A Reactive Interview with
Walter Sorrells
 


Hypertext fiction comes in all shapes and sizes in The Heist Walter Sorrells goes back to the tried and tested formula of the crime novel. In this latest edition of the Reactive Interviews we talk to Walter about the trials and tribulations of moulding the classic crime novel into an interactive on-line experience. Walter's latest book is Will to Murder while his first book Power of Attorney was nominated last year for the Edgar Award for best original paperback by the Mystery Writers of America . His next book Cry for Justice will be out in the US this summer.

Q. As an author how different do you feel your approach was to writing hypertext fiction from someone who approached it from a more theoretical position?

Well, I confess to having a weakness for theory, myself. But good theory usually makes for bad art.

When I sat down to write THE HEIST, I very consciously used a classic crime novel type, the caper, as my starting point. I suppose this was an exercise in, what...genre-bending or something. What I mean is that I wanted to take a very proven type of story, one that works really neatly in linear text, and see how it worked in the context of a non-linear form. So there was actually a bit of theoretical engine under the hood of this project. Maybe more importantly, a lot of hypertext fiction is self-consciously arty...and hugely boring; so I wanted to poke a thumb in the eye of the high-tone approach by using the grungiest, least respectable, most blue-collar form I could think of. In other words I wanted it to be light-hearted, accessible and entertaining.

I'm not terribly sure THE HEIST worked out to be one iota less boring than a lot of the academic pablum I've read, however.

That said, any artistic project ultimately comes down to nuts and bolts issues. In this case, there are the basic issues that any storyteller has to deal with: what are my characters like? what happens in the story? and so on. Beyond that, of course, there's the trickiness of the medium. The novel is a pretty well explored form; hypertext is not. Nobody's really figured out what works well and what doesn't. So once you start banging your face against those technical problems, theory recedes pretty damn rapidly. (If it doesn't, you're not engaged in story-telling; you're merely illustrating an idea about story-telling. The LitCrit types will tell you this is still art. They may be right, of course...but who gives a shit.)

Q. How did you first approach the construction of your hypertext story? (e.g. story-line,characters etc.) and did this approach differ from the way you would normally write a story?

I read a bunch of other stories -- studied them from a technical perspective -- and tried to figure out what kinds of hypertext techniques I could use in the context of THE HEIST.

So far, so good. But I also wanted to make sure that whatever I did played to my strengths as a writer. I excel, I think, at dialogue, scenecraft, suspense and character rendering -- none of which were terribly important in most of the hypertext fiction I read. The most interesting hypertext things I'd read were kind of elegaic or poetic or associative in nature -- qualities that, for good or ill, aren't high on my hit parade.

Additionally, the linear form is well adapted to conveying a sense of time: each sentence moves the story forward temporaily Hypertext doesn't work comfortably that way. So I had to come up with things what I call "canebrakes" and "bottlenecks" -- techniques for channelling the reader through a series or grouping of links in such a way that reader's sense of a timeline isn't destroyed.

I'm not sure, incidentally, that my solutions to these problems were terribly effective.

Pretty much everyone can tell a story -- at least a simple one. It's like telling a friend about an event that happened during your day: this happened and then this happened and then this happened. That natural sense of conveying time that you have when using the spoken word translates fairly easily to print. But not to hypertext.

Q. What were the main problems/advantages you found writing hypertext fiction compared to linear forms of narrative?

I kind of got into the disadvantages earlier. It's hard to tell a linear story without using what I consider to be an extremely tedious gimmick, of ending each section with a link and just sort of saying: "Would you like to pick up the GUN or the KNIFE?"

There are two reasons I consider this to be a shitty gimmick. One is that it's a kind of false choice. You can't give a reader a bona fide choice at the end of every page or paragraph. If you do, the story becomes geometrically complex (or you resort to dopey tricks like saying OOPS, YOU JUST KILLED YOURSELF! on every third or fourth link). So what ends up happening is that you actually have two or three or four plot lines that run kind of parallel, and the universe of real choices becomes very small. If I know I'm being manipulated, I'd rather read Stephen King. At least he's not disingenuous about what he's doing.

Anyway, that little diatribe aside... What I did was sprinkle links throughout the text. I basically let you travel through the story from the point of view of any character -- with some little gussets and flashbacks and footnotes thrown in. A solution, incidentally, that I wasn't terribly happy with.

The good thing about it was that I was able to look at the story from inside of a bunch of different characters' heads. So, ideally, the suspense story serves the characters rather than the characters being slaves to the suspense plot.

Anyway, having tried to tell a suspense story (a very linear type of form) using hypertext, I'd have to say the advantages are to be found elsewhere. Maybe in more poetic forms where association (of ideas, of themes, of experiences) is more important than lucidity.

I don't mean that in a pejoritive sense. I think anybody in the LitCrit community is well enough aware of the traps we can fall into looking for "clarity of vision."

In summary? Honestly the disadvantages (for me, at least) piled up a good bit higher than the advantages. Maybe a lot of that comes from the fact that I've spent the last fifteen years of my life trying to master the linear form of writing. My eyes may not be fresh enough.

Q. Do you feel the technology needed to construct hypertext fiction interferes with or obstructs the creative process?

Nope. That's like asking if brushes interfere with the process of painting. Sure it's easier to be a painter today when you can buy Windsor & Newton pthalo blue in a tube than it was to be a painter in the 16th Century, when you had to grind and mix your own paints out of rocks and linseed oil.

But there are advantages to grinding paint, too. It gives you a familiarity with your medium. Likewise, dicking around with your links, de-bugging things and doing all the crap you have to go through to get your story working right in hypertext is part of the discipline of the art. You're actually learning something, seeing something when you go through that exercize.

McCluhan's formulation that the medium is the message has become a contemporary cliche. It's, patent horseshit, of course... But media and message are terribly intertwined. So struggling with the medium is part of what makes art more interesting than dentistry. But more important than that, it's within this envelope of creative struggle that art makes its most profound breakthroughs.

Q. How much feed back have you received from people who have read 'The Heist' and will this effect the way you write in the future?

A woman wrote me last week saying that her dogs didn't like THE HEIST. Apparently she was laughing so hard that she woke them up.

I've gotten some comments, but nothing that would really change how I would write my next hypertext piece. I would be more likely to react to my own sense that THE HEIST had some pretty huge shortcomings that I'd like to fix next go round.

Part 2

Walter Sorrells
walter@mindspring.com
Editor, The Mystery Zone

Comments and responses to any of the interviews in the series can be sent to me at leo@innotts.co.uk

Copyright © L J Winson 1995, 1996,1997,1998. This page was last updated 08 February 1998 17:22:07 .