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Which way
I am quarrelling with myself about what kind of media I should be working in. Over the past couple days, I’ve been reading The Corner, which is a fantastic book. It’s well-written in general, but what was particularly fascinating to me was the little connections between parts of the story, where a seemingly minor character later gets a story unto him- or herself, or two different characters witness the same events but see them differently. I found myself wishing there was a hypertext edition where I could jump across the chronology of the book, to make these connections explicit. But then I thought: if I were reading this on my computer, I probably would not have gotten this deep into the story in a single sitting — last night I spent about four hours finishing off the book. Reading from a screen just isn’t as compelling and meditative experience for me as it is with a print book.
It’s a conundrum.
I am, for the moment, grappling with it by writing whatever comes to my mind, whether it is hypertext, linear narrative, or anything else, and letting it take me where it will.
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Chris, I would say that your current method of dealing with the situation is the best, even for the long term. There’s no reason why you should limit story by a preferred medium, and I’m a firm believer in “story sets its own form.” I think that your experience in reading The Corner only illustrates that had the author known about hypertext and felt comfortable with it, he surely might have chosen it as the narrative form.