NetNews Usenet Archive 1993 #1/NN_1993_1.iso/spool/misc/writing/4039

Text File | 1993-01-06 | 5.0 KB | 121 lines

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From: [e-mail] (Tom Maddox)
Subject: Re: Anyone comment on Storyshaper? [actually, Storyspace]
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Organization: Netcom Online Communications Services (408-241-9760 login: guest)
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Date: Wed, 6 Jan 1993 19:07:25 GMT
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    Here is an excerpt from a column of mine published in _Locus_
magazine, December, 1992.  It was the second of two columns on hypertext.
*****

[. . .] And with regard to Storyspace itself--
which I consider an ongoing laboratory
environment for hypertext--[Mark Bernstein] says it is like "a
new kind of paint."

    In order to understand why this is so, we
have to consider the general nature of what is in
some ways the most serious and complex mode of
hypertext artifact:  the extended prose
narrative.

    The print text has a beginning and end, easy
to locate and understand.  We start here, we end
there.  Robert Coover, in an excellent article
about hypertext in The New York Times Book
Review (June 21, 1992) remarks:  "Much of the
novel's alleged power is embedded in the *line* [my
emphasis], that compulsory author-directed
movement from the beginning of a sentence to its
period, from the top of the page to the bottom,
from the first page to the last."  Thus, "Have
you read it?" has a simple meaning:  have you
traversed the "line"?

    Some print texts inflict a kind of hyper-
structure on us.  Coover goes on to say, "[T]here
have been countless strategies to counter the
line's power, from marginalia and footnotes to
the creative innovations of novelists like
Laurence Sterne, James Joyce, Raymond Queneau,
Julio Cortzar, Italo Calvino and Milorad Pavic."
Such texts may pose riddles or repetitions that
drive us to hunt through what we've already read;
they may assume peculiar non-linear forms
(dictionaries or encyclopedias, for example);
they may contradict themselves or appear to do
so; they may even connect their ends to their
beginnings in an attempt to defy linear form.
Finnegans Wake, Dhalgren, and Gravity's Rainbow,
to give three notable examples, do such things.
However, the physical facts remain:  there is the
book, and if I turn its pages from beginning to
end, reading each in its turn, I say, "I've read
that; I've finished it"--never mind what I do or
do not understand about what I've read.

    However, the hypertext artifact won't allow
us such delusions.  "Have you read [Michael
Joyce's] Afternoon?" Bernstein asked during one
of our conversations, and I just laughed.
Hypertext has no necessary beginning and end,
hence no unitary completeness:  it will not allow
us to finish--we are reading it, or we have
stopped reading it; we have never read it.  We
have never completed "the line" because we
cannot:  as Coover says, "[T]rue freedom from the
tyranny of the line is perceived as only really
possible now at last with the advent of
hypertext, written and read on the computer,
where the line does not exist unless one invents
and implants it in the text."

    Storyspace, written for the Macintosh,
allows the writer to invent an extraordinary
number of lines and to connect them in weird and
multifarious ways.  One word or phrase or
graphical element can lead to any number of
others; one "space"--a kind of window in the text
that is to Storyspace what the paragraph is to
print text--can lead to any number of others.
The reader's choices are both enabled and
circumscribed as the author chooses:  I might
allow only one connection between spaces, I might
force you to choose among many; I might not allow
you to see certain spaces until you have read
others (this is done through a cute piece of
technique called a "guard field" that allows
access to a given space only when specified
criteria have been met).  I can present you a
two-dimensional map of all spaces and allow you
to choose among them at your whim.
*****
[end of excerpt]

    Unlike a previous poster on this topic, I haven't been willing to
make a commitment to Storyspace as a vehicle for writing a novel.  I find it
just a little too unstable; in particular, its printing capabilities can
result in unexpected results, including crashes.  In fact, I regard it as
a medium for creating true hypertext, meant to be read on a computer, and
I entertain in a desultory way the idea of writing for that medium some
day.

    Now that I think of it, I am not satisfied with *any* writing
software for the Mac.  Word drives me nuts (interface, clumsiness, bugs),
Nisus has odd vulnerabilities (memory-based editing, unexpected formatting
changes, no major update in a few years), and Word Perfect, which is what
I am using on a novel ms. right now, can be slow and has a weird problem
with screen rewrites using some fonts.


--
                Tom Maddox
                    [e-mail]
    "That's a bird bone chair, Bob.  I don't know if I should sit there."
                Tom Waits