Hypercompendia

Spent some time today changing titles on the Writing spaces and decided that while I may lose the numbering system soon in the titles, I have changed the color of each path just to make it easier for myself to keep track of them.

The problem is, I seem to find more I want to add to these characters rather than concentrate on connecting them.  Maybe there is something to that–maybe there is something else in them that connects them that I just haven’t seen that is more subtle than what I’ve seen so far.

Haven’t as yet switched to the Chart or Outline View because I want to make sure all major changes are  made and so they’re all alike before I wander onto that format to test its ease of use over Map View.  What I really need to see is all four paths laid out in a single view, and Map just isn’t going to do that for me.

Wow.  I’ve created a dilemma that’s taking some real brain power to figure out.

In trying to reorganize the traffic patterns of Paths, I first noted down all the connections between the stories, then pondered whether there was justification (usually, yes, because I’d put some thought into it when I set them up) and whether I could remove guard fields to allow freedom to remain on that path.

I’m trying to explore ways of doing this with the current main paths, but I’m finding that it might be necessary to re-lay out the entire piece to plan it not as four paths that touch, but do the intermixing of the stories myself and create that as one main path, allowing the four paths to be followed individually if the reader chooses.  It would possibly give me more control over the flow and yet it would appear more freeflowing to the reader. 

I think.

What I may need to do is save yet another copy of this piece and fiddle with it individually so as not to change the way the project stands now until I know what I’ve done is the best way for the hypertext to work. 

Two things I’m going to concentrate on in hypertext work this weekend:  Cutting most of the links between stories and replacing them, in fact, seeking only the most relevant connection points and making them work.  I need to allow the reader to go further than one Writing Space into a parallel path.  I need to allow him to walk around there until he finds some reason to go back to where he was (maybe) and has learned something that enhances the story path he continues upon.

Today was a day of going through each story and marking where it hit a juncture of joining another. Now I realize that Paths itself was set up outside of the Storyspace environment, but it truly is such a perfect fit for it, I just have to figure out how to make them play nice together.

The other thing I’m going to do in Storyspace is to enter the e-mail story of Tom, Marie, and Frank with the information we have so far.  First, however, I’m going to read Mark’s essays on hypertext so that there becomes a more flowing narrative out of what’s been done to date.  In truth, I see that the way the e-mail story has developed is probably more of a hypertext link by link as it went back and forth already.  Meaning, as it progressed, we both (Steve Ersinghaus and I) were thinking in a true hypertext form.  Maybe we’ll even get a Vassar student involved in it. 

The non-hypertext work I need to concentrate on this weekend involves completing the building of the main PC, apple and pumpkin pies, and stuffing the ass end of a turkey.

Now I’ve been typing for more years than I care to mention, but there is one symbol I need from these instructions in the Storyspace manual that I can’t find on my keyboard, nor recall having seen it.  Look at this:

"Their first date"| "Peter steps on her

foot"|"Donna fires Peter’s mom"

This   |   means that reader must have fulfilled one (or more) of the conditions noted.

So how, unless as I’ve done just now with copy & paste, do I make that vertical line on the keyboard?

|  Hah!  Just found it.  Off over to the right as an upper case over the slash.  Sonovagun.  Even on this keyboard it looks like dripping dots of a colon.  But then again, my e, i, o, and l, have been worn off and missing anyway and the s, d, and n are on their way to oblivion.   

Actually that would have been a good title for the last post and is sort of irrelevant to this one because this is on characters.

(NOTE:  Is this how unstructured hypertext makes you feel?  Plopped in the wrong pond?)

Something else Steve mentioned in his post has me thinking again about characters within hypertext, and if the form itself influences the decision towards limitation. 

"If Anne is linked to Jeremy, Jeremy linked to Joyce, then how is Joyce linked to Anne?"

With the hopping around in the spaces of time and place that hypertext encourages, doesn’t one of the grounding elements then depend upon something else such as characters?

Can you imagine The Brothers Karamzov–or any Russian novel–in hypertext?  (though a link on each name to a box of description, i.e., "Mickail is really Ivanovich Dostoley, whose middle name is Mickailovich but three of his friends call him Mickail") 

I think that hypertext narrative may indeed require that a grounding force be determined, whether it be character, place (I can see this as a room in an Italian castle and the people who have slept there through the years), theme (killer instinct within every individual), leit moif (Marquez’s begonias), etc.  So there might be the need for one constant, and maybe this has already been discussed on Mark’s pages or one of his links. 

In Steve’s novel, The Life of Geronimo Sandoval, I see the narrative linked by limited main characters, Ham’s search for his brother, and the grounding of place, particularly his southwest home.  The main character himself seems to emanate from his home space, and his travels and time spent away just circle back to base.  There’s the theme of water and borders, and of course, I’d almost consider the string theory a leit motif.  The patterns are all there.  The scattering that hypertext allows then, must be skillfully tied together–this is no shotgunning of possibilities, but a patterned whole.

I’m not sure if I’m discovering new things or floundering badly (Look ma, I can drive with my eyes closed!) but Steve Ersinghaus has been bringing up some great issues as he takes on Paths. 

It’s become obvious to me that in first preparing this narrative* I didn’t quite understand the way links can work though I understood how they do.  I’m fixing and rearranging and improving the connections I’ve made as I work with the actual program of Storyspace.  That’s to be expected; I knew at the time I wrote Paths that I was writing for hypertext possibilities (without, as I say, fully comprehending them) but had the necessity of book pages in traditional form to deal with, and that changed the plan somewhat.  Or rather, the method, since the plan is still intact.

Steve says:

"I don’t like the idea of providing freedom to the reader, even though exploration may matter. I like the idea of allowing the work to decide its possible internal modifications and adjustments. It’s a massive struggle."

Well I’m all for taking back control, but I understand what he is saying here.  The work as a whole is a cohesive collage; each image must stand on its own, yet relate to another:  Now that’s Great Aunt Minnie, she’s Gertie’s sister who’s right over there next to her brother Albasilver.  If the reader follows a diagonal pattern across the map and completely misses the wayward daughter Pearl, he’ll never know how the whole Clam family got started one moonlit night on a couple of beers and be completely confused at the photo of little Jimmy Clam in the lower left-hand corner.

So I would think that while I am trying to touch story points at certain levels that grant access to possibilities, I don’t want to allow total random wandering.  I do want to make sure that by following any one of the four paths, by the end of that path, the reader has a good idea of the basic premise of what happened, and what may be happening, as well as what could have happened.  Any of the stories should be revealing that much–though not completely by themselves, but with the help of the allowed sidetracks into one of the others and the vision it reveals.

I do wonder whether I am off on a "Look ma!" trip, or whether I should read and incorporate some of Mark’s theories into this piece.  I realize that you have to know and understand the rules before you break them–I’m a strong advocate of that in writing, but I’m also aware that I’m too easily swayed sometimes.  It will be interesting to see what Steve has to say about the structure once he’s further into it; I trust him to be honest and if he says I’ve led readers into and then left them lost in the woods, or put up fences while they weren’t looking, then I’ll know that the hypertext form does have some rules that need to be followed.  And I’d better learn them.

*I myself vacillate between calling Paths the singular "narrative" and the multiple "stories," because of its nature.  In the end, I think that it is a single story as there may be only one truth, and that is what the reader has decided it to be. 

Spent some time last night going through the links from one main path to another and I think I may have gotten overzealous in cutting them.

One of the reasons that I have taken advantage of the guard fields is the way the narrative is laid out in four main paths.  Once a link is made onto another path, if the reader should  follow that path through, he’d not only be dropped into a different environment (an entirely new space that both combines and defies simultaneous existence), but he may be dropped somewhere in the middle of a story without at least some clue of what’s going on.  I suppose I should allow this, but because the main characters are involved in each of the stories, I’m thinking it might be confusing until the gist of the narrative–choice being concurrent in time–be realized.

But I do want to allow as much traveling between stories as possible, so that’s something I’m going to be focusing on in the next few days.  I suspect that at this point I may also break down and read some of the valuable information at Eastgate’s Hypertext Now and Patterns, etc. that while it may be too late to consider for this project, may at the very least help me in making link decisions.

I should’ve known this, and even though this isn’t the greatest because of the size, here’s a Map View of one section of the Paths project in Storyspace (thanks to Steve for the info on how to save image):

Probably due to some heavy pressure and rolling his eyes as he reads, Steve Ersinghaus has been kind enough to take a look at the Paths project and has some nice words to say about it at his site. 

No, he wasnt’ paid, but we do try to help each other out when we can and I sincerely appreciate his willingness to put some time in amid his super busy schedule. 

What we’re going to have to do is put some thought behind understanding the nature of the beast, and focus on who a writer of hypertext plays to, what audience would be interested in the reading of hypertext if they knew about it, and what makes it easier to transition from volume of pages to CD and screen.

I’m not going to read any more of Hypertext Now yet, since I’m still putting down my own thoughts and feelings of experiencing Storyspace for the first time and don’t want to be influenced by what looks like a very thorough coverage from a creator’s viewpoint.  So I may be going about it all wrong, but it’s my own way to navigate, just as is the nature and purpose of hypertext anyway.

I’m finding myself very, very comfortable within the setting, the space of the program.  I would like to see it looking a bit more slick perhaps for presentation to the reader, but as a writer, it’s the comfortable worn spinaround seat and the golden oak desk and plunking away on the old Royal (did I ever mention that Susie Secretary here once slammed a carriage return so hard the typewriter flew off the desk?  I was secretary to the VP of Sales at the time).  While I’d mentioned a while ago that it didn’t seem as inviting as the MAC version, it certainly is welcoming and puts one at immediate ease.

The thing is, I’m almost feeling like I have found my niche.  Though I still tend to write a bit old-fashioned, I’ve updated from Baroque and lost most of the Poe influence.  In the right mood, I can get downright experimental but I can’t quite shake the underlying tone that is my voice as a writer.  Hypertext somehow suits my different personalities, accommodating all aspects and ranges of whim.  I also appreciate the freedom of flowing thought that doesn’t necessarily require tie-ins.  Up until now, only a few very close friends and my husband (okay, mom and dad did too) understand what I’m talking about when I present something either out of the blue or totally unrelated to a discussion.  The conversation, you see, was already at full throttle in the brain and was only granted oral rights when the proper moment came along.  This is a perfect framework for hypertext I would think, leaving readers with that what the hell? feeling.

So Storyspace and its hypertext advantages suit me perfectly.  The question may be whether I suit the hypertext environment.