I pretty much just jumped in with both feet when I wrote THE HEIST, not really thinking about it too much before I started. It was the equivalent of trying to write a novel without ever having written a short story. Not necessarily smart. I think I would spend some time giving more thought to what I was trying to do technically and see if I could come up with something that was structurally a bit more elegant.

Q. In one of my interviews Charles Deemer claims that; "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." Do you think that on-line fiction can ever be more than an interesting experiment for the writer rather than the reader?

I suspect Deemer's right. But it's hard to know. My record as a techno-prognosticator is not good. I thought CDs would go the way of the 8-track tape player. I also told a friend of mine back in 1987 that I thought, since DOS was clearly a dead end road, that Microsoft's stock had about topped out. A million dollar error in judgement.

It's going to require more experimentation, that's for sure. I suspect if hypertext fiction ever adds up to much (I mean as a popular rather than an experimental medium), it will be through things along the lines of The Spot -- serialized soap-opera stories written by a team of authors. More of a Hollywood/collective approach than the old fashioned novelist/craftsman method. It's just too much work for people to profitably write good and entertaining stories on a one- off basis.

Q. Do you think it is possible to satisfactorily finish a hypertext fiction novel?

Sure. As satisfactorily as anything else. Emerson wrote something to the effect that art is operating at its highest level when it fades into mystery. Any work of art that's too neat is probably kind of a cheat. There will always be some loose ends. Hypertext fiction just has a way of creating even more loose ends than linear writing.

Of course all art (and commercial fiction, especially) is also about tying up loose ends, about telling us that the world is controllable and that order can be imposed on chaos. I don't see any reason why this shouldn't be true of hypertext, too.

(As a footnote, the serialized story -- the soap opera being the prime example -- never reaches resolution, but there's nothing "unsatisfactory" about this. It's the modus operandi of the form: The whole game in the soap opera is to get you hooked and then never really resolve anything. In that sense, the soap opera might be the most "accurate" form of art yet dreamed up. In the real world, there's no denoument, no riding off into the sunset. You just keep getting up in the morning and stuff keeps happening.)

What I'm saying is that loose ends are just a technical problem: you have to build your links in a sneaky way so that they fold back into the main story...whatever that might be. A story that has no center, no core, is an artistic failure -- however inaccurate a reflection of reality that might be. One of the great errors young artists make is that they think writing should all be fair and above-board. Big mistake. Writing is prestidigitation. If you're not a sneaky son of a bitch, your reader goes to sleep. I'm talking about matters of technique here, incidentally -- suspense, foreshadowing, scene construction, link structure, whatever. You can't change a character's motivation midstream, or suddenly bring Uncle George back from the dead. Psychologically and thematically, a writer has to be pretty scrupulous or the reader gets justifiably angry.

Q. Where do you see the future of hypertext fiction?

Other than my weaselly, inadequate answer to the last question? I wouldn't even begin to guess.

Q. What advice would you give for anyone thinking about writing hypertext fiction?

I'd give the same advice that I give to people who say to me, "Gee, I've always wanted to write books like you do." I have this obnoxious little schtick I do where I get up out of the chair I'm sitting in and I pat the seat and I say, "Here's the first lesson. Put your ass in the chair and keep it there until you've written something." There's nothing mysterious or complicated about it. The shoe commercial's got it right: Just do it.

Practical advice? There's nothing to be intimidated about. Find some geek that knows HTML (or some other hypertext package, if you're not aiming to write for the Web), talk to them long enough to get the jist of the technology (an hour should be God's plenty), and then sit down at your computer and play with it. Play, play, play.

Screwing around is the source of all art.

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@reactivewriting.co.uk

Copyright © L J Winson 1995 - 2000.

This page was last updated 14 Jun 2000.