Abstract

. . . what really happens, of course, is that I do all of these things and more in their time and place.

All what things? you may fairly ask, since I do not know exactly what you may have read before arriving at this point. Beginning with where we are right now, in the map below, the file you're currently reading is the node in red labeled "Abstract." The "things" I referred to a moment ago are the writing "lives" described--no, hinted at--in the five nodes at the top of the diagram, all pointing to this node. According to what you've read thus far, you may want to click on those nodes and read them before going on with this one. Or maybe not.

Figure 1

Each of these five texts is a beginning, a first attempt to tease out the meanings woven into the title "Writing Lives." I use the plural because I base it on my life as a writer and that life, more now than ever, feels plural. One source of that feeling is that I consider myself a fiction writer, but one who is also sometimes interested in criticism and theory. But a more intense source of that feeling these days is that, like every other writer, I've always written with print publication in mind; now, like a growing minority of writers, I write with electronic publication in mind, too. Specifically, my interest is not in printed fiction transferred to the screen, but in hypertext, a form of writing that, while not necessarily computer-based, has the computer as its currently most practicable medium of presentation. The more I read hypertext and read about it, and, more crucially, the more I struggle with writing it, the more I feel myself artistically divided. I have ideas best suited to printed, sequential fiction; I have others more suited to nonsequential hypertext.

To seriously confront the new electronic writing technologies is to reassess what it means to be a writer. I work with words. At the same time I recognize, as I indicated in the five nodes in the map in Figure 1, that writing is not just working with words. That in itself is not a revelation. Still, in the end, words are the tools I use, the signs. But now, having followed a trail whose faint traces I first saw five or six years ago when I encountered the word hypertext, I've come to a fork in the road. On the one hand there is the working with words, the making that gives me an almost visceral satisfaction; on the other there is the new tool, alluring because it enables hitherto undreamt of ways of making new things, but also troubling because it not only employs text as I've always thought of it but also demands what Jay Bolter has termed a "visual rhetoric" (Bolter 1996) The temptation is to blurt out "But I don't have one! I'm a writer!"--except for a quiet inner voice that says "Or do I?"

I'm not worried that, like Frost's famous traveller, "I shall be telling this with a sigh/Somewhere ages and ages hence." I expect I can flit back and forth between the two roads when I want so I don't have to regret the one not taken. But that flitting back and forth is the crux of the problem, the reason for the reassessment that must take place, for now I get ideas for two different media. When I set out to be a writer some twenty years ago that second road was simply not there. Now it undeniably is there and I must reconsider everything in light of it. What I have done in this project is to begin writing hypertext fiction, a story entitled "Holier Than Thou," and monitor that process thinking all the while about my writing lives--print and electronic, creative and critical--and how they interact with the new tools and media. Broadly speaking, I've focussed on three areas:

• Writing as making. By this I refer to what I consider to be the main components of writing, especially fiction writing but to a lesser extent critical writing, and how those metamorphose as I handle these new tools. I've hinted at some of these components in the five nodes in Figure 1 above, but will revisit them in more detail.
  
  
• Writing space, or writing in the context of the writer's life. To write I not only have to set aside a physical space in my home or office, but a temporal one in my schedule and a cognitive one in my mind. Electronic technologies come at a price that greatly affects where and when I can work, and this undoubtedly has implications for reaching that inner solitude where writing takes place. Then, too, those new technologies beckon with many possibilities for altering the very concept of writing as a solitary occupation.
  
  
• The writing community, or the "art world" of writing. As sociologist Howard Becker has noted, the production of any artistic work takes places in the context of its art world. Beyond the individual writers lies a vast infrastructure of publishers, distributors, readers, and other writers. Networked publication and communication cannot help but change this world.

Figure 2 below is an image map that shows, on a broad scale, the overall structure of the project. In the center, the red node is the creative work in progress, the hypertext fiction "Holier Than Thou." Surrounding it, the blue nodes are the three areas described above, a metafictional space, the writer watching himself writing. Within each of these four nodes, in green, are smaller subtopic nodes. And finally, the nodes in black that form a box around the main content nodes provide a navigational infrastructure enabling readers to approach topics in different ways; for example, the bibliography provides links via cited authors, and so on. I should state here that the arrowed lines give only the most general indication of the number of links between nodes, and no indication of the links within them--it is the view of a landscape from the airplane, not the automobile. The story alone has some 80 nodes and 350-400 internal links and has its own separate map; additionally there are many arrival and departure links between the story and the critical material surrounding it.

Figure 2

What's left out of this map is something that academic assignments require but hypertexts tend to subvert: conclusions. The writer can always add another node or make the web of links between existing nodes denser. Or, in a truly interactive hypertext (which the Web is not), other writers can alter the existing structure. For this project I've tried to strike a compromise with a section called "Future Directions," which is reachable from links in the Navigation menu at the end of the major topics. There I indicate some provisional conclusions, but more importantly what I think needs more development. What I've done thus far is erect the structure of a thought experiment, with my own vocation as the data. Since the vocation is writing, the data will change piece by piece as I write my way through the new technology; but since the technology is changing, too, even faster than I can write, there is no fixed point on which I can lay my finger and say, Here, here's the conclusion. In discussing hypertext, the philosopher Michael Heim notes about our current age that, "Information is abundant but without any fixed center around which to organize it. Our task is to hold onto the anchor of our own experience to find meaning in the sea of information" (Heim, 40).

Navigation

Abstract | Bibliography | Glossary | "Holier Than Thou" | Project Entrance

Version Notes

Initial release: April 7, 1996
Last update: August 1, 1996