Hyperactive fiction, poetry and web writing

Reading onscreen: Is it easy to read? Do you think you can read a screen as as easily as a book?
Quality: Is the quality of the writing as good as you'd find in print?
Links: Do you find it easy to navigate? Is it easy to move from one page to another? Do you read everything on the page before you click?
Satisfaction: Is the work satisfying to read, as a traditional book is? If not, why not?
Normally in a web site, consistency of design is vital. Is this true of web writing? Changes in format and means of navigation are disjointing -- or are they part of the experience of reading?
Can you feel the changed relationship between reader and author? Do you like being able to make a choice and influence the pattern of your own reading? Do you miss not being able to read EVERYTHING as you can read a book cover-to-cover. To some extent, web writing creates a collaborator out of every reader. In some hypertexts you are invited to contribute your own writing to the whole..
Do you think writing for the Web has its own style? Perhaps a more compact, poetic type of prose? This is because readers generally haven't the patience on the Web to read long screens of text, it's tempting to click on to the next page..

Hypertext and web writing: More examples

Lies: a short hypertext story by Rick Pryll http://www.interport.net/~rick/lies/lies.html
Dark Lethe: a collaborative hypernovel run by L J Winson
The Heist: a crime caper by Walter Sorrell. Genre fiction on the Web : http://www.us1.net/campbell/teletale/1.htm
Hegirascope2: a hyperfiction by Stuart Moulthrop : http://raven.ubalt.edu/staff/moulthrop/hypertexts/hgs/hegirascope.html
Gashgirl by Francesca da Rimini : http://sysx.apana.org.au/~gashgirl/arc/index.html
Grammatron by Mark Amerika : http://www.grammatron.com/
Deep immersion by Terri-Ann White, the result of a trAce funded writing fellowship
Enterzone: hypertext ezine
Hypertext haiku: text, visual and interactive
Rockgarden of Love by Christy Sheffield Sanford http://www.thing.net/~grist/ld/b-cs-rg.htm
Light - Water a mosaic, by Christy Sheffield Sanford http://ebbs.english.vt.edu/olp/newriver/5/light_water/series.html
My Millennium a compendium of web writing from trAce http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/writers/sanford/my_millennium/presents.html

Hypertext: Hypertheory

Hypertext News: an online newsletter for hypertext writers : http://hypertext.pair.com/
HYPERTEXTUAL CONSCIOUSNESS "an exploration into cyber-narrators, virtual reality and the teleportation of narrative consciousness into the electrosphere..." by Mark Amerika. http://www.altx.com/htc/title.html
Problems in Web Fiction - how does one begin an essay in a medium in which the writer, and not the reader, controls the beginnings and the endings, where the movement is determined by software? http://www.panix.com/~clays/fiction/
trAced : the trAce Online Writing Community site reviews of hypertext : http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/traced/hyper.htm
Hyperizons: the Search for Hypertext Fiction: good links, but rather out of date now (last updated 1996) : http://www.duke.edu/~mshumate/hyperfic.html
Eastgate Systems: the leading publisher of hyperfiction, using the Storyspace system : some good articles and examples of web fiction too. : http://www.eastgate.com
http://www.eastgate.com/hypertext/WebHypertext.html
Reactive Writing: links to some interesting hypertext fiction and interviews with their writers : http://innotts.co.uk/~leo/hyper/
The Electronic Labyrinth a long hypertext discussing hypertext as a writing tool : http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/elab/elab.html
Hypertext Reflections: a scholarly look at hypertext, itself using advanced HTML techniques such as javascript and frames : http://english.ttu.edu/kairos/2.2/features/reflections/bridge.html
Hypertheory Sites an annotated list from Washington University: http://students.washington.edu/megant/hyperfiction/theory_sites.html
Written on the Web from FEED magazine, by Carolyn Guyer (1995 but still brings up some interesting points) http://www.feedmag.com/95.09guyer/95.09guyer.html
the reading list (again out of date) is at http://www.feedmag.com/95.09guyer/95.09guyer_sample1.html

Some comments on and criticisms of hypertext/web writing

"Hyperfiction might one day yield a truly inventive work of art, but for the time being it remains a self-conscious, gamelike diversion."
Michiko Kakutani, "Culture Zone: Never- Ending Saga," 1997

"Now we have Espen Aarseth's wonderful term "cybertext" to explain the fundamental kinship of any literary project with a feedback loop -- hypertext, adventure game, ars combinatoria." Stuart Moulthrop at Cybermountain

Hypertext, according to a link in "The Unknown," is "a mapping of a text onto a four-dimensional `space.' Normal grammars, then, do not apply, and become branching structures anew. Fragments, branches, links . . . The text coils in on itself." If this makes your head hurt, relax: You are normal. But it gets easier with repeated use.

From Boulder Weekly: "It was a dark and stormy night/day Exploring the story world of hypertext" by Joe Miller (Review of The Unknown)

Scott Rettberg, the Chicago-based co-author of The Unknown, says that in order to net a larger audience, budding hypertext authors will need to concentrate less on complex high-tech structures for their books and more on accessible content. "We can get together a group of people like those at this conference who appreciate complex structure," he said, "but take that to a mass audience: two clicks and they're gone. It's going to be important for people to start thinking about how readers respond to this work. Because without the reader, it's not literature."

"In our hypertext novel, not only are we four authors collaborators, but the reader is an active collaborator as well. The reader actually chooses what novel they will read, and every reader actually forms a different novel from the material that we've given them."

April 15, 1999 : New Kind of Convergence: Writers and Programmers By LISA GUERNSEY

"We are so absorbed in creating this stuff ourselves," said Catherine C. Marshall, a researcher at the Fuji Xerox Palo Alto Laboratory, "that we forget that there is a tenable thing called a reader."

While I am convinced hyperdrama and hypertext non fiction are here to stay, I am not sure hyperfiction has a future at all - or if so, it will continue to be on two extreme fronts: games entertainment on the one hand and eclectic even snobbish postmodern academic mumbojumbo on the other. I have a hard time imagining "a popular hypertext novel." I'm not sure readers want to do the WORK that it takes to read hypertext fiction. In hyperdrama, the action is live, real, vibrant - it's not like READING. Hyperdrama is physically more dimensional. Hyperfiction requires a lot of decision-making from the reader, and I'm not sure the reading public is up to it.

Poststructuralists call into question the ways in which our society, a print-based culture, relates to text, our chosen mode of discourse since the advent of the printing press.

As a quickly growing and developing new form of writing, a form which has been hailed as the greatest development in writing since the printing press, hypertext embodies many of the characteristics of poststructuralism's ideas of what writing really should be all about, rather than the way in which writing is dealt with in the world of print.

for the trAce Online Writing Community and Cheltenham Festival of Literature
October 1999

Hyperactive Fiction and Poetry

New forms of writing on the World-Wide Web

Hypertext and web writing: More examples

Hypertext: Hypertheory

Some comments on and criticisms of hypertext/web writing