SF author James C. Harwood commented on my SF post:
"I've been experimenting with layered story ebooks and the use of internal hyperlinks, trying to break new ground. For example, a reader can click on the name of a character and be taken to the Glossarium support blog website to get more information about that character."
To which I said:
Yes. I've long (since the nineties) been interested in hyper-linked fiction as a new creative medium. You could create a whole little universe which people could explore. If it was good, I think people could get quite hooked. I think the curiosity factor could be stronger that it is with strictly linear fiction.
To expand here: one could do it in a myriad of ways, of course. Character profiles. One could have overlapping stories for many characters. One could link to... well, recipes from a cafe in the story, for god's sake. The possibilities are endless.
One might make certain parts of the site subscription-based and get an income.
(Putting artistic integrity issues aside for the moment, imagine J. K. Rowling making such a site for Harry Potter, maybe getting some help from selected writers. That could be a gold mine.) (Not that she needs the money.)
Has anybody had thoughts about such a thing? Or heard of anybody actually doing it, (besides Harwood)?
Update: when it gets big and complex enough, some may ask: what's the difference between this and, well, a web site? Or even the web? The answer is wholeness. The whole thing has to be created with the Whole in mind, so it's collectedly one piece of art.
And the reader will delight in finding all kinds of connections... this character once met that character, though they were not aware of it... both of these characters are trainspotters... this character and that character are both interested in the same girl...
I think it might be a good idea to have the links under each page, rather than within the text. Otherwise the reader ends up with unfinished pages all the time.
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Update: Nancy from the yahoo Tim Powers group gives me our first example: 253. (He's very funny.)
Update: Dragonlady says:
> Reading this made me think, I'd say that video games, role-playing-games in
> particular, are in part just that. You can interact with the story and
> there are side quests etc.
Well, you *could* certainly do that with hyperlinked fiction. The reader could choose what the character should do, etc. But that's not what I was thinking about, more like traditional fiction at its heart, but just not arranged linearly. It's all fixed by the author, but the reader decides the sequence of reading, and even what bits to read or not.
And I guess it would be most natural for it to be looser than most novels, so the reader does not have to find and read *all* of it for it to make sense. The individual bits and sections should be satisfying on their own, but should support each other.
Actually this will be an important difference from pre-web storytelling. When you start a traditional story, you know you're stuck with all of it, or miss the point. With a hyperlink story, you can read as few or as many pages as you want, and if it's a well done one, it should give you something. So there's less "investment" in starting to read.
One page is about Lizzie's morning. She gets a phone call from Pam. There's a link to a page containing how Pam's morning went, and how the phone call affected her. Pam leaves home and meets Bob on the stairs. There's a link to how Bob's day goes. There should be some meaningful relation of some kind between the characters, of course.
There can also be links to non-storytelling parts. And there can be bigger stories interwoven with the small bits, like a murder mystery or whatever.
I think this ties in with a development I've noticed in modern fiction, not the least in quality TV shows like _The Sopranos_ and _Weeds_. Until recent times, if a character in a story lied to another character, you could bet your bottom dollar that later it would be found out and there would be consequences. But these days it's as likely that nothing happens at all as a consequence. Life/story just goes on and other things happen. And so it's less predictable.
I think it's a busting loose from the old rigidity of storytelling principles.
Hypertext fiction just feels like it may be the right way for me to write. I always had the greatest struggle fitting my creative writing into traditional story format (three acts, problem-solution, etc), it totally kills the creativity for me. But I'm very good at writing "organically", people always think I'm writing about real events even when they are pretty fantastic.
Update: Stephen found this interesting resource.
You could create a whole little universe which people could explore.
ReplyDeleteIt seems like it might appeal to those with attention deficit disorder. For the rest of us it would probably be an intrusion. Plus it would take a long time to get anywhere in a story if you kept going off in new directions.
Hopefully they'll keep printing books because if what you're talking about here is the way things end up, I'll have to give up reading.
I'm ADD like all-git-out, so that may be why I'm so fired up.
ReplyDeleteI'm sure linear fiction (but not paper books) will be around forever. Like you say, hyperlink fiction won't be as relaxing.
I really hope that paper books last, at least in quality editions (see Star Trek II).
ReplyDeleteHmm, looks like hyperlinked fiction could go one of two ways. There is the hopping to glossary, traditionally referred to as "see end notes", or there is the "computer book" style of fiction as popularized in the 80's in the "Choose your own adventure" series, where every page or two you get to make a character decision and follow that plot line. "if you go into the abandoned coal mine turn to page 56, if you'd rather chance things in the swamp turn to page 87".
ReplyDeleteThere are even "adult" choose your own adventures now.
Doing it on a PC would be more like an old text based adventure game. "What do you think Mrs. Montag?"
captcha - pogan
I actually experimented with this idea briefly back in university - I still have a chapter of a 'Star patrol' story with hyperlinks to character personnel files, important reference topics for the setting, (which do cross-reference to each other,) and one flashback that fits into the 'interesting but not vital to the plot' category. Basically, I was throwing in everything I could to make the hyperlink content interesting, but not really deflecting anybody from the linear storyline.
ReplyDeleteThis chapter is still online, in a corner of my ISP webspace, but it's full of expired email addresses and references to counters that don't work anymore, and so on.
Alexod:
ReplyDeleteI think those two are just two amongst many, many things you could do with it.
Just as an illustration, take Pulp Fiction, the movie. Write it down as a novel. Then cut it up into scenes, and put each scene on a different web page. Link between them, let the reader decide the sequence. PF is such a cut-up story this might even work decently, even though it was not created as hypertext fiction.
This is not how I'd make one, I mean it just as an illustration of how one might look which *isn't* a multiple-choice role-playing story.
It's a new medium, and I think most people (readers as well as writers) have a hard time undoing the linear thinking of traditional stories
"I was throwing in everything I could to make the hyperlink content interesting, but not really deflecting anybody from the linear storyline."
ReplyDeleteExactly. The challenge is to drop that altogether.
After all (in my opinion anyway) a plot is basically a device to keep people's interest captured. (Suspence.) The linking (and the writing) could do that instead. Exploration, rather than going on a ride.
Exploration, rather than going on a ride.
ReplyDeleteI can see bad writers needing that. You were talking about the decline of science fiction and rise in popularity of fantasy. As with all fiction, it's probable a large percentage is crap. Those writers could probably benefit from this linking - it would distract their readers from the crappiness of the story.
Technology is so unreliable. If they ever go to 100% electronic for books, good luck if civilization falls again.
ReplyDeleteI have no doubt that there are dozens of other ways this could go, I was just seeing two main proposals here, and suggesting that they were not novel ideas, just a new method of presenting.
ReplyDeleteI am wondering what Greenaway's intent was for Tulse Luper, it seemed to promise to be an exploration of a new medium. It was a project he started when he abandoned film.
Just thinking. If there is no link, no story, then the whole thing becomes like a coffee table book. Something you dib into once in a while, never really losing yourself in. Can this work?
ReplyDeleteI guess "The Devils Larder" is a good example of how it may work in fiction. This is an anthology of short stories by one writer, all about food and eating. Jim Crace manages to leave you wanting more of his style, and the contrasting ideas of what food really is in a social context.
Again two other non-linear pieces are The Pillow book of Sei Shōnagon, a diary which is eloquently written, and has survived the ages. There are two films that reflect this collection, one is obviously Peter Greenaways film, The Pillow Book, which takes a non-linear story, but goes further and defies settling on an aspect ration, the image is framed as needed. Of course this film is not unique in either regard, The Tracy Fragments manages to play with splitting the screen to show parts of the story, and also plays with flash back and flash forward.
We see repeated retelling also in Memento, taking the last five minutes of the story first and building back.
I agree Pulp Fiction also provides an example of how things could go, the same method - overlapping and intersecting stories told at there own pace, was adopted by Jimmy McGovern in the first season of "The Street", six tales of life in a Manchester working class street. Unlike a UK soap (Coronation Street/Eastenders) which would tell the stories in parallel in real time, this takes 50 minutes to tell each tale, after the six shows you see all the intersections, and what appeared as a side story or a red herring in one episode suddenly becomes the pivotal point in another.
At worst though, it could be like the poor protagonist in Monty Pythons sketch about the man with the badly edited life. You may follow a thread through the experience which misses all the climaxes, and doesn't even get a square meal.
Speaking of Jimmy McGovern, it's too bad he's not still doing Cracker. Loved that show. I think he said he'd done all he could with it, or all he wanted to. I wouldn't want to see it done by anyone else.
ReplyDeleteJoe,
ReplyDeleteDid you ever see the American version of Cracker?
Personally, I grew up with Robbie Coltrain as a comedy actor (Young Ones, Blackadder, Comic Strip Presents, Pope Must Die, Nuns on the Run) and the idea of him doing serious work (Cracker) or semi-serious (Tutti Frutti) put me off. However, McGovern caught my interest with "Hearts and Minds" and "Priest", and so now I have grown up I am watching Cracker for the first time. I started with the latest film, then went back to the series.
The film was interesting to me since Fitz had spent 10 years overseas, as I had, and he returned to a Manchester that was very different from the one we left.
I lived about 4 blocks from the police station where Cracker was set (Longsight, Manchester), so Cracker has more personal moments for me.
Great actor, to so many just Hagrid, but to the rest of us a comic great and good dramatic actor.
The Street is worth a watch, but is by far the bleakest McGovern to date.
You may also want to see if you can find works by Bleasdale and Willy Russel, two other great Liverpool playwrights. Bleasdale wrote "Blackstuff" and "Boys from the Blackstuff" as well as "The Muscle Market" and a few others which have been filmed. Russel wrote Shirley Valentine and Educating Rita. WR is more lightweight than the other two though.
I did see part of one episode of the American version, the remake of "To Be a Somebody." Did you like it? I hated it. They changed too much. I'm not against remakes. I actually prefer the U.S. version of The Office, for example.
ReplyDeleteI had seen Coltrane in Nuns on the Run (loved the shower scene, considering my age at the time; it's still of course a favorite) but nothing else until Cracker.
I liked the most recent movie but missed the redhead Penhalagon. I guess she'd probably be in her 40s now.
I will definitely check out Bleasdale and Russel. Thanks.
"Nuns on the Run (loved the shower scene,"
ReplyDeletesee, that's twice we've agreed today. :-)
Why there are so few scenes like that in films, I don't understand.
I only saw a small amount of the US version. Their Fitz just seemed to drift between melancholy and maudlin. Never cared for it.
ReplyDeleteAh, yes, great shower scene. In my mind better than that in Starship Troopers, and though less quantity, more easily done than the one in - Ah, name escapes me, first in a series of American teen sex comedies with Miss Tallywhacker?
I still think that the shower scene in Arachnophobia is my favourite though I'm sure the version I saw more recently is a cut version.
Maybe we need a new thread to discuss memorable shower scenes...
Porkies!!!
This idea has many layers. So much could be done with it, but the authoring of it would be a great deal of work, and it would have to be done with quality and care, or it would frustrate more than entertain.
ReplyDeleteSome techniques that would enhance hyperlinked fiction:
1) Glossary or footnote links: The first time a character's name appears, there's a link to their bio, but this should be done with care, since we learn some things about a character only later in a good story. How many times have you been reading a play by Shakespeare, and seen a character's name you hadn't seen for three scenes, and asked yourself, "Now who is this guy again?" Click his name to see. (But underlined hyperlinks would be annoying if every time you saw the name it was underlined. Maybe the words that have links are shown some other way that isn't so different from normal text.)
2) Flashback - If a character is recounting a previous event, you can link back to the actual part of the story that contained that event. Is the character telling the whole truth as they explain the event? Sometimes you want to jump back and look at what was really said.
3) See what the character sees - Is the character looking something up on the internet? Click on a link at that point in the story to see what they are seeing on that site. If you don't want to look at it, just read on by. Some will want to enhance the experience by seeing the page and some won't. Maybe the page contains clues to what will happen next. Maybe the character doesn't see something important on the page, but the reader does. This can be a page from their on-line bank account, their mother's email portending some doom, or a page in a book they pick up. There's really no limit to how this one could be used.
4) Feedback - Have the reader send the character an email at one point. Have the reader send the author an email with a link.
5) Story-line forks in the road - Already been mentioned here. The reader makes decisions that determine the outcome of the story.
6) Pass the Point-of-View - Mentioned here. Pass the POV off to another character. The story could be designed in such a way that the reader is guided to pass it back to the original character after a while. You could read a story straight through, and then the next time you read it, decide to take a detour and see what Larry was doing for that day he could not be found by the main character. Turns out he was one of the people betraying Bob! Makes the story a bit different.
7) Links of all kinds! The character can have a page on some social networking site, with links in the story. A character can be listening to a song, and a link can lead to an mp3 file that the reader can listen to as they read that chapter. The character can see something on television, or watch a movie trailer, and the reader can see the same thing by following a link.
All of this leads, of course, to product placement and other marketing evil in the midst of your fiction. Someone should make a fortune!
Thanks for the thoughts.
ReplyDeleteI'm sure there's tons of possibilities we don't easily think of because we're stuck in linear thought.