Hypercompendia

One of the things Steve mentions in his post on his current hypertext project, Brimmer and Death, is this:

In the beginning, I had no idea that Death would play a role in the story. The story began with Brimmer having a conversation. This conversation was abstract and meant nothing upon first writing.

And that’s exactly how many writers get started; I know that’s my method.  A conversation out of nowhere, a sentence that stays in the mind until it needs to be written down somewhere to develop. It would seem that without conscious awareness, a writer has these ideas tickling his mind until he laughs in response by giving them substance, i.e., turning them into text.  Eventually they become a thread and he’s the first to ‘read’ the story:

Later, as the story developed, this conversation turned–luckily–into an interluding message.

One of the reasons I was reluctant to try Storyspace was that this was how story developed for me, from an opening line, a paragraph, a conversation, running through my head much as persistent tricky lyrics of a song.  How then, I argued, would I deal with plotting and structure when it never occurred to me to write that way.  I was never aware of beginning, middle, or end until each happened in its time.  I have files and files of each–that may never grow to the whole trio.

What I’m finding out however is that Storyspace is perfect for this type of writer’s process.  An odd thought goes into a box (Writing Space), sometimes needing several (another function of SSP, natural breaking into sequence) and tied together so they don’t get lost.  Eventually, boxes are added like cars to a train engine and voila! they’re heading somewhere.  The tracks necessarily cross and here’s where the writer begins to understand what’s happening.  Motifs begin to appear.  Patterns.  And a whole lotta random thoughts, lovely prose, becomes a visible story in the hypertext structure of Storyspace.

I think I’ve finally found my niche.