Creative Hypertext

My first thought was, "I want to do this."

My second thought was, "Why would anyone want to do this?"

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.

[...] 

What I'm getting at is that The Heist may be essentially unreadable. But that's your call.

--Walter Sorrells

This makes me sad.

I wish The Heist had been better written, because when I clicked on the first link, I really wanted to get an idea of how exactly a hypertext novel works. But the writing was just so childish that I had to force myself to pay attention. There was almost zero character development or explanation, so I had no idea who was who. I couldn't remember the names, and frankly, I didn't care. The prose itself was so stilted and forced that I couldn't take it seriously--though I do hate crime fiction like this. I also felt like the obscenities and sex-talk really took away from the story.

I think I can imagine how the author felt when he first came up with this idea--so inspired that he just had to write, write, and write. But his new idea could have had so much more of an impact if he'd slowed down to revise or even hired a beta reader.

In his introduction, Sorrells talks about how a story like this can be frustrating for both readers and writers. I don't think it has to be that way at all. What about labeling each page with a time? What about changing the background color depending on which storyline you're following? I haven't put that much thought into everything, but I think you see where I'm going. You always need to think of your audience when you write. In a story like this, you may need to go the extra mile to get your message across. It's never the fault of the readers if a story is incomprehensible.

After I got to "THE HEIST STARTS HERE", I think the story became easier to navigate. You could sort of tell which link would take you to the next linear page just by using some judgement. I think I reached the last page--that is, I reached the page that says THE HEIST ENDS HERE a few times. Sometimes I'd hit a page that had no hypertext at all. I wasn't sure what that meant, so I'd just hit the back button.

What I thought was most interesting was he mentioned that, in regular formatting, this story was about 150 pages long, (probably about 40k words). I know I didn't find every single page. I know I didn't read 150 pages of text. But maybe that's okay. Maybe that's simply an unexpected side effect of working with hypertext. Just because something is different doesn't mean it's wrong.

I also noticed that the hyperlinks all ended in numbers. In retrospect, I wonder if that's significant?

kthxbai