This week we learned about “aleatory poetry,” which is basically when a story changes every time you refresh the page. It has been interesting to learn over the past few weeks about new forms of storytelling where the reader is an active participant in the happenings of the story. I had never read a story in the form of aleatory poetry before this class, and it was cool to get to read one as well as attempt to make one.

Writing and coding my own “aleatory poetry” was a fun experience. There were many challenges, and I never actually got my story up and running, but it was fun, nonetheless. Coding the story was obviously the greatest challenge. Below I posted a screenshot of my story in html to show what my process was. I am still in the process of tweaking it to hopefully get it up and running soon.

One thing I learned through this process was about writing a story in a way that multiple outcomes can occur. This seems pretty simple, but once I got to coding, a lot of my sentences had to be tweaked in order for more than one word to be able to fit in that certain spot. For example, in my story I tried to be as vague as possible. Like one character I originally had sitting at a table, however, there wouldn’t be a table at lake (or at least at any lake I’ve been to). So, I had to make the setting a little less specific in order for multiple outcomes to fit into the story.

Even though it is fairly short, I had fun making this story and learning about this form of storytelling. I have never thought of digital authoring in a way that was so digital (for lack of a better word!) The internet is amazing in that there are infinite amounts of information to learn about and share. I am now adding “aleatory poetry” to the long list of incredible possibilities that the internet has to offer.