Hypercompendia

How fun!

Added an afterthought, sort of a no, this could’ve happened or not too, and used one of Storyspace’s Special Links tools, the random selector.

Coded in the guard field as ?(n), I chose between two different paths by typing in ?(2), meaning that every other time the reader goes by one will be chosen, and the other will be bypassed.  In effect, not visited unless the reader chooses to pass by that whole loop again.

Gives me that Nyah-nyah, I know somethin’ you don’t know sense of power.

Since last week, I’ve been rereading these stories and editing, revising language use and voice. 

And adding.  Just about 200 Writing Spaces now, and I think I may just have poked my nose into their lives and asked all I wanted and gotten all I wanted to know.

Funny thing with this process in Storyspace, in contrast to the static text I’m so familiar with, is that I’m not getting as easily tired of the story because it’s all been changing so much.  The characters are growing by the changes so they’re becoming fuller and more interesting I think.  Sometimes I just follow the main line, avoiding the text links, just to see if the stories themselves hold up to what they’ve become, if they can honestly support the intricacy of the looping. 

So sometimes I add links to the main line as well.

It’s hard to decide, I think, how to physically structure the narrative of story in Storyspace.  I’m anxious to try building one up from ground zero, but meanwhile, working with what I have it seemed to naturally fall into place.  I followed characters and their perspectives. 

The story does have an obvious theme, and it is clearly character-driven.  But in adding and revising, I’m finding two elements possibly missing.

One is grounding, or setting.  It’s not just a matter of place, thus description, because setting is vital to the theme of choice and movement.  Therefore, I’m giving that a bit more importance, an easy thing to do in the Storyspace format by "adding a path in a pause."  In fact, any spots I find myself pausing in dare clearer definition by path.

The other is the standard of a character wanting something, seeing how far he’ll go to get it, and whether or not he achieves his goal, in what way does it change him. 

These stories are almost an after-the-fact issue on that.  Decisions have been made, the drama is over, and the aftereffects are the story now.  The pressure points are the side trails revealed a bit at a time here and there, that while officially backstory, are also not fact as they are based on each character’s perspective.  They also may or may not have happened that way.

Interesting problems to overcome.  Storyspace appears an invaluable tool in not only pointing out the troubling spots, but in offering the best way to remedy them.

173 Writing Spaces, 245 Links. 

This experience of working with Storyspace, writing into it and reading it to bring out more with each reading and then writing in more, is something valuable I’m learning about writing in general.  I’m hoping that I’ll never revise as before, but look for what might be missing, or for clues that beg to be found.

Up to 157 writing spaces and just keep getting these impulses to pick up and run.  Hither and yon. Climbing fences or crawling under them.  Peeking into windows. 

Having fun in rambling with the stamp of approval that the software gives, yet I know that its intent is still to strategize and organize and leave threads of sense to follow.  Somehow, they do though.  I think that when one is immersed within a narrative it would be hard to obliviously throw in stuff that doesn’t fit the tone and story.  It’s hard enough sometimes to drag myself out of the story to realize that someone is asking me a question.  Another millisecond to recognize him as my husband.

Being more aware also of the poetics of what is being put inside each Writing Space.  Each one must be interesting in itself.  Almost a stanza of a poem. 

How the years race once the mysteries of life transition to the common and known.  Taste is tasted only once, yet the memory would have us believe it better. 

Impossible.  The most evil of all masqueraders is memory.

Using Writing Spaces to discover things.  Make a bunch of blank ones.  See what needs to be questioned, answered.  And that’s how I’m uncovering about how this character thinks.

In rewriting the second story, I can so much more easily see that it was indeed the "weak link" in the chain. 

Told in first person of a character who has such an impact on the entire piece, it needed to be delved into deeper.  Instead, it fell flat.  Sort of an afterthought, and it was and it shows.  But the guy needs to have a say, a rebuttal perhaps it may be called, to all the questions raised about him by the other characters.

I’m not sure that this wouldn’t have occured to me in linear format, but what makes it so much easier in Storyspace as a reading form is that drop-ins, thoughts out of the blue or minimally related, the niggling little questions sparked by a phrase, are not only allowable, but encouraged.

It is indeed, the process of building a story.  Architecture of narrative using language and presentation.

When I woke up this morning I found myself once again anxious to get back into the program.  Stumbling down the hall towards the kitchen to make my husband’s lunch (yes, we’re that frugal; think of the $5/day saved, not to mention a sandwich the way he likes it and fruit, and turning one stupid light off to save $25 a year doesn’t measure up), uh, where was I…..

…oh yes, I hang a left into the living room and click on the laptop.  I can do this by feel so my eyes don’t necessarily need to be open.  This way, once I’ve kissed my husband out the door I can sit down and start playing immediately.

One thing I particularly like about the Storyspace program is the additional need to manipulate the text boxes apart from just working with typing words strung into a story.  Even the visual, the mapview (or chart or outline; tree, to me, is dopey, at least for this project), becomes a part of the writing process that once you get used to it, tells a story in itself as to the complication and depth of the narrative.  An easier way of putting it:  How exciting is it to wave even a hardcopy bunch of pages around versus colored plot points all laid out and connected.

Think the sight of a half-inch of text pages is fulfilling?  Try this: drop them on the floor from a height of six feet (all right, I’m really reaching here).  Pick them back up at random and read.  Then try to make sense of it.

Back to the main point here, and that is that where I used to play Freecell or some such idiot game as think time or not-think-at-all time, the Storyspace environment fulfills that need to tinker, to be actively doing something creative even when the creativity does not filter into language use and storytelling.   I noticed this same level of excitement–above story–in putting together a poem in Movie Maker.  Coordinating visuals, audio, and story wasn’t just a bunch of creative ideas, but required the manipulation of technical software direction in order to make the whole thing work.  Storyspace does this for me.  It’s like playing a game while you write.

So now I don’t have to go to Freecell or Solitaire to be productive (using that loosely here) while my mind is taken with the thought process of story prior to it becoming a tangible typed text.

Rolling back around to the creative edge of the project, after doing a lot of work on the fiddling with presentation via the typeface and box sizes–a pull down the edit ruler, change, save, put up the edit ruler, save again for each writing space.  Realized that saving immediately after a change, such as moving the box or changing its size, is the best bet rather than moving on to the next and saving a few at a time when a major change is being made. 

On the writing end, there are still plenty of things I’m curious about in each of the stories–after doubling them in word count (or at least write spaces)–but first there’s a major overhaul begging to be done on one of them. One path is a rather sad reflection brought up by memories and possibilities.  Another is rather whimsical on the surface yet holds the key to learning the consequences of choice.  The last story is perhaps a less romantic, more realistic acceptance of where we lead ourselves.  But one story appears shallow.  The character himself, with each addition of discovery, only gets worse.

I either try to expose the better side of this character if it exists, or I’m going to redeem him.  My tactic is to ask some things of him and see how he chooses to handle them.

Not as creative this morning so I attended to the technical side of the project. 

Though I was too antsy to have set it up before, I am changing the font size to 14 from the teeny weeny 12 that is the program’s default. (12 in our world is not the same as 12 in the world of Storyspace.)  I’m not changing the typeface though I would like to, but this at least makes it that much easier for me to work with.

Overall, the Storyspace environment is very easy to work with and to learn.  Though I haven’t touched into all of its power, it already is very comfortable (esp. now with the 14 pt) and much of the manipulation has become second nature in a very short time.  Constant, to the exclusion of all else, but what has it been–a couple of weeks?

By the way, for those who do look at manuals–and even I did when I ran into the unknown or my guesses weren’t working–the Adobe PDF format Storyspace manual is extremely well laid out and clearly describes the action to be taken to do whatever.  Breezing through it prior to playing within the program, it would look rather complicated, but once one is familiar with working the software, it’s all crystal-clear.