=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-1628/nht_paper_2
|storemode=property
|title=Thoughts About Writing An Exciting Hypertext
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1628/nht_paper_2.pdf
|volume=Vol-1628
|authors=Mark Bernstein
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/ht/Bernstein16a
}}
==Thoughts About Writing An Exciting Hypertext==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1628/nht_paper_2.pdf
THOUGHTS ABOUT WRITING AN EXCITING HYPERTEXT
Mark Bernstein
Eastgate Systems, Inc.
134 Main Street
Watertown MA 02472 USA
+1 (617) 924-0044
bernstein@eastgate.com
ABSTRACT and the once-royal women of the doomed city wait to which
Decline And Fall is a Storyspace-style hypertext novel, a school victor each will be enslaved2. Euripides wrote The Trojan Women
story based loosely on The Trojan Women. Its goal was not to be in 415 BCE. Nearly five hundred years later, Seneca revisited the
good, but rather to be exciting – to make an argument that subject in his Troades of 54CE, drawing as well on Euripides
hypertext can be coherent, consistent, and possibly fun. These are Hecuba, written around 424 BCE. All describe the lamentation of
some notes of what I learned from the effort. the former royal family of conquered Troy as they face what
cannot be faced amid the ruins of their palace.
I laugh, when those who at the Spear are bold
Keywords And vent'rous, if that fail them, shrink and fear
What yet they know must follow, to endure
Storyspace, hypertext, hypermedia, literature, fiction, Exile, or ignominy, or bonds, or pain,
education, design, implementation, support, history of The sentence of thir Conquerour:
computing, maps, links. This is now Our doom. (Paradise Lost II.204-209)
1.“NO MAN BUT A BLOCKHEAD EVER The plays do not conform to modern taste – they have too little
WROTE, EXCEPT FOR MONEY.” drama and too many loose ends – though Berlioz’ Les Troyens
A number of critics have conjectured that hypertext is inherently and Michael Cacoyannis’s film of The Trojan Women (with
lyrical [31] or postmodern [24] [17], that it resists the familiar Katharine Hepburn as Hecuba, Vanessa Redgrave as
Andromache, and Geneviève Bujold as Cassandra) are notable.
narrative pleasures that attend print [6] [7]. I disagree [3]. My
argument would, admittedly, be more convincing if we could The Trojan Women assumes axiomatically that women have no
point to a wider range of dramatic and exciting hypertexts. The agency. For Polyxena and Cassandra, this is the dramatic premise:
pursuit of the hypertext potboiler is unlikely to generate either Polyxena cannot be saved and Cassandra cannot be believed.
literary prestige or great sums of money; its neglect is not That’s who they are. What might happen, though, if those less
surprising. afflicted by the gods tried to do something, even if all they can
One familiar approach to making hypertext stories exciting is to manage is flight?
make them into games, asking the reader to participate as (or on
behalf of) one of the characters [26]. Games have proved
successful. At times, though, the player’s concerns overshadow
the characters, and the position of the story1 in the game has of 2
course been famously controversial. The arguments I have termed Compare Psalm 137:
“My Friend, Hamlet,” moreover, cast doubt on whether games By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when
make sense when the story is inflexible: let a sensible person like we remembered Zion.
you or me into a tragedy, and everything is likely to collapse. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.
In Decline and Fall, I set out to tell an exciting story in a full- For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song;
throated hypertext, and to do so without offering any likelihood and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us
that the reader’s choices will change how things turn out. The one of the songs of Zion.
choices matter –readings may be very different – but Troy always How shall we sing the LORD'S song in a strange land?
falls. If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.
If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my
2.THE TROJAN WOMEN mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.
Decline and Fall is (very roughly) based on The Trojan Women, Remember, O LORD, the children of Edom in the day of
an account of the aftermath of the Trojan War. Troy has fallen, Jerusalem; who said, Rase it, rase it, even to the foundation
thereof.
1
O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he
Following [4], I use “story” to refer to events that occur in the be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us.
fictive world, and “plot” to describe how an author arranges those Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against
events. the stones.
3.THE SCHOOL STORY Senneterre is not here “great battle chief of the fierce
For a decade, we’ve been talking about hypertext tragedy and bowmen of the Northern Hardwood Forest,” as
we’re not much further along. It’s time to try something else. Professor Courvason chooses to render her courtesy
Why not melodrama? title, but Lady Oakton.
Melodrama was always a suspect quality for modernism because To us, The Country was simply where we lived. The
it was so readily (and frequently) deployed in the service of forest and the desert, the grand old houses, the beggars,
bourgeois sentiment and conservative cant. Postmodernism picked and the colonial gallows were simply the world as it
up the story again in film; in print, postmodernists grabbed old always had been.
stories to break them over their knee. [10]. Two conspicuous We will proceed (in one reading) to a place where we might
refuges for plot remain. One is genre fiction, and indeed the expect to end: with our protagonist on the dormitory roof, holding
shelves of the App Store are filled with adaptations of detective a rifle, about to be killed by a SWAT team. Still, before we can
mysteries, dating romances, adventure romances, hero quests, and climb those ancient gables, we may need to establish the setting or
vengeance tales. invoke our muse. Even in exposition, we can create tension by
The other sanctuary is Young Adult fiction, a marketing term playing with and against convention. We have a very English
which has evolved, in contemporary usage, to denote stories with school but this is not England: to make London serve for Troy is
plots3. The School Story lends itself well to The Trojan Women: very hard work [28]. We have denaturalized a setting which the
in particular, both are necessarily fixed in place. The School Story following lexia will work hard to renaturalize and problematized
necessarily has a large cast, and this naturalizes if it does not solve things which the kids will take for granted. Even prefatory
the problem that clearly vexed the ancient playwrights: if there are exposition can create tension, provided it does its work and gets
a million tragedies in the naked, ruined city, how do we out of the way. The audience wants to know what’s going to
acknowledge their multiplicity? happen [20].
We have read lots of school stories. The form was enormously Once that’s done, of course, we can generate whatever momentum
popular in the nineteenth century, when it provided a window for we require by showing a point-of-view character who wants
the British working class into a hidden world [27]. If Tom something urgently. Trish Parker would very much like to live a
Brown’s School Days is not universally read today, Harry Potter little longer, though she knows she won’t. She shares Polyxena’s
is. A setting flexible enough to accommodate Michael Chabon’s predicament:
Wonder Boys, Jo Walton’s Among Others, Anita Shreve’s Of course, I have to admit
Testimony and Dorothy Sayer’s Gaudy Night might stretch to I'd have liked to live a little longer
accommodate the children of Troy. I mean there's a lot I don't know yet.
Our point is to generate excitement even though we know Like: why do guys insist on driving?
(approximately) what is going to happen. (The first sentence of And how come they call on Friday to ask you out
The Hunger Games begins “When I wake up;” we already know for Friday night?
how the story will turn out, though there are 1,193 pages to go.) And why do guys hate to get dressed up?
The nineteenth century school story ends in graduation, the How come they don't like to talk on the phone?
twentieth century school story ends in the dissolution of the Why do guys drink out of the milk carton?
school. Decline and Fall has one beginning, and essentially one And how come they like to play air guitar?
end; what matters is what happens in between. Why is a guy who sleeps around a stud
but a girl who does is a slut? [8]
4.STORYSPACE 3
Decline and Fall is a traditional Storyspace-style hypertext, made A very sharp reader, seeing this, might sense the tension that
up of nodes and links. It runs to about 90,000 words, in about 375 Polyxena seems to be appearing out of place, outside the position
writing spaces. she holds in the plays. Is this incidental, or purposeful? Is the
Storyspace 3 extends Storyspace to include the semantics of identification wrong? These implicit interpretive theories must be
sculptural hypertext [23] [5]. As in Storyspace, links may be held in abeyance, and they are likely to remain in suspense until
deactivated by guard fields, which are now generalized predicates we encounter Polly Xena, either in the full flush of unwonted
on the state of the reading. In addition, writing spaces may prosperity or, in other readings, already green in memory.
themselves be guarded by predicates, called requirements, and Other readers (O wicked sons!) won’t see the allusion, or seeing
may change the state of the hypertext by performing actions when will not care. They want to know how Trish Parker is going to get
visited [21] [22]. Storyspace 3 also offers a simple stretchtext out of this mess, or in any case they want to see what happens to
facility. her. They want to know how this happened in a fancy colonial
prep school, and what’s going to be done about it.
5. ONCE UPON A TIME
We begin with exposition. Most of Decline and Fall is told in third person, present tense, an
energetic mode that also helps finesse time shifts.
Because I am writing in English, I have replaced our
traditional titles and forms of address with their rough 6.AND THEN…
equivalents in European tradition. My classmate Linnea Incident is exciting. Desire is exciting. Conflict is exciting. And
so is the puzzle of robotic hypertext, a dual reading where we try
to understand what’s happening and try also to understand what
3 this machine is doing. Are we reading yet?
YA fiction is poorly understood. It’s not chiefly about an
absence of sex [14] [29] or violence [9] [13]. Some incidents are inherently energetic. Raymond Chandler’s
famously suggested that, when he found himself stuck in a scene,
he could always arrange to have someone walk in holding a gun. links are recorded in the trajectory and can take actions that
David Mamet suggested that the Hollywood romance is simply change the reading state, moreover, stretchtext can be used, as it is
the progressive unveiling of the heroine, and that’s reliable, too in Twine, to offer readers a sense of choice [12].
[19]. In part because I’ve been arguing that recurrence is not an error
Even in repose, dialog is exciting [18]. Interrogations are for so many years [1], Decline and Fall largely forgoes strict
especially exciting [16]. What has not been made sufficiently recurrence and avoids conspicuous cycles. There remains a good
clear is that dialog offers interesting opportunities for deal of implicit recurrence, both through reference to what
hypertextuality, and interrogation really lets hypertext take over. happened in the story-past and in foreshadowing what will happen
So, too, does dialogue where the parties are speaking at cross- in the story-future. Because the account is not chronological, both
purposes, especially when incredulity is in the air. Cassandra, who history and prophecy often serve to recall and recapitulate (and
sees the future but whom no one will believe, was born for sometimes to reinterpret) what a reader has already seen. (The
hypertext. ancients knew what they were doing when they invented
Foreshadowing is interesting. Allusion is interesting as well. I Cassandra, a prophet who nobody believes and who can therefore
have emphasized here the challenge of excitement, of propelling say whatever needs saying without the least risk to continuity.
the reader across the chasm that separates one writing space from
the next, but we also need to distract and relieve the reader,
8.UNIT TESTING A STORY
Decline and Fall isn’t a large novel, but it’s fairly large as a
giving them something to look at (or think about) beyond the
hypertext fiction. Even with one starting point, on ending, and a
horrors of war. We may be beset by ignorant armies, but once in a
preference to avoid cycles, the network and underlying state
while we need to remember that comfortable old land of dreams –
machine is complex. What mechanical assistance can the system
so various, so beautiful, so new.
lend an author wrestling with the network?
7.BUT THERE WAS ONE THING THEY First, it’s fairly easy to identify a number of common blunders.
HAD FORGOTTEN Tinderbox agents [2] can identify passages that lack inbound links
The reader brings to a school story the memory of other school (and so are unreachable) and those with no outbound links (and so
stories they have read, or heard about, or have seen adapted for end the reading). The syntax for changing the game state
film or television. Tom Brown plays rugby, Nicola Marlow plays $Tags(/me)=$Tags(/me)+”otters”
stickball, Harry Potter plays Quidditch, Ender plays The Game.
is easily confused with the syntax for modifying a note after it has
The school story doesn’t require a scene on the playing fields, but been visited.
when we find ourselves there, we know where we are.
$Tags=$Tags+”otters”
Even outside genre convention, conventional episodes
communicate where we appear in the story arc while presenting Again, a simple syntax scan can identify suspicious actions.
an opportunity to play with the reader’s expectation. When our More interesting, we can use Markov processes to model reader
hero changes clothes, we know they are also shifting identities trajectories through the hypertext. This proved surprisingly useful
and commencing a new approach to dealing with the world. When for tracking down errors that led, for example, to unwanted dead
our kids have built a small zone of comfort and refuge in the ends. This remains far below the sophistication that Stotts and
wilderness – whether smoking pipeweed in the ruins of Isengard, Furuta implemented back in 1989, but it’s not been attempted in
building shelters with Ralph and Piggy in the Pacific, or many writing tools since [30] .
improvising running water in the jungle of The Naked And The
Dead, we know that this pastoral pleasure will end, and soon we 9.ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
will again be on the run, our heroes isolated, and we are all the I am grateful to Mark Anderson, Bill Bly, Em Short, Bruno Dias,
eleven o’clock speech. and Paul Czege for discussions on topics touched on here. John
Timeshift provides an ample source of episodic hypertextuality. Clute explained the hero’s change of clothing and lent me an
We can begin with Trish and her rifle on the roof, the moment ending, several years before I began the story.
when everything goes to hell. Or, we can begin at the start of the
school year, unpacking our bags and telling our chums about our
10.REFERENCES
summer vacation. The summer after the revolution, the summer of
the Occupation, is bound to be worth talking about. We might [1] Bernstein, M. 1998. “Patterns of Hypertext”. Hypertext
begin instead last summer, at a country-house party where ‘98. 21-29.
political parents worry about the rebels and uninvited guests [2] Bernstein, M. 2003. “Tinderbox”.
behave badly. Sequence matters, but different sequences need not
disrupt coherence or continuity [11] [15]. [3] Bernstein, M. 2010. “Criticism”. Proceedings of the 21st
ACM conference on Hypertext and hypermedia. 235-244.
Stretchtext also provides plenty of opportunity for local
hypertextuality. Passages can expand to explain themselves, or to [4] Bernstein, M. 2009. “On Hypertext Narrative”. ACM
problematize and question what they appear to assert. In free Hypertext 2009.
indirect discourse, the narrator speaks in her own voice from a [5] Bernstein, M. and Greco, D. 2002 Card Shark and
character’s point of view [25]: Thespis: exotic tools for hypertext narrative. In First
It was the abode of noise, disorder, and impropriety. Person, N. Wardrip-Fruin and P. Harrigan, eds. MIT Press.
Nobody was in their right place, nothing was done as it [6] Birkerts, S. 1994 The Gutenberg Elegies. Faber and Faber.
ought to be.
[7] Carr, N. G. 2010 The shallows : what the Internet is doing
Stretchtext can invite yet a second voice into the discussion, to our brains. W.W. Norton.
perhaps challenging the initial observation. Because stretchtext
[8] Mee, C. L. “The Trojan Women: a love story”.
[9] Collins, S. 2008 The Hunger Games. Scholastic Press.
[10] Coover, R. 1969 The Babysitter. In Pricksongs & descants;
fictions, ed. Dutton.
[11] Egan, J. 2010 A visit from the Goon Squad. Alfred A.
Knopf.
[12] Short, E. 2016. “Beyond Branching: Quality-Based,
Salience-Based, and Waypoint Narrative Structures”.
[13] Grant, M. 2010 Feed. Orbit.
[14] Hornby, N. 2007 Slam. G.P. Putnam’s Sons.
[15] Egan, J. 2012. “Black Box”. The New Yorker.
[16] Oates, J. C. 2015. “You Will Get Yours: (review of Harry
Brandt, The Whites)”. The New Yorker.
[17] Kakutani, M. 1997. “Never-Ending Saga”. The New York
Times Magazine. 40-41.
[18] Leonard, E. 2007 10 Rules of Writing. William Morrow.
[19] Mamet, D. 1996 Make-believe town : essays and
remembrances. Little, Brown.
[20] Mamet, D. 1998 Three Uses Of The Knife: on the nature
and purpose of drama. Columbia University Press.
[21] Bernstein, M. 2016 Getting Started With Hypertext
Narrative. Eastgate Systems, Inc.
[22] Bernstein, M. “Storyspace 3”. Hypertext 2016. in press.
[23] Millard, D. E., Hargood, C., Jewell, M. O., and Weal, M.
J. 2013. “Canyons, Deltas and Plains: Towards a Unified
Sculptural Model of Location-based Hypertext
Proceedings of the 24th ACM Conference on Hypertext
and Social Media”. HT ‘13. 109-118.
[24] Miller, L. 1998. “www.claptrap.com”. New York Times
Book Review. 43.
[25] Moretti, F. 2007 Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models
for a Literary History. Verso.
[26] Murray, J. 1997 Hamlet On The Holodeck: The Future of
Narrative in Cyberspace. The Free Press.
[27] Rose, J. 2001 The intellectual life of the British working
classes. Yale University Press.
[28] Rosoff, M. 2004 How I live now. Wendy Lamb Books.
[29] Rowell, R. 2013 Fangirl.
[30] Stotts, P. D. and Furuta, R. 1989. “Petri-net based
hypertext: Document structure with browsing semantics”.
ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems. 7, 1, 3-
29.
[31] Tosca, S. P. 2009 The Lyrical Qualities of Links. In
Reading Hypertext, D. G. Mark Bernstein, ed. Eastgate
Systems, Inc.