Hypercompendia

Steve Ersinghaus is doing a series on the reading of hypertext and it’s going to be one helluvan interesting indepth look at the form of hypertext and its literary composition. 

A Higher Power  has brought to my attention the need to take the knife, dig deeper, and cut out the cankers from this hypertext.  He’s right. 

It’s tough to look at your own work and yet, with all the reading and studying I’ve done, particularly in the last few years at an intense level, I should be better at it than I am.  To recognize what I’d see in the work of others and even if I can’t prevent myself from writing them in, at least know enough to take them out in editing.

My writing used to be very unimaginative and stiff.  After several classes and kicks I began to shed the Poe influence (here I refer to the grammatical style of structure rather than the positive Poe influence) and become a little more willing to share in writing the pictures of story that only I saw in my head.  Appropriately titled, Reflections in Imagery was a story that just about sunk under a woman’s thoughts as she viewed her naked body in a full length mirror.  Okay, so I overdosed.  It’s a habit of mine as a Scorpio to be one way or the other, God forbid I should walk the middle of the road.

So I go back and read and decide and cut out the waste.  And once it’s gone, it’s gone (honest, I used to save these things!) so for its final appearance, here is the first of the fallen, and rather appropriately contains the metaphor of the blade:

Balanced on the horizon, it flamed red in its agonies, sinking slow and low on the sharp blade of highway.

There are ideas for story that fall into a category of telling best suited by a particular format, whether it be linear or varied, single or multiple pov, all encompassing of time or an action sequence of an hour.  A writer has the choice of what best serves the piece–as long as 1) he recognizes what pattern is developing and 2) he knows what mediums are available and how they work.

One needs to know the size of the arena, the height of the wall, the age of the lion before one can decide strategy.

Sometimes things just work.  Sometimes they don’t.  I don’t approach a medium with a story in mind; I write an opening, and when I get an idea of where it’s going, I may pull it and transfer it to another vehicle, the jet of Storyspace if it’s going global.  The train ride of Hypertextopia with its window shots of the countryside, the main highway for the linear story, the slow boat to China of paper and pen.

Sometimes a poem turns into a story, a story is concised down to a poem. 

Every  story has a place, every tale is looking for its teller,

Learned much from a workshop on this last night (more on that later here or at CW) but one thing that came of it that I had forgotten was that in editing, sometimes something vital is lost.  Overly ambitious and anxious to please, I slashed and mashed with glee.  In the hypertext format there is much already left out as it is easy to leave the transitioning up to the difference in textboxes once a pattern has been established. 

In cutting out unnecessary words, sentences, actions, etc., I ended up with a lexia that brought in a new character and waited a sentence before it was made clear who she was.  However, in also leaving out the name of "Herve" because that sentence had been eliminated and the next reference to him was simply "he," –which became the starting point for him–it became unclear who we were talking about. 

Another thing I realized as over 20% of the story fell into the black hole of the cosmos, was I ended up with a lot of "she" sentences that had likely been filled in with name or with fluff to separate the "shes" so they weren’t all clustered together and obvious.  That’s a bit harder to fix, usually necessitating deeper cutting and making choices between which things "she" did as to what would stay, what would be deleted.

Still more to do on this to get it into a "more orderly" and "polished" form as was suggested.

After spending a couple of days honing language on A Bottle of Beer, I went onto the site as a reader–not logging in, and therefore, presented with a different manipulation of story.  And then, as I do with all stories I write, I read it out loud.

Wow.  It’s like reading a good night story to a child.  The small portions of text that are restricted by the boxes force a pause while the mind then tells the reader to click to go further–either on a portion of highlighted text or the bottom arrows that lead to the next ‘page.’   But the reading pattern does sound like the bedtime reading, focusing on just that block of text at a time, the pause at the end to insure that all has been read before moving on to the next. 

Interesting.

Sometimes all you need is a pat on the head and a kick in the butt to do what you should know by now but forget and get lost in the journey. Feeling a hundred percent better in the rewriting, chopping out, cleaning to the most showing of words that presents a picture story of this piece. 

A Bottle of Beer is taking a better shape in its trimming down of excess fat and focus on the high cheekbones, the wide-boned pelvis more perfect for birthing a child.

Discovered Chris’ site, Gimcrack’d, via if:book’s post on hypertext and Chris’ comments here.  Finally got a chance to hang out a bit there and need to spend more time, but he appears to have another form of hypertext narrative going on that looks interesting.  Here’s what he says by way of introduction:

Preface

Gimcrack’d is an ongoing anthology of stories that react to your touch — you might call them hypertext. Some let you go exploring inside them, revealing themselves bit by bit. Some let you change the story as it’s told to you. There are also more unusual ways they can react to your presence — but you’ll have to see for yourself.

There are a few guideposts as you read:

    * A ∴ signals a stopping-point in a story. There might be many of these, just one, or even none. (That symbol, by the way, should appear as three dots arranged in a triangle — your Web browser needs to support Unicode to see it properly.)

    * Links set off by » change the course of the story permanently. If you’d like to revisit a choice you made earlier, you may do so by clicking the rewind to here link in the upper-right corner of a passage.

The three most recent stories are bolded in the table of contents above. You can also keep up with recent changes to this site with this page’s RSS feed, or through our blog.

I for one certainly appreciate all the interest by writers in the hypertext environment.  It’s not just a method that people are encouraging, but they are looking to use the new technology available to find a better way of saying what they want to say. 

I’ve been following Charles Deemer’s work on producing a piece for Hypertext 08 that he will present in film form, on Hyperdrama. 

Must link to this intro that he has put together since–it’s very well done and interesting to students of new media in all forms. Intro to Hyperdrama

A lot of changes have taken place on the Hypertextopia site since I started writing a story into it about a week and a half ago.  This morning, I found another tab on the top of the main writing space page and found this:

 
    This story is not available for your friends to collaborate on.
    Adding a password will allow them to write in it as well.

This, I believe, came out of a suggestion in the commentary at if:books which posted and hosted a lively discussion on hypertext and it’s rather small audience (to put it politely).  Some even prayed it would never resurface.  That part particularly bugs me; I dislike the color orange but certainly would never wish it banned or eradicated because there are some people who love it.  I just never wear orange or drink orange soda.  My favorite color is green.  I wear it a lot and eat limes.

Back to the thread here: I’m not really sure what is accomplished by adding collaborators to a piece, though I would suppose that if a piece were to be at its best by using several writers, then you can do it in hypertext as well as any other medium.  To me it just comes off as a case of misunderstanding the theory of hypertext and making new writers of a piece out of readers albeit by offering the reading of different paths written by a single writer.

Such fun!