Hypercompendia

Going through Paths for language use, typos, that kind of thing because I thought the cycles had been complete.  A passage holds me within a certain Writing Space.  It’s towards the end of this particular path, and is part of the original writing.  I’ve read it maybe a hundred times or more, and yet…why didn’t I see this, the choice and possibilities?

I really, really think that the format of Writing Spaces focuses the writer (and hopefully, the reader) on the words as well as the episodic nature of the environment.  In this case, it was always a lead towards the end:

I wonder if I were a bird, if I could be a seagull.  I think I’m not as graceful now.  I think perhaps I’d have to be a rounded mourning dove, with the whirring flutter that never allows complete free flight and that peculiar pecking walk that seems so timid and afraid.  I carry my shoes and walk along the slip and sliding water’s edge to feel the moving silt beneath bare feet.

Man, that’s like wide open.  Yet I’d put an ending to it within a couple more paragraphs.  Being forced to see this excerpt without the next what I’ll call ‘predetermined action,’ since this what is set in place, I’m seeing something else happening.  In the split second between this and the next moment for this character, in that split second that I as writer have separated the text into Writing Spaces, this character does something other than what I had expected.

Now that’s what I think Storyspace does for creative production.  Contradictory to its visual small border of Writing Space, it offers not merely more white space to fill with words that progress the story, but unlimited spaces that can continue a thread, or fork off again.  The end is not in sight, creatively, nor technically with the visual maps and charts of the program. The last text box is never automatically the last.  And never necessarily remains where it is within the story.