About the time the earth cooled, I learned to build websites by taking an online class called Hypertext Fiction and Poetry. I never became much of a web designer, and then I fell in love with fiction writing. But I never forgot what fun it was to write fiction in hypertext.
Carol — looking for the next story
The way hypertext worked, I’d scatter internal links to other places in the story. Readers could click on a link without reading the rest of the current page. They might never come back to the page they left, or they might click on a link that did bring them back, returning to 1906 from a time in the character’s life in 1910.
Hypertext fiction didn’t only abandon the strict linear structure we’ve had in storytelling since our ancestors stood up in caves by firelight and dramatized how Og defeated the mastodon. It also meant that the listener became a partner, sort of, in the story. By clicking one of two or three links on any given page, one reader assured himself of a far different story experience than another reader had. A far different experience than the author intended, perhaps.
That meant that the author gave up control of the story. I couldn’t control which links the reader clicked on first. But it sure was fun to plan the links.
I could develop routes for the paths a reader might take through the story, and assure each reader got a coherent story no matter which links were chosen.
Or I could just put in random links and let the reader fly.
Except for some avant garde writers, hypertext is pretty much gone from fiction and poetry now as technology has swept it out to sea and replaced it with enhanced e-books and transmedia.
Already I can see the uses of blending music, video, and other forms to break up the linear storyline — but only if the story could benefit.
Suppose a soldier plodding along a dirt road in enemy territory, begins to hear echoes of a favorite song from childhood? The audio can be embedded in the text and the reader might hear it as he reads on about the character’s sore feet, the throbbing wound in his scalp. The advantage fiction has over film is that we fiction writers can develop the character’s inner life in a way film cannot. We and poets can get inside the characters’ minds and hearts, reveal the truth that another medium can’t do.
Or suppose a newly bereaved character sees a butterfly and immediately recalls how the lost loved one collected everything with a butterfly motif? Bits of video could bring that to the reader’s mind with immediacy and force. We’d have both the inner life in thought via words, and the present-day butterfly flitting about, amid other scenes involving the loved one and butterfly things.
Or Dan Stark, my protagonist in the Vigilante Series, recalls an incident from a few months back that causes him to associate a significant object with a crime. Or another memory triggers a feeling of guilt.
There are lots of other ways we can blend audio, video, and writing in an ebook. The exciting thing is that the technology exists. It’s here, in HTML5, which I’ve been buried in for two days. That’s not enough, for sure, to make me adept at using it, but I see some of the possibilities.
The possibilities are endless. The future is exciting!
A colleague at my last job was excited by interactive text for both fiction and nonfiction, and we often talked about it. I enjoyed the way his eyes would light up with enthusiasm.
However, I am boringly linear and what I like about low-tech text is exactly the way it limits the options. In theory, jumping around through a text sounds like fun, but I know I’d get anxious feeling I was missing something if I wasn’t reading every word, and in the intended sequence.
Meanwhile, I’ve also long thought that mixing other media with text gives the ebook potential as a whole new medium for storytelling. For image- and sound-oriented folks, it could make reading more inviting, but I can’t believe it would ever compete for interest with movies and games.
On the other hand, my brain was programmed for processing input a half-century ago. So what do I know? I encourage you to go for it.
Ron, I can’t imagine you ever being boring, especially not regarding linear fiction, as a writer or a reader. Certainly, as Craig Lancaster also points out, one of the benefits of low-tech fiction is that it limits the options, and puts readers (and let’s confess some writers) into a “trance.” Another term you’re probably familiar with is the “fictive dream.”
I don’t know if enhanced ebooks can be done without ruining the “dream.” I’d hope so, because it’s important that readers not be pulled out of it. We’re having too much fun there.
Very interesting ideas, Carol. I’ve never thought outside the linear storyline, but I like the idea of incorporating audio, or video into a story line. You are a step ahead of the rest of us, that’s for sure!
Thanks, Randy! Like Ron and Craig have mentioned, the “trance” or “dream” is important, so incorporating other media and different ways into and through the story into the story would have to be carefully planned. I can see multiple drafts of multiple drafts before the whole thing could be seamless.
But obviously, I, too like the idea.
Good stuff, Carol.
I see a lot of value in these things as add-ons to fiction rather than integrated aspects of the story. That’s just me, and it’s strictly a judgment grounded in the kind of books I read. I don’t want links and audio and video to distract me from the trance of reading. A reader’s imagination is the most interactive component that could ever be married to a story, in my estimation.
But using these tools to build alternative endings, or after-the-story additions or complements? Absolutely! I see great promise in that.
So, Craig, you might use them just as that — add-ons. Pieces of backstory linked to characters, maybe, or whatever your fertile imagination can think of. You’re right about not being distracted from the story. Absolutely! Like I wrote to Ron, interspersing other media into the main story would have to be meticulously planned.