Hypercompendia

What’s so great about going through six months’ worth of postings on a particular topic is that it is much like getting together with a pal and reliving some great times you’ve spent together.

In reading through on my work with Storyspace and Hypertextopia that produced some of my best writing to-date, I’m enjoying the adventure of it all but validating my opinion that the hypertext format is something that–like the structure of poetry–has had a distinct influence on my writing style.

In returning to linear narrative for a creative writing course, I find that phrases come more easily, stories invent themselves, characters do whatever the hell they want to do and I can’t stop them because…because the paths of hypertext allowed them their reasoning behind their motives.  The visual text box imposes a limit of sorts on how much should be told.  Yes, those boxes stretch to any length and width, but the environment seeks some form of organization and even the simple matter of keeping the boxes similar in size makes a point.  For example, a well-filled writing space usually indicates an action or vital informational segment of story.  A few sentences–or just a single one–makes not only a dramatic point that lets the sentence stand out by itself, the visual of it floating alone like an old bullfrog on a lily pad gives it its deep bellowing impact.

We often don’t know how we progress as writers; it is a gradual thing that someone else may comment upon that makes us look back and discover the footprints in the trail.  Well, as I look back, I see some mother tracks in the dirt just behind me.

I guess there’s no reason to keep it a secret–I’ll be presenting at a workshop on June 19th in Pittsburgh, PA at the Hypertext 08 conference.  That’s what all this “presentation” talk is about.  That’s my opening slide above.

What I’m doing now to get started is putting together an outline that I should be able to easily follow to show the path of a writer’s first exploration of hypertext as a creative writing medium.  I’m filtering through the posts here since they are sort of a blow-by-blow daily report of the journey.

I’m learning Mac Keynote as the slide program–since if there’s something else for an audience to look at besides me, I won’t be as nervous.  It will also keep me on course since I tend to ramble off in other directions–the typical hypertext mind, now given status raised from scatterbrained to the methodical mapping of the hypertext way of thinking.

I’m loving working with Keynote, and I’m loving the creative side of presenting a presentation.  What I am also finding is that the images I’m using of my work in Storyspace show colorful maps that fairly light up the slide screen since part of my strategy in narrative structure was to separate the perspectives/characters/outcomes by color coding.  That way–though I didn’t–I could have set the text boxes up in patterns following the linking of the threads and not lose track of the individual threads themselves.

So in and among the typical bulleted text slides that are more for my own notes than for audience reading, there will be some lovely full color shots of hypertext maps and spaces.  I’m psyched!

For a long time I’ve felt that hypertext mimics the natural thinking process of the brain.  Here’s an example, hot from just a couple minutes of break time outside in the back yard:

Layers of puffy white clouds, traveling at different speeds across the bold blue sky.

–> Start humming Judy Collins’ "I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now, from up and down, and still somehow…"

–>Airplanes bring you above clouds, allowing you to look down; life keeps you down and looking  up

–>New tune: "Well I’m leaving, on a jet plane, don’t know when I’ll be back again…"

–>Image recall:  Miami, Florida coastline out the window

–>Intrusion:  I’m afraid of heights, can’t get above my own height on a ladder.  Why no fear of flying? (Except, of course, for how planes are put together these days.)

–>Possible answer:  Because if I fall in a plane, it’s just to the floor.  Or, if the plane falls from the sky, I’m not alone.

–>Conclusion:  I only have a fear of falling alone.

There now, see how it works?

This is a download point for a story I’ve written using the Storyspace hypertext software and may be read by doing the following:

Download and unzip both the .ssp file which is the piece, and the Storyspace Reader.app file which allows you to view the story.  In the case of Windows, there will be an additional small .sni file that includes settings.  Once downloaded, open the Storyspace Reader and maneuver to the file called Paths.ssp to open the project.

For Mac:   Paths  (Draft 3)

For Windows:  Paths  (Draft 2)
 

If you have any problems–or critique, for that matter–please let me know!
 

Enjoy!

Really good post at Adventures in Interactive Fiction regarding the creative challenge of writing for Interactive Fiction.   I can well imagine that it poses its own problems (hope to find out real soon!) and some of those are brought up specifically by the medium, one being the need to be concise and precise since the text area is usually fairly small.  Not small by restriction, but more by plan.

Anyway, this sounds like another writer’s journey that is well worth the read.

(Link thanks to Planet IF)

A framing customer comes from New Haven and brings me a gift, a book
of poetry.  She’s done this before.  She is a creative writing teacher
at Yale and knows my own passions.

I ramble on about Calvino.  I rant on hypertext.  I make her take the link to A Bottle of Beer
and make her promise to read it.  I hint with no subtlety that
hypertext belongs in her curriculum. I cannot help the fire that seems
to singe most of my audience and yet I see a hopeful spark ignite her
eye. She understands the chain of memory mimicked by the human mind.

So here I am, right? I’m going through the Hypercompendia postings to grab some of the magic experienced in writing my first story into Storyspace, started back in November of ’07.  So I’m going along, filtering through scanning-type reading and copying & pasting those passages that seem vital to the feeling and the writing process as it changes.

I’ve got 20 pages so far of single-spaced entries.  I’m halfway through November.

Now I know that the purpose of this is just to jog my memory of the enjoyment of it all, but some of these postings are just so great because in sequence, they show the jubilation as clearly as the frustration of the writer. Then you throw in the change she is undergoing with the learning process of the hypertext environment, and well, you’ve got yourself a nice fat book here.

Good Grief!  Did I say book?

Thing is, either I get busy and brutal with the blade and leave the key points of the issue, or someone’s going to have to bring a hook with him to get me off the podium.   

Maybe I just won’t leave time for questions. Besides, all the audience will really want to know is why I hate small children…

I’d have to say I crawled sideways, crablike into software, though I went kicking and screaming into technology itself. I broke down and got a used PC in 1996, and have since built and rebuilt about ten times.  I’m now up to five computers: 3 PCs, a Dell Latitude laptop and a Mac laptop. I have a floor to ceiling shelf unit loaded with computer guts.  I actually still have an 8 MB memory stick hanging around, along with a couple extra monitors, hard drives I swear have vital information on them, four or five cases in various stages of missing parts, a thousand computer screws, and miles of different cables.  I really should do something about getting rid of it all.

But the point here is that I am one of those who learn as I go.  I really don’t believe you could take a computer course to learn certain programs any better than teaching it to yourself.  There just is so much to learn about any program that you’ll forget the details of how to do something long before you need to do it.  I tend to jump in, keep it simple and then start playing around and exploring buttons and menus as I go.  Or better, when I want or need to do something, find out how to do it.  I’ve even found my way around a program in a typing test once and came out fine.

So I’m putting together a presentation and since I like working on the Mac, am using Keynote for the project.  Problem is, I don’t know how to use Keynote.  But it’s similar enough to Powerpoint to have allowed me to get started, and with a few slides–both image and text–under my belt, I can worry about changing things and fixing them later.  But I’m learning a new program because I need it, and I’m sure it’ll do all that I require of it.  Just wish that Flash had been that easy.

Google search, clear and plaintive:  what is hypertext.  It lands them here, where if they spend some time and look through the posts and links, they can find some sort of answer.  And yet, there is an obvious need for a center of operations, much as we have started to establish in a wiki form recently and a place that leads to all the resources available so that the information is disseminated in all its aspects.

This post then is an attempt to lead those who are plopped down by the Great Goggle God into my world and need to settle into it deeper.  For starters:

Storyspace

Serious Hypertext

Hypertext Fiction

Hypertextopia

Mark Bernstein

Steve Ersinghaus

Charles Deemer

Tinderbox

ELO

Nick Montfort

Gimcrack’d

Literatronic

Hypertext Now

I’ll amend and add to this post if there are more that should be
here–and there are–as even though the sidebar holds the links, Google
Ploppers need to be directed to this post in particular I think, thus,
the title.  I know that when I land on a weblog in a search and the
first few posts are not directly relevant to my query, I leave
uninformed.

I’ve been working on a presentation for a workshop at Hypertext 08 (that is, if they let me in with my credentials and lack thereof) and have decided on Keynote for a visual portion that can probably implement the Storyspace and Hypertextopia pieces as well as the old .doc formatting that I’ve exported into .pdf.

Need to focus on a small portion of the ideas that have come up since I started writing into hypertext and that’s been the hardest part: to lose a lot of the Ahah! and Omigod! excitement that is not directly relevant to the point of how a writer changes style and thinking by working into the hypertext environment.

Of course, it’s all a matter of editing, editing and more editing to cut out the sidetracks.  Oh…that’s in direct contrast to the hypertext way, no?  LOL, a linear presentation to describe hypertext!  But then an interesting thought intervenes: by allowing a Q&A portion of time, the questions that one would answer spontaneously in hypertext format, can produce a more interesting mapping of the presentation at its end.