I'm suspicious, as a rule, of theoretical blather about
writing, but hypertext fiction is still new to enough people that
The Heist probably deserves a modest bit of prefatory
commentary. I'll try to hold the theory to a minimum.
Basically all I've set out to do here is write a short
noir-flavored crime novel using hypertext techniques. I use the
term "novel" broadly: the amount of writing in this story
equates to about 150 pages of typeset text. But depending on how
you read it, it could end up reading more like a short story or
novella.
A lot of the hypertext fiction written today is arty
literary stuff. Me, I'm a commercial writer. Meaning my goal
generally is to write things that will amuse and divert people.
So The Heist was mostly
written as an experiment to see if I could write something that
was entertaining -- as opposed to self-consciously arty and
"interesting". (Interesting, in this sense, meaning
really goddamn tedious.)
No attempt has been made here to do anything innovative
with the hypertext form...such as it is.
I wrote the bulk of the novel in about a week. This is
way too fast for decent quality control. But then what do you
expect for nothing? So if you run into the occasional misspelled
word or flat scene, put it down to haste. I know that sounds
like a piss-poor excuse for failures of craft (which it is). But
it also happens to be true: The Heist does not represent
my
best work.
So caveat emptor, folks. But I hope you'll read it
generously, which is to say, in the same slap-dash, experimental
spirit that it was written.
Anyway, for those of you unfamiliar with the term, what
is hypertext fiction anyway?
Hypertext fiction is simply fiction written using the sort
of associative techniques made possible by computer technology.
In practice this means that instead of going in a
straight narrative line as you would in a printed novel
(or, for that matter, an epic poem or a country and western
ballad), a hypertext story just spreads out like oil on a pond.
Practically speaking, hypertext works like this: Certain
key words (or other visual items such as pictures or icons), can
be clicked on and will lead to other pages of the text. In other
words, it works just like everything else on the World Wide Web.
My friend Abe Dane (who runs a big commercial web site for
the Hearst Corporation's magazine group) and I were talking about
the Internet
once, trying to come up with a mental model which would help us
make sense of the thing. I seized on the word architecture
-- mostly, I suppose, because it has a magisterial, ponderous
quality to it. "What's the architecture of the Internet?" I
asked,
rhetorically.
"It's a big pile of shit," Abe said. "That's the
architecture."
So, too, hypertext fiction. Hypertext happens in piles
rather
than in the neat stacks we're used to finding in a conventional
printed
story. One thing branches off into another couple of things
which
branch into more things. One scene slides into another. One
character leads to another. You (the reader) can pursue a story
by character
or by scene or by any number of other methods.
Which, as a writer, is frustrating: it has a way of
leading to geometrical complexity.
But this stuff may be even more frustrating for
readers. What I'm getting at is that The Heist may be
essentially unreadable. But that's your call.
All of which is by way of saying that there's no "right"
way to read the story. You can rush through, following a
particular character. You can dawdle and meander, get lost in
the byways. You can pursue "plot"...or not. You can doggedly
track down every link in the entire story. It's more a matter
of muddling than reading in the conventional sense. (I suppose
the term browsing applies, too. It's just that I hate
that
word: it implies a kind of cow-eyed dumbness in the reading
process, and
a trivialization of whatever is being read.)
There are a lot of different ways of constructing a
hypertext story. Sometimes they're written so that you get to
the end of each scene (or sentence or paragraph), you have a
decision to make about which way to go with the
story. In its most trivial manifestation, this approach has the
feel of a computer maze game: "You're in a room. Lying on the
floor are a gun and a knife. Would you like to pick up the gun
or the knife?" You click on one choice or another and off you
go.
I find that approach to be extremely tedious.
Another approach, used in some of the more arty hypertexts
I've looked at, is to have symbolic or obscurely mechanical
choices at
the end of each section. In one fairly interesting story I
read, there were two buttons at the bottom of each section of
text, one labelled TRUTH and the other LIES. After reading each
section, you'd press one button or the other and scoot off to
some other part of the story. An ingenious and interesting idea,
but not particularly useful for something like the The
Heist which has no particular literary pretensions.
So what I've done is just made links from certain names or
phrases that lead associatively to other parts of the story.
Call the Blunder Method.
Clicking on a character's name will either lead to a new thread
within the story or to some kind of background information on
that
character. Clicking on phrases in the body of a page usually
leads to parallel action focusing on a different character.
Generally speaking (though not always) if you click on the last
link on any given
page, it will lead you further down the same thread you've been
following. Some threads dead end. Some of the sub-plots are
fairly well
developed while others are pretty stunted. If you run into a
dead end, use the back-up button on your browser until you reach
a page that leads somewhere.
All this can be confusing. Sometimes you won't be sure
exactly where on the timeline a particular scene is happening.
There are some technical ways I could have fixed this, but I
didn't bother. You'll figure it out, more or less.
The story is designed to be read using a Web browser. It
will look modestly more cool on Netscape, but you shouldn't lose
much if you read it through another browser. To accommodate
various browsers, I've intentionally avoided gratuitous graphical
complexity.
Okay, enough blather. For godsake it's just cops and
robbers.
