first escape from a darkened tube train, then his fleeing from the power-mad authorities through the darkness of east London back to home and safety.

The format works so perfectly I’m sure we will see this repeated again (and I also assume that this isn’t the first, although I’ve not seen it before). The central character has so much history and back story, as you can have been reading the blog for years, that you can’t help but be pulled into the story.

This plays nicely into the mechanics of the format; the drip feed of updates – mirroring I guess the traditional newspaper serial – keeps you planted on the edge of your seat, refresh the page for new updates. At the time of writing, we still don’t know what’s going on or what’s happened, and the desire to get the full picture is high.

While I imagine this could well be just to fill space while he’s on holiday, it’s an interesting experiment that plays nicely with the mechanics of storytelling; it could turn out that blogging could be a very effective method for drama.