Hyper for Hypertext!

This week I took a break from my typical writing routine to try something different, something so groundbreaking and new that I had to explain to every single person I told this project about what it was, exactly, that I was writing. Short stories? Yes, everyone knows one or two of those. Fanfiction? Okay, it's sort of like a short story. But Hypertext? Hold the phone there, buddy; what on earth is a hypertext story?

Well, Imaginary Rhetorical Device Man, I'm glad you asked.
In the process of describing a hypertext story, I explained it as 'a series of photographs no one will ever see in the order they were taken'  'a story written on notecards you throw up in the air and read in a different order every time' and ' a labyrinth out in cyberspace'.  It's a series of events  -- things like text, pictures, music, videos -- strung together by hyperlinks. The idea is that the story is partially created by its author and partially created by its user. When we read a text, we bring our experiences to it and interpret the text through that experience. Hypertext stories bring this to the forefront -- our very experience of the text itself will be different than our freind's, and that is the first thing we will talk about when we discuss the story -- the experience.

I didn't write the story so much as I built it -- I created a map where I wanted all my links to go and then starting carving out bits of trail where someone could stop, take a breather, admire the flowers. Some are paths that lead to more paths and some are paths that lead to dead ends you have to back-button out of.  There's music, some quotes, some pictures. It's not just a story, as I've said it's a stereophonic, mulitmedia event. (Much like this blog!) And not a purely textual event, as I've just described.

You can read the whole thing (or parts of the whole thing) here at Past Lives: A Hypertext Story