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Nearing the end
I’m at the very end of the story I’ve been working on. All that’s really left in terms of writing is the final scene. I’ve been putting all these little stubs of code throughout the story, noting what the reader’s actions were for later without really considering how doing one thing early in the story would affect things down the road… only that it should somehow. So I get to decide that now.
Writing endings in general is tricky, much more so when you have to write maybe three or four for a single story. I think people who say that a story can only have one ending are wrong, given a decent amount of reader agency, but I also think people who promote the idea of more or less limitless endings also don’t have it right. There are… channels? I guess the term could be for it. Sort of general paths a reader can take a character.
I think there’s a dance between what the reader wants and what the author imagines. You have to allow a reader to step on your feet — you know, when the king says, “Go save my daughter,” video games usually let you choose whether you say yes or no. And yet what kind of story would it be if you said no? Something else entirely. The video game solution is for the king to say, “But you must!” until you finally agree. When I write hypertext I find myself handling it by just cutting off the story abruptyl. It’s the authorial equivalent of saying, “You’re going down a path I can’t follow.” The word that comes to mind for these branches is degenerate — in its mathematical sense, I mean.
Anyway, even once I finish writing, I still have a lot of stitching left to do. There’s so much vocabulary that doesn’t really exist for this kind of stuff — stitching seems the right word for it, though. I ended up writing a bunch of flashbacks and didn’t really want to worry about integrating them into the main thread properly — I just wanted to get them written while I could see them in my head. So there’s tricks in that, too.
I’ve been pondering how you’d teach hypertext — what kind of syllabi you would draw up, how you would catalog the necessary craft. Or for that matter how you’d learn to write it. I feel like I’ve stumbled around so much without really systematically thinking about it.
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Endings are always the hardest for me, because in my own life experience stories never end. There’s always more, even after someone dies, life goes on. I’m drawn often towards Serling endings: I’ve shown you one aspect of the character’s life, now let’s zoom out and fade to black. What’s next? I’m sorry, that’s not what my story was about.