 |
| 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.
