STORYSPACE & HYPERTEXT: Editing Theory
While Steve Ersinghaus may not agree with me after his 900+ writing spaces in his Storyspace novel The Life of Geronimo Sandoval, I’ve discovered through my own Hypertextopia piece A Bottle of Beer that my editing methods have changed, become more thorough, even without a ruler poised over my knuckles. It’s a very important difference.
Text boxes focus the writer–as well as the reader–on a small portion of text at a time. No seven paragraphs on a page that invites skimming to the unrestrained writer. One thought at a time, one absolutely vital piece of text that has to justify its taking up space in this cramped enclosure.
It’s likely one of the most important things I’ll ever learn about the editing process–not that I hadn’t been taught to centralize editing in this way; just that it’s not only natural for a writer to miss his own errors and to feel heartache at every phrase deleted from his eloquent recital of passage, we tend to get lazy. Or bored with our own stuff after a hundred readings.
With hypertext, we may have read it a zillion times, but we’re concerned with taking out unnecessary words among maybe a hundred or two, and you’re not going to get the feeling that you did the job right if you’ve only taken out a couple. You know there’s more excess in there; you read the same paragraph again and find more. And more and more. Then you feel you can move on to the next. This doesn’t happen as readily or naturally in traditional format writing.
The bonus? The eventual reader gets to focus on your clearly defined point.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology