Hyperfiction and Org-Mode
I've been interested in parser interactive fiction for a very long time – it's a wonderful, fascinating topic which I was introduced to by one of my favorite books of all time.
The way in which the world is not just represented at the base level of the program as a cloud of points and numbers with no inherent meaning, assembled into trees of containers that are ultimately elided at compile time and cannot be directly manipulated, in such a way that meaning must be arbitrarily constructed on the back of it, but is instead represented using graphs of symbols and relations and rulebooks of events is just captivating. Especially in how this allows the almost seamless intertwining of writing – since writing is, in its essence, just a linear graph of symbols – with the program's world representation in a way that makes the machine almost capable of understanding the semantics of everything. It has a strong overlap with Lisp and symbolic artificial intelligence that's appealing to me.
More than that, parser interactive fiction combines the two things I love doing most in life: writing and programming, things that I often view as intimately related in their nature, the experience of doing them, and how they exercise my mind.
The problem with parser interactive fiction for me is that I'm just not that good at coming up with puzzles (or doing them) – it simply requires too much lateral thinking. More than that, combining programming and writing is just extremely difficult. They are just different enough that the totality of the skill and effort they require is a lot more than they would require alone, and they also have nonlinear effects on each others' difficulty as well, each making the other more difficult – the writing suggests something must be one or the other way, which would be difficult for the programming side to do; the programming requires the writing to be broken up, branched, and oriented around it.
Nevertheless, if I was able to restrict my ambitions, I would probably do pretty well at writing parser interactive fiction. The problem is that I'm very bad at restricting my ambitions – if I'm going to do something, I want to do something big. Visionary. Interesting.
What I've found, however, is that if I break large projects down into small chunks that can be individually completed relatively easily, and actually feel relatively complete and stand-alone when done, but which can steadily build up toward a larger more ambitious project, then I'm able to make a lot more progress. The amount of writing in the "Category" sections of this blog is a testament to that – more than 90,000 words in around 30 days (not counting a few days of breaks for my disability).
In order to make writing that feasible, however, I needed to use hypertext to its utmost potential: a big part of the reason I felt like all of my writing had to be these gigantic projects was due to the limitations of static, essay-oriented writing. Thus, if I had multiple interconnected ideas, the only way I felt comfortable working them out was in a monolithic narrative that wove them together, and if I wanted to use ideas from elsewhere in my work, I felt that I had to briefly reiterate their definitions, which made each such grand narrative need to be relatively self contained. But, conversely, I also often had an overwhelming number of ideas on a topic, often in tension, which led to these essays ballooning to gigantic proportions.
This possibility was partially encouraged by the fact that for a long time all my writing was done locally, not published to HTML or a website, which made hypertext a bit outside the realm of anything I'd thought about, but part of it was the tooling I was using – essentially, Emacs treated as if it were Vim, editing plain text Markdown and using a static site generator to export it. There's really not much room for play there, and linking between things (or finding what to link) is tedious and annoying in such an environment.
Thankfully, the possibilities of org-mode, made possible by its computing environment have completely reinvigorated my writing by solving this problem. This means that composing highly interlinked hypertext bodies of work is completely fluid and trivial. It almost happens at the speed of thought. I've found this to be immensely liberating for my non-fiction work.
Now, lately, I've begun wondering lately how much I can apply this idea to my fiction writing. Using highly hyperlinked text, with the power of org-mode behind it has been a completely transformative experience for my writing in so many ways, and I want to bring that to other parts of my writing. A lot of the same problems apply: I find myself only really capable of completing short stories, but I want to be able to build larger worlds and narratives out of them, and a linear assemblage of short stories just doesn't do the trick for that – the limitations of that are just too great.
At first, I considered taking the classic hypermedia approach: separating each scene, character background, perhaps even event, into separate hypertext nodes and linking them together. The idea behind this was to use hypertext not just to enhance my writing experience, but to significantly change how readers experienced my writing. I god excited about the concept of providing only a set of events, from various perspectives, and various histories and thoughts from various perspectives, all interlinked heavily, and letting the reader navigate through them to determine the narrative and meaning of them. It seemed really interesting, like an extension of some things I'm interested in about post-structuralism.
Instinctively I was a little suspicious of this idea, though, because I'd bounced off of the vast majority of my interactions with such hypertext fiction (usually in the form of Twine games and such). So I started looking into what, if any, literary theory there was on the subject. Eventually, I came across an article that made a very good case for why hyperfiction wasn't pleasant for readers, and that the theories in post-structuralism that seemed to apply were mis-applied in this case, or just totally out of touch. (Nevertheless, I still intend to read several hypertext works: Grammatron, The Unknown, Blue Hyacinth, and the more recent Neon Haze).
As a result, I decided to take a new tack. In my new model for how my hypertext fiction will work, I'll still write short stories, or even whole novellas, as self-contained works with a linear structure. However, I'm going to write them all in the same world, and whenever the paths of various characters cross, even for a moment – even if they aren't named – I'll create a hypertext link out of the sentence describing that their path crossed to the specific part of the other character's story where that crossing happened for them. Likewise, for events that are seen from multiple points of view, maybe I'll have hyperlinks to all the other versions of that event. This way, readers will be able to enjoy a linear, self contained narrative arranged for them by the author, but there will be a meta-narrative (not in the traditional sense, but in the literal sense of a narrative composed out of narratives) operating in the background which they can explore through these chance connections and different perspectives – either going back and reading the whole story the event or chance crossing of paths linked to, or just reading that part in medas res and then moving on to something else.
In order to avoid this being distracting (especially as the number of connections grows), these links will be "hidden" – they'll be styled so that they look identical to regular text, except for the fact that when you hover over them, your mouse turns into a cursor. This way each story can be read as self contained, and readers need not be bothered by the interconnected meta-hyper-narrative aspect unless they're intrigued.
Another interesting thing that falls out of this is that there will be no central entrypoint to the larger narrative of my world, only individual people's perspectives, narratives, and the points of view on certain events that happen in them. Thus, the question becomes, how do I inject the reader into such a data well? I think the only right answer is to randomly select, when they click "ENTER," which complete short story they start out on. Of course, I'll also have to annotate each story with a future history date, and create a secondary sitemap that orders them in a timeline with small excerpts or descriptions, so that those who want more control, or to go to a specific story, can find it, but I think the randomized way of entering the narrative is more true to what it is at heart.
Thus, this is not going to be a set of hyperfictions, but a hypertext story world containing many fictions!