My First Hyper-text

The moors. (Veleta, Wiki.)

by Louis Shalako

A hypertext is a story with multiple endings or multiple story lines. It can also be a portal, one that takes the reader off on some long and involved journey. Hopefully it leads them somewhere new.

It seems to have done so for the author.

In its most complex form it can look like a tree, with all sorts of stand-alone spinoffs branching out in all directions.

The multiple ending version, in fiction, involves alternate storylines breaking off at a given point. Readers reach a certain point in the text and then they have a choice as to which alternative story line they wish to follow.

They don’t even have to read the book the same way twice—the next time they read it they might decide to see how another version of the book turned out. If there are three endings, there is three times the fun in reading it. If the book is a good one, with all sorts of subtexts and little curlicues of smoke going off in all directions, in all three versions, each of which is a unique story, if there are lots of thing implied but left unsaid, it might be beastly interesting as an overall art form. Your main characters change over the story—in three fascinating and different ways.

I’ve wanted to experiment with that for some time, ever since I first heard of it and understood what it was.

I’ve even wondered if I should put factual links in a mystery novel. I first thought of that while doing the research for Redemption: an Inspector Gilles Maintenon mystery. If readers could read about Gilles walking across the moors on his summer holiday, and then click on a link that takes them to good pictures and informative articles about the moors, it might help the story to come alive. It would help the reader to visualize the story. The whole thing is just denser in terms of reading material.

It might make the story a richer experience for the reader. Video and music links could be incorporated, and whenever the reader tired of that, they simply return to the story and carry on.

I haven’t brought myself to doing that yet, but writing even the simplest blog post with links out to any supporting material basically covers the whole process in a nutshell.

If you want a text with three endings, you simply write it. The beginning is common, and at the midpoint, there would be bookmarks to another piece of text inserted in the ebook after the ending of version one. 

That process is very simple.

All they have to do is click, and there they go. Next chapter, only it is version two.

There might be two links: all the reader has to do is to keep reading for version one, and there are version two and version three with their alternate endings.

It takes long enough to write a book, so I really haven’t gone after that idea.

However, non-fiction ebooks are a natural for some kind of conscious hyper-writing.

Once I have enough material, of news, views, opinions, commentary, a series of essays or whatever, I will definitely put that plan into operation.

I think that really does qualify as hypertext because it expands the story, non-fiction as it is, and over the course of time our hypothetical story ‘ending’ changes. That’s because an encyclopedic entity like Wikipedia, or any other repository of knowledge, updates and improves its database, so in that sense the story is ever-changing. That’s valid in the context of the modern world, where the pace of progress is so fast that some of what we write is out of date before it is even published.

It is also possible to put a brief note at the end of the book, linked to a website’s contact form, and readers would be able to report a broken link, offer opinions of their own, or interact to some degree with the author.

What’s really interesting is that readers can follow up a link, add their comments to the site or story, and advance the story on their own initiative, outside of the actual book. The book is a link or portal to offshoots beyond the control of the author. If someone has special knowledge or a unique perspective, then the work will go beyond the writer’s original vision and continue evolving over time. If you don’t agree with Wiki, you can sign up to edit the original material, give citations, and just advance the sum of human knowledge in general!

In a hyper-text, the links take the place of footnotes. In a hard copy book, the reader would have to option to search online or go to a physical library or bookstore in order to check out the references and source materials. Assuming the author ever decided to produce a non-fiction hardcover or paperback book, the hyper-links would become footnotes and reference notes in the back of the book.

It seems like a reasonable experiment, and it also involves new skills. Now the author must think in those hyper-textual terms: good links, good writing, good pictures, and from the perspective of the artist, it has to be coherent. It can’t be all ragged in places because you couldn’t find a good link.

It is a matter of the thing being well-conceived from start to finish, and that holds true whether it’s fiction or non-fiction.

Think of what all of this does to a writer’s mind.

It’s not exactly going to hurt my brain, is it, ladies and gentlemen?

Hell, it might even help.

END

Author's Note: Writing a hyper-text requires hyper-thinking, hyper-editing, and a kind of hyper-conception of the whole project from top to bottom. It is layered thinking rather than strictly linear.