 |
|
 |
 |
 |
| The Rite of Spring: Experience | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
Writing the Rite |
||||
Some notes on an Experience of Writing Hypertext Fiction |
||||
| |
|
|
|
|
| The Rite of Spring: Experience | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
Writing the Rite |
||||
Some notes on an Experience of Writing Hypertext Fiction |
||||
In the very short time since The Rite of Spring has been published, it has started to receive very flattering notice, and a couple of people have asked me to write about writing hypertext fiction. This is in no sense an academic paper; while serious academics are making serious study of the process of constructing and navigating hypertext fictions, I have not been following their work and am not familiar with it; my own work has been pursued in isolation, and, doubtless, suffers in consequence.
For those interested, reading lists on Hyper-media and 'Post Modern Studies' are available on the Web; see for example [McMullen 95]
In the summer of 1992 I was coming to the end of working on a linear novel Thought and Memory (unpublished). This had been a difficult experience, from a number of points of view.
The form of Thought and Memory is a continuous first-person narrative, told by the female central character many years after the event. Because the setting was tenth century Norway, it was hard work finding and maintaining a credible voice. It was also my first attempt to write from the point of view of a member of the opposite sex. Finally, the plot proved difficult to resolve in a satisfactory manner.
In summary, writing Thought and Memory had become hard work, a drag. At the same time I was reading widely and reviewing modern 'fantasy' fiction, and was becoming increasingly irritated by a number of genre features. However, it was clear to me that there was a market for fantasy, in a way that there might not be for strange historical/philosophical work. The Rite was therefore conceived as something for fun -- something light and skittish, which would attempt to subvert and poke fun at the stereotypical 'fantasy' plot structure, as well as a number of targets within contemporary society.
My previous experience of writing fiction had convinced me of the need to know ones setting intimately. Some twelve thousand words of Background material were written, establishing the geography, ethnography, sociology, theology and political environment, before the narrative was begun. A three dimensional computer model of the City at Her Gates was constructed, in order that lines of sight and visual descriptions could be checked. This preparatory material was a great help in the development of the narrative itself, although the development of the narrative lead in turn to some changes in the background.
One of the tiredest fundamentals of the fantasy genre is the trilogy. It was therefore necessary that the Rite should be conceived as book one of a trilogy, with an overall trilogy title (The Myth of the God Incarnate); the plot for this was outlined in full, and in fact I am presently working on the second text, The Beleagured God. The trilogy will end with The House of the Last Incarnation, when I get round to writing it.
The Rite, although written as a hypertext, was not originally intended to be published as such; rather, I had intended that the fragments should be collated into a sequence and published as a linear text. However, the form of the text, a sequence of first person narratives from a spectrum of different actors, lead very naturally to a non-linear approach to writing. Generally, I would write a series of fragments from one voice, go on to write fragments from a second voice, and so on. Aonan was both the first voice to be started and the first voice to be completed; generally, I worked on Aonan, Linnain and Tan until I had a complete narrative, and then filled in the other voices around them. The Taynuic/ Beinnain sub-plot was written, frankly as an afterthought, after the primary narrative had been completed.
The Rite was written very fast. Typically I would write two or three fragments a night, and the primary narrative was completed within six months, by the winter of 92/3. I wrote mainly in the evenings. I used GNU Emacs as my text editor on BSD 4.3 UN*X; a custom dictionary was created for the ispell spelling checker to cope with the range of peculiar names (the use of ridiculous names in fantasy fiction was another intended target). A database was created using bourne shell scripts and AWK to maintain information about characters.
After the primary narrative was completed, a collated print was distributed to a number of friends for reading and comment. Initial feedback was that the setting was too exotic and needed further fleshing out; this lead to the development of the Taynuic/ Beinnain sub-narrative, which serves primarily to introduce 'Background' material into the text.A further iteration of review was then undertaken, after which the text achieved very much its present form in about mid-summer of 1994. It was converted to HTML in September 1995 and published on the Web in January 1996.
The mazy nature of hypertext leads to a real potential for disorientation for the reader; in order to overcome this, and present the reader with a digestible narrative, I feel that it is important for the author to provide consistent, high-quality navigating tools, and to predict and provide for as many as possible of the ways in which readers may wish to navigate the text.
In 'hypertextualising' the Rite, I adopted gylphs from the alphabet described in the story as a consistent set of navigation tools, giving two separate clearly marked paths 'onwards' from each fragment, as well as standardised means of accessing overview and background information. An oversight, as yet uncorrected, is that I have not provided a standard way of accessing biographical detail of the voice narrating the fragment. This group of navigation controls, positioned at the head and tail of each narrative fragment, are intended to provide the user with a clear and consistent formal framework for navigation.
This formal framework is supplemented by the informal indexing of names, places, measures, and other items of potential interest or unfamiliarity within the body of the narrative to the background documents, and of the referencing from the background documents of viewpoints into the narrative.
The narrative and background are thus expected to act as two independent but interlinked planes through which the reader can navigate at will, but which provide very different ways of viewing the material.
If there can be said to be a 'mainstream' of current hypertext fiction, it is a stream of highly experimental pieces. Features which appear common include very short fragment size (see e.g. [Carson 95], [Leibov & Delitsyne 95]), bewildering plot structures, many post-modern features, and complex linking schemes.
The Rite differs from this in being, as a story, fairly conventional. It has no post-modern features apart from two brief authorial interventions ([Brooke 94a], [Brooke 94b]), a highly formal linking scheme, and a strong but simple plot structure. Furthermore, while the narrative is not linear, there is a clear concept of the progression of time, and consequently it is possible to apply a linear collating sequence which is implicit in the fragment titles and closely approximates to the principle marked path. Finally, the Rite's fragments are very much longer than the norm for current Hypertext fictions, at an average of about 1500 words. While shorter than a conventional chapter, I believe this makes them a convenient size to be read 'at a sitting'.
Because hypertext fiction is in it's infancy, the techniques of practitioners may be of interest. My experience of writing the Rite leads me to the conclusion that, given the nature of hypertext, more careful discipline is required in the structuring of plot and material than is the case for conventional linear fiction, because of the inherent difficulty which readers experienced in linear fiction have when faced with the ambiguous and disorienting structure of a hypertext.
However, the extent to which the Rite succeeds as fiction and as hypertext is for you to judge. Read on.
give me feedback on this page // show previous feedback on this page