Hypercompendia

Something’s still not right with The Hanging though it has been copied and renamed (to preserve the original after all that work!) to be reorganized into a thought of not the characters as much as the house that is the protagonist in the story.  Unfortunately, I still need to check Mark’s Eastgate site to insure that this idea has not already been produced in hypertext form.  I know, I know; a fresh approach would be just fine and I do see that, but I’m the type that doesn’t comprehend why any writer would really develop story based on another writer’s world (take heart, J.K.!) and look upon Originality as God (maybe influenced by the Garden and the whole Catholic original sin thing). 

At any rate, the concept still comes back to me–now that I’m performing hypertext maneuvers–about Alzheimers and its only benefit, that of suiting perfectly the Storyspace form.  Paths was like that, needing hypertext to tell it.  The idea of a single mind that lives in different times outside of reality intrigues me.  I’ve had the experience with my mother and it’s as fascinating as it is heartbreaking an affliction.  This whole idea goes well with my own frame of mind right now in exploring other genre.  For there is no dark blacker than the human mind caught up in mental illness.

What had temporarily stopped me (this time!) was a fellow student’s indication that she was planning a workshop story on Alzheimers and her experience with her grandmother’s unfortunate battle with the disease.  The very idea that someone else came up with the idea was like a barrier to me and it’s taken a few months to talk myself into believing that I wasn’t stealing the idea even though I hadn’t mentioned it before.  So there you go; Catholicism raises once again its demanding head.

So even as this post comes off as just one more "I’m gonna…" for every hypertext I’ve started there are at least ten straightlaced (ha!) stories sleeping on the hard drive of one or the other of five machines.  Bear with me; one is going to fly!

First love dies hard; comes back in spirit.  Edgar laughs in glee:

The story that wouldn’t make itself known beyond the details of the characters and a death has taken a turn that’s not exactly sci fi but will be leaning towards magical realism bordering on fantasy.  I had an itch to try my hand at a completely new genre but just don’t get the urge to create mythical creatures or alien anime.  The thrust that The Hanging lacked for me–and this, quite far into the narrative–may be the very opening for a more mystical and philosophical romp through a metaphor of mankind.

Here’s a new beginning:

And here’s the building blocks that need to be taken apart and reassembled into a different pattern of ideas, many of which will be discarded in the new schematic as it develops itself:

There is a tightrope that lays itself out in the story and there is a new form of structure that wants to be fragile steel.

Even as I wrap up a creative writing course with one new hypertext and two half-decent unhypertexted stories under my belt, I return again to this Storyspace work I’d started on a couple months ago and somehow drifted far away from.

During the Tunxis Writers Festival yesterday I hooked up to the internet and played a bit and then found myself checking out the Storyspace work I have here on the laptop.  I read The Hanging as if I’d never seen it before–as if I hadn’t been the one who wrote it.  There’s a story here I like.  Though the characters never grabbed me completely as did Yolanda in A Bottle of Beer, I think I have found some feeling for them, something behind their sullen unwillingness to divulge their story quite as easily as did Yolanda.  But then, Yolanda only had an hour or so to live.

Going back to this, the latest of the Storyspace projects, I see something very interesting.  It was obviously written in a few moments of creative fluidity that was open to the medium, using it in its purpose of choice.

Off the opening text box, I have two boxes.  One appears to follow a flight of fancy, the other provides a sense of realism.  Each of those branch off into three spaces.  The more surreal seems to ask the traveler–the natural term it seems for this area of story–to develop a psychological insight into life beyond what is known. 

The best part of all this is that since I’ve been away from the story, and have written others in between, it is a surprise to me and I am open completely to all the possibilities it appears to offer.

Added a few more writing spaces to the latest Storyspace work, likely because I’m in a let it all hang out mood after last night’s writing class.  But then I’m painfully aware that Paths has never received the editing that I did with A Bottle of Beer and is an embarrassment hanging over my head.   But if I step back into Anne’s world, if I’m ready to sever the cord with Yolanda, will I be able to take on the troubles of this new character that has all the personality of a newborn and isn’t anywhere near as cute?

I’ve found that the editing process is intense in its demand of time and emotional commitment.  The investment is well worth it, that’s been proven to me, but is it possible to be more than two people at once?

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.

Sometimes you just go with the flow.  After stalling on four different pieces started in Storyspace including one that is quite developed in content if not settled into story, this new work has appeared simply when I went to check out the color capabilities of the program.

This happened a couple weeks ago with Hypertextopia and ended up in a complete story, A Bottle of Beer. Just diddlin’ around with the format, seeing what the program does by filling in boxes with whatever came off the top of my head and something begins to form all by itself–very different than when I sit down to write something off a preconceived notion of story.

Don’t know if this is really going to go the length, if it’ll even develop an arc of sorts (or many, seeings that this is Storyspace), but I’ll give it some attention over the next couple of days.

No secret really, since it’s right there in the menu preferences and Eastgate’s Storyspace Manual is one of the best how-to’s I have ever read in my life, but yes, I’ve just discovered something about Storyspace as well as myself.

I’m a sucker for media glitz.  I bought the Mac because I should’ve bought the super screen for the Dell and didn’t.  I love the graphics on computers.  I love the Mac for Storyspace because it just looks too cool for words.  And now, this:

And you can’t see it because I can’t get an image of it but the text links are in bright red and blue.  Neat, eh?  Oddly enough, it’s suited to the newest piece because I just started writing and the black background just produced an apocalyptic tone.  Wonder what the red, white, and blue text foreshadows?

It’s likely an obvious happening, but it seems that your latest work is always your best.  I feel that A Bottle of Beer written in Hypertextopia is the best story, the best written, the best evidence of all that I’ve learned about writing and experienced in life placed into a fictional narrative that I’ve ever presented.  But then again, Gazpacho was the best text and Paths was the best after that, written into Storyspace.

But there is writing mode and there is author mode and the difference between them is the discipline that goes into the production.  Every day I write, and write a lot.  There is no going over, rereading, rewriting, no effort made to extract only the best and polish to gleaming what’s written.  There’s a basic laziness about the writing that carries the burden of ‘fat’ that I don’t find it necessary to trim off for the purpose the meat serves as a meal.  Laziness is the likely reason, though again, for what the writing is intended, there’s little impetus to spend time and effort on the process of fine-tuning a post, an e-mail, etc. 

I started writing A Bottle of Beer on February 26th and rewrote it through yesterday, March 13th.  That’s over two weeks on a single story, and hundreds of hours–since when I’m working on something I usually work to the exclusion of all else unless hunger pangs and a sadly neglected spouse demand that I take a break.  When I see what editing can accomplish however, when in the groove of waving the sword or sweeping away the dust from the dig, it’s a strong reminder that editing is likely the most important part of writing.  At least until a writer can achieve the instinct to write well sooner and the blade is embedded in the first strikes of the story.

So Paths will likely undergo some slash therapy.  It is a story that I do feel is worth the intense editorial scrutiny to make it all it can be.  That way, even if it goes nowhere beyond my hard drive, when it is discovered sitting there some day as my nieces and nephews go through my belongings, they may stop and read it rather than simply delete it forever. 

I need leave behind things that would make me feel proud and bury the garbage before it’s discovered.