Immersive Storytelling
Helen has long been interested in moving storyworlds out of the box of a book or screen. Her thoughts on VR and storytelling can be read on LitHub here. Her explorations of alternative storytelling include creating a digital epilogue, or “epiblog” for her first novel Making It: A Novel of Madison Avenue, an e-book that ends with online links to content that tells readers, at a glance, what happens next for each character.
In her former life in advertising, she was the creator of an award winning ad blog AdBroad. Her posts about the day-to-day experience of being a copywriter can still be read here.
She is also author of the acclaimed Twitter handle @BettyDraper. Her channeling Mad Men characters to another platform was unofficial, but recognized by AMC and earned her invitations to speak at conferences including South by Southwest, Digital Hollywood and International STORYWORLD. Her experiments in 21st century storytelling have been cited in several books on new media entertainment, including:
The Art of Immersion: How the Digital Generation Is Remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and the Way We Tell Stories
By Frank Rose, W. W. Norton & Company, 2011
Digital Storytelling: A Creator’s Guide to Interactive Entertainment
by Carolyn Handler Miller, CRC Press, 2014
Mad Men Unzipped: Fans on Sex, Love, and the Sixties on TV
By Karen E. Dill-Shackleford, Cynthia Vinney, Jerri Lynn Hogg, Kristin Hopper-Losenicky, University of Iowa Press, 2015
Helen continues to explore fresh approaches to digital storytelling and promotion. In a doubly meta publicity play, the protagonist of her new novel What Was Mine (Lucy Wakefield) interacts with Roger Morse, the protagonist of Rick Moody’s novel, Hotels of North America by contributing a post to a hotel review site that is ostensibly created by Morse, but is in fact, promotion for Moody’s novel by Little, Brown and Company.
