We’re all familiar with hyperlinks in non-fiction from time spent on Wikipedia surfing an endless web of information on one subject to the vaguely related next. Anyone who has played 10-clicks-till-Jesus knows the connections hyperlinks create can be both amusing and intriguing.
But how does this Internet savvy mode of navigating influence the realm of fiction and storytelling?
Founder of hypertext publishing company Eastgate Systems, Mark Bernstein, said we are living in an increasingly text-focused world.
“We all spend our time reading on the screen now,” he said “And there’s absolutely no reason why we should expect to continue reading only simulations of codex book lovingly painted on our screen.”
Codex book is a term for the old familiar print-and-paper book.
According to Josh Fisher, app developer and founder of app publisher Appoet, the concept of reading on the screen has yet to reach its full potential.
“I think e-books are now only in their intermediary format,” he said. Fisher said he thinks we will see them further evolve to become more interactive.
Hyper-what?
Gail Carmichael, a computer science instructor at Carleton University said hypertext fiction “is about presenting an unchanging piece of fiction in such a way that readers can click through hyperlinks and skip through the text in the way that they want, and it becomes a bit of a non-linear experience.”
Bernstein said hypertext fiction comes in a variety of forms and despite the name, doesn’t necessarily require the Internet and hyperlinks. He defined hypertext more specifically as interlinked information that is sometimes, but not always, presented on a screen. Most importantly he said hypertext fiction is literature that demands a more active kind of reader interaction than a traditional book.
Fisher develops apps that create this interaction with text.
“What I try to do is make mobile applications for storytelling—to engage the reader or the user in a completely new way and involve them in the story telling process,” he said.
Carmichael said Choose Your Own Adventure books are an obvious example of simple hypertext.
“Another one is called Hopscotch. It’s designed so that each little chapter is sort of episodic in a sense that you could read in isolation,” she said. “The author has two kinds of suggested orders that you could read it. At the beginning of the book he says, ‘we’ll read it from whatever order you want, or read it from beginning to end, or here’s another mixed up order that you might read it.’”
“Lots of people who write hypertext are very interested in form and formalism. And to them the structure takes on a more important role,” Bernstein said.
Hypertext in the past
Bernstien said the structure of hypertext narratives can vary greatly.
“One of our writers, Deena Larson, wrote a wonderful extended collection of poetry called Marble Springs which was in essence a collection of characters from an imagined world—a magic alternate world that she had built up over years while she was mostly blind, among other things. She wrote this down into a quite lovely hypertext and structured it essentially as sections of musings,” he said.
Larson said she was inspired by Edgar Lee Master’s 1915 work Spoon River Anthology, which she considers a precursor to hypertext fiction because of the lack of linearity in its structure.
“You’ve got a bunch of characters who are in a graveyard and if you wanted to find out about Mrs. Woodsley, you’d go to page 47—but her kids are on page 58,” Larson explained.
She said she had this in mind for her work of hypertext fiction, Marble Springs. She said she wanted to present a town with all its people and the complex connections between them, and she first went about it in a physical way that also incorporated visual art.
“I had it all on a model railroad track,” she explained. “You could walk around this little track, pick up a piece of paper, you could read the poem, and the paper had strings that attached to it to other paper. And this . . . didn’t work. It was like an inch thick of embroidery thread—no good.”
“And then somebody said, ‘Well, you know what, there’s these new-fangled things called computers!’” Larson laughed. “This was in the ‘80s! Computers were pretty new-fangled. This was before IBM had images. Macs had images and they were pixels. It was a 640 by 280 frame.”
“I did my master’s thesis on [hypertext] and I interviewed everyone in the field, all eight of them. Including Mark Bernstein,” she said.
She said she’s been working with the medium and with Bernstien ever since.
Reader-writer interaction
Josh Fisher said hypertext allows for readers and writers to interact in a way that traditionally structured books cannot accommodate.
In What We Mean, an app designed by Fisher, the reader is presented with a collection of 20 love letters written by Fisher’s grandfather to his grandmother during World War II.
“I scanned them all into my computer and then blacked them out to make poetry,” Fisher said. “A black-out is when you take a block of text and take a sharpie marker and block out some of the text.”
The app allows the user to swipe between his grandfather’s original letters, and the black-out.
“And what it sort of creates is the final conversation between the three of us,” he explained.
“On the application side, as a user, you can take your own picture to create your own black-out poem and share that with friends,” he said.
Delivering a lecture
Bernstein likened the process of writing hypertext to delivering a lecture.
“You design the lecture once but vary its delivery for different audiences, depending on how things seem to be progressing with the audience, what they seem to be interested in, what questions or contentions arise,” he said.
“Hypertext, by restoring interaction with the audience, lets the author plan a lecture that’s still written which can be delivered, in his absence, after her death, yet still accommodate different audiences.”
For example, in Deena Larson’s hypertext Disappearing Rain, half of the links are deliberately not working and their absence is part of the structure and narrative of the story. She said the piece also changes over time as the Internet changes.
“The only trace left of Anna, a freshman at the University of Berkeley California, is an open Internet connection in her neatly furnished dorm room,” the story introduction reads.
The reader is invited to “join the four generations of a Japanese-American family as they search for Anna and discover credit card conspiracies, ancient family truths, waterfalls that pour out of televisions, and the terrifying power of the Internet.”
One link originally led to a webcam at Berkeley, but Larson said this was disabled as time went on to reflect Anna’s disappearance, as if it has happened in real time.
“Because it was written in 2000 and the idea here is that Anna has disappeared, and there’s only an open Internet connection,” Larson said. “It’s your only clue.”
“Those links no longer work because as we get farther away in time, the more we lose track of that,” Larson said.
She said developments in technology have made the stories she created over ten years ago somewhat irrelevant. But hypertext itself is still alive and well—just in different forms.
The future of storytelling?
So why aren’t writers working on interactive e-books right now?
Fisher said the challenge of new technology in a creative field is it looks extremely complex to those who aren’t familiar with it.
“Everything looks super hard to begin with,” he said.
“You look at it and it looks like a completely new language. And it’s a really high barrier to entry for a lot of artists. Especially those who aren’t the quote unquote digital natives who have grown in a technology-centred world, its incredibly hard.”
“The great trend that I’ve been seeing over the last five years—and I actually think Apple had a lot to do with it, is that things are becoming a lot simpler,” he continued.
Carmichael agreed and said there are more tools available now, such as Twine, an open source tool any user can use to tell non-linear stories.
“One nice thing on the hypertext side is that there are a lot of tools now that somebody completely non-technical could pick up and use,” she said.
But Fisher said hypertext won’t be replacing traditional books any time soon.
“I think a lot of people start thinking about hypertext and hypermedia and they’re like ‘well the book’s going to disappear as we know it—the book’s going to disappear,’” Fisher said.
“I don’t think that’s true,” he continued. “I think the book’s going to stick around. I think what you’re going to see is the physical book turn into something like the coffee table book. It’s heavily produced, got a high production value, you know, gorgeous. It’s going to be something you want to show off—like a vinyl record.”
Bernstien said he thinks writing will remain the same no matter which medium it is expressed through. He said the idea of writing as a vocation and a calling will last no matter which form it takes.
“Media never replace media,” he said. “We still have live performance music, we still have live performance drama. That’s been going on for a very long time. Media grows up alongside media.”
