Last week I posted a second person point-of-view narrative about driving home during a rainstorm. Because second person forces you into being the main character, I think my story would transfer well into an e-lit because the e-lit features would really enhance the reader’s experience.
I think a really cool feature would be to make the background animated, perhaps dark with flashes that imitate lightning strikes, or perhaps an animation of rain. Doing this would bring the setting of the story to life by literally “setting” the story in the bad weather.
I also think sound would be another great feature to add. There are so many sounds that could be used for my story—car horns, rain, wind, thunder. I think the best way to accomplish this would to be if the whole narrative was actually read aloud through an audio file, that way the specific sounds could be timed correctly in the story. This would really help pull the reader into the story.
I have always been a fan of changing font styles in stories. I find that certain fonts almost have “personalities” to them. In my narrative, I would bold, italicize, increase the size, decrease the size, or completely change the font for certain words. For example, the word “heavy” could be bold, “storm” could be in a jagged font, and “conquered” could be enlarged. This technique puts emphasis on specific words, forcing the reader to give them more thought, thus impacting his/her reaction to the story.
One of the features of the e-lit “These Waves of Girls” that I really liked was how certain sentences were hyperlinked to a new page. It was a great way for readers to explore the different stories. I think this would also be an interesting feature to add to my narrative as well. I would use the hyperlinks to go to a new page each time the setting/distance changed. For example, the first part of the narrative takes place in a parking lot. I would hyperlink the last sentence of that part to take readers to a new page, which would be the highway. Doing this would actually take readers on a journey themselves.
Lastly, I would also incorporate images into my narrative. This actually ties into my previous idea of adding hyperlinks. Every time readers get to a new page, the image would change. I would use an image representative of the setting at that time in the story. So the first page would have a picture of a parking lot at the top of the page, and then the second page would have picture of the highway. I think it would be even more effective if the picture were taken from a first person point-of-view. So the picture of the parking lot would be taken from the perspective of someone sitting in the driver’s seat of a car parked in the parking lot, and the second page would be taken from the perspective of someone driving on the highway in the rain. This feature, just like all of the ones previously stated, would be effective in forcing the reader to truly imagine him/herself in the story.