Hypercompendia

There are ideas for story that fall into a category of telling best suited by a particular format, whether it be linear or varied, single or multiple pov, all encompassing of time or an action sequence of an hour.  A writer has the choice of what best serves the piece–as long as 1) he recognizes what pattern is developing and 2) he knows what mediums are available and how they work.

One needs to know the size of the arena, the height of the wall, the age of the lion before one can decide strategy.

Sometimes things just work.  Sometimes they don’t.  I don’t approach a medium with a story in mind; I write an opening, and when I get an idea of where it’s going, I may pull it and transfer it to another vehicle, the jet of Storyspace if it’s going global.  The train ride of Hypertextopia with its window shots of the countryside, the main highway for the linear story, the slow boat to China of paper and pen.

Sometimes a poem turns into a story, a story is concised down to a poem. 

Every  story has a place, every tale is looking for its teller,

Unbelievable:

husband – gender-specific expression.  A gender-neutral word like ‘spouse’ may be appropriate.

Tell me, do you really believe we’re smarter than we were?

I use iPages right now in the Mac for my writing and just got the time to try their "Proofread" feature and it’s even more ridiculous than WinWord’s:

whores – Sexist expression.  This word may offend some readers because it is pejorative and can be applied only to women.

Give me an effin’ break. Small-breasted, large-breasted, wombed wonder–all the best terms down the politically correct tubes, er, shoot.  At least ‘endowed’ may be still used since it’s gender-neutral. As far as I’m concerned, vive la difference!

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.

Learned much from a workshop on this last night (more on that later here or at CW) but one thing that came of it that I had forgotten was that in editing, sometimes something vital is lost.  Overly ambitious and anxious to please, I slashed and mashed with glee.  In the hypertext format there is much already left out as it is easy to leave the transitioning up to the difference in textboxes once a pattern has been established. 

In cutting out unnecessary words, sentences, actions, etc., I ended up with a lexia that brought in a new character and waited a sentence before it was made clear who she was.  However, in also leaving out the name of "Herve" because that sentence had been eliminated and the next reference to him was simply "he," –which became the starting point for him–it became unclear who we were talking about. 

Another thing I realized as over 20% of the story fell into the black hole of the cosmos, was I ended up with a lot of "she" sentences that had likely been filled in with name or with fluff to separate the "shes" so they weren’t all clustered together and obvious.  That’s a bit harder to fix, usually necessitating deeper cutting and making choices between which things "she" did as to what would stay, what would be deleted.

Still more to do on this to get it into a "more orderly" and "polished" form as was suggested.

After spending a couple of days honing language on A Bottle of Beer, I went onto the site as a reader–not logging in, and therefore, presented with a different manipulation of story.  And then, as I do with all stories I write, I read it out loud.

Wow.  It’s like reading a good night story to a child.  The small portions of text that are restricted by the boxes force a pause while the mind then tells the reader to click to go further–either on a portion of highlighted text or the bottom arrows that lead to the next ‘page.’   But the reading pattern does sound like the bedtime reading, focusing on just that block of text at a time, the pause at the end to insure that all has been read before moving on to the next. 

Interesting.

Sometimes all you need is a pat on the head and a kick in the butt to do what you should know by now but forget and get lost in the journey. Feeling a hundred percent better in the rewriting, chopping out, cleaning to the most showing of words that presents a picture story of this piece. 

A Bottle of Beer is taking a better shape in its trimming down of excess fat and focus on the high cheekbones, the wide-boned pelvis more perfect for birthing a child.

Discovered Chris’ site, Gimcrack’d, via if:book’s post on hypertext and Chris’ comments here.  Finally got a chance to hang out a bit there and need to spend more time, but he appears to have another form of hypertext narrative going on that looks interesting.  Here’s what he says by way of introduction:

Preface

Gimcrack’d is an ongoing anthology of stories that react to your touch — you might call them hypertext. Some let you go exploring inside them, revealing themselves bit by bit. Some let you change the story as it’s told to you. There are also more unusual ways they can react to your presence — but you’ll have to see for yourself.

There are a few guideposts as you read:

    * A ∴ signals a stopping-point in a story. There might be many of these, just one, or even none. (That symbol, by the way, should appear as three dots arranged in a triangle — your Web browser needs to support Unicode to see it properly.)

    * Links set off by » change the course of the story permanently. If you’d like to revisit a choice you made earlier, you may do so by clicking the rewind to here link in the upper-right corner of a passage.

The three most recent stories are bolded in the table of contents above. You can also keep up with recent changes to this site with this page’s RSS feed, or through our blog.

I for one certainly appreciate all the interest by writers in the hypertext environment.  It’s not just a method that people are encouraging, but they are looking to use the new technology available to find a better way of saying what they want to say. 

I’ve been following Charles Deemer’s work on producing a piece for Hypertext 08 that he will present in film form, on Hyperdrama. 

Must link to this intro that he has put together since–it’s very well done and interesting to students of new media in all forms. Intro to Hyperdrama