Hypercompendia

I feel very guilty doing this, since the whole purpose of the program is to link things, not repeat them, but for the second or third time now I find myself duplicating the text within a Writing Space.  This was done once for convenience, just to avoid the link to a single Space and back again with all the guard fields necessary to keep the reader from going ahead into one of the other stories where things wouldn’t make sense.  Now I find it a useful way of tying things in without linking (sorry, Mark!). 

What happened was this:  I saw another scenario for the end of story #1, and in writing it, realized that something similar had come up (out of the blue, unrelated, different person, blah-blah) in Story #3.  Well, in working traditionally, that snippet likely wouldn’t be there, and if it were, it’d be moved once I saw this better spot for it.  I have the option to link, but since I want to take that particular snippet and change a word or two, as well as expand upon it here in Story #1, I think it’s neat to be able to repeat it, though not verbatim.  A reader will make the connection, I’m sure, once he’s read both pieces of text in their own contexts, and will not need to go back for confirmation.  Plus, maybe I don’t want him to do that. 

Now you just couldn’t do that without considerable skill in unhypertexted narrative (unhypertexted, def: old-fashioned straight linear text without reason or ability for wandering unless that much of a skimmer).

The capability of duplicating a piece of story here is along the lines of creating leit motif perhaps.  A recurrence that becomes recognizable.  Maybe it’s just reinforcing a notion of possibilities, or relating the characters to each other by a pattern. 

It’s another use of the tool.