Hypercompendia

I seem to be drawn–if ever so gently–to the old woman here; a minor character I thought.  She’s desolate, her world a bubble around her to float through the real world she no longer knows.  But bubbles are transparent, and sometimes she’ll see something that will make her reach out…and draw back in.  Because a bubble is also a wall.

Haven’t been inspired to work on this piece for a while, yet in the middle of nailing a corner together in the frameshop, I got this:  She ran her hand along the edge of summer…  Which with a bit of coaxing became this:

She ran her hand along the edge of summer, touching the overhead branches that drooped with the weight of the sun. A shiver shook her bones, sent them to sing like a tuning fork plucked by the long reach of September.  Cold wind remembered nibbled away at her skin.  She paused to button the front of her sweater, her fingers melting in the mink coat her mind wore.

I need to read McCarthy, Gay, poetry.  I’m wandering too far from the fountain with the narratives I’m currently reading.  I need to read more hypertext as well.  We are what we eat; what our mind chews on and swallows, what makes us smack our lips with delight.

Once you’ve written in hypertext, particularly using Storyspace, your thinking on links is forever affected by the process.

About an hour ago I linked to one of my own posts on a post I was entering into Spinning. What I wanted to do–and attempted without thinking twice–was to link to a particular phrase within the referenced post.

I was expecting a thread!

One step forward, three steps back. No doubt about it, for me (and likely only me) the hypertext format of Storyspace forces me to reread and rewrite the writing spaces individually each time I go in to work on a project.  God only knows what the original one was worded as but this is likely not to survive too long either:

John Kellerman’s nights wrapped around him, tucked in by alley walls that held the day’s warmth in a fragile grasp within an hour’s touch of the new sun rising. The faint click of a traffic light, an occasional hailing of a lonesome cab the lullaby to which he slept.

It seems I just can’t bounce ahead blithely spewing story; a spit in every box.  I read and fix and read and fix each box it takes me to get to the end where something new is supposed to happen.  Sometimes I’m so worn out I never reach that point.  But this: I think I’ve left a better trail.

It’s no new wisdom that we grow from what we experience, from the toddler’s first tumble to the failures and successes of adulthood man learns something from every episode of living.  We are what we have been and what has happened to change us along the way.

When we write story, we have a character who comes to us full grown. We throw a few things out there for him and watch to see if he will avoid, stumble over, and face them head-on. We don’t always understand the reactions we get from him, and here’s where backstory comes in handy.  Not to merely set up a situation by event, but by the character’s reaction to that event to more importantly round him out to comprehend him.

That’s what’s happening for me now in my current wip, and likely why it’s taking me so long; each character is being revealed slowly as they walk to the heartbeat of the park; the scenario and setting where they will meet in some manner for just a fraction of a moment but one that changes them each in certain ways forever.

Hypertext is the perfect medium for such strong character development.  We get an idea of who someone is by what they’re doing, and when we ask why? we take that trail and discover an answer.  In hypertext, we can mark that trail for others who are curious enough to follow.   Is it vital information?  Maybe not–to the plot of story anyway.  But to the understanding and enjoyment of the story?  Yes.

…the story grows.  A mapview and a glimpse into a man’s fading world:

Here I was, all nicely balanced map-wise and then a stroke of thought that something I had written in another blog was perfect for and needed as a grounding in this hypertext.  So copy and paste I did, and then went to disconnect and reconnect the links and lo and behold! – It screws the whole thing up!

So delicately I save and move away.  I now have two spaces that both want to be the first and yet only one, the second, can properly branch out to story. 

Major revision #12 to work on today.

Working now on the boy:

He shifted the skateboard in a flash of yellow into a casual trophy held under his arm, his feet slap-slapping the sidewalk in a confident rhythm.  He felt his mother in the upstairs window, curtains held back at a secretive slit.  With the skill and need of a nine year-old, he slipped through.

Maybe it is just my nature, that of seeking balance and form; maybe it is the story itself, but it grows as a web, or a snowflake, reaching outward in a pattern that is shaping itself into equality for each of its characters.

Two have met–though for a second only; the flash of a nod and a smile.  What is the tone of their relationship, what is the basis beyond the park and routine?

It is nearly painful, this writing, this story.  It is setting its own pace and like the characters with their lives stored away in compartments of their mind, the shelves are filling up even as the boxes are taken down and opened, sifted through and sealed and returned.

Man, still going through the same twelve spaces as things clarify: