The struggles with the physical and temporal writing spaces are all in the name of getting to the cognitive writing space, a frame of mind where writing takes place. As I said in my introduction to the subject of writing spaces, I conceive of this cognitive space as a kind of internal solitude where an intense focus can take place. It is not a place of total seriousness, of course: a lot of goofing off takes place there, too, just fooling around with word and image and memory and desire (not to mention objects on my desk and looking out the window). But when writers speak of the discipline involved in writing, being able to regularly access this interior space under all sorts of physical, social, and emotional situations is surely one of the most crucial components of that discipline. Doing that makes all the difference between waiting around for inspiration (see "Writing Fictions, Making Texts" for my feelings on "inspiration") to strike and being an actual working craftsperson.
When I can have things the way I want them, my preferred physical and temporal writing spaces are at my desk at home, first thing in the morning. My wife is there, my books are there, my cats are there, my life is there; and most importantly, my best concentration is then. Those circumstances seem to enable me to enter and probe the interior space most readily. In Approaches to Writing, the novelist and historian Paul Horgan describes what would also be a fairly typical morning for me in an ideal situation:
[The working day] starts on awakening, with a sort of bated breath in the thought, if I may put it so. Preparation for the morning's task gets under way in an induced and protected absent-mindedness, as if to allow the work in progress to come clear gradually, so that its daily rebirth suffers no jarring collisions with immediate reality, but establishes its own inner reality from which it will draw conviction. Absurd as it may appear to those in other vocations, any contact with a serious distraction, or obligation elsewhere, may, at this daily moment, disturb a balance already delicate. A phone call is a minor catastrophe and a knock on the door a potential disaster. Until the day's work can actually begin, a frowning selfishness protects all the ingredients of plan, design, idea, and will; and when it begins, it flows forth, if the day is a good one, or it struggles forth, if it is a poor one; but strangely, later, it is difficult to tell by the evidence which pages came from fluent work and which from halting. It is again a reflection of the discipline we have mentioned (Horgan, 10).
This working condition is perhaps not quite so tenuous for me, but it is close. The "induced and protected absent-mindedness" is prone to being crowded out by almost anything from the daily newspaper to the thought that later in the morning I will have to go in to my job. Like many writers--most, I daresay--I do not make my living by writing, so the writing space must be shoehorned into my day somehow. It's a tight fit. It's kind of like putting on my shoes. It I don't get my toes in first, they're pretty hard to get in later. For the time being, all of this is disrupted for me. My writing place and writing time have been dispersed all over campus into all sorts of (formerly) non-writerly activities. It can be very difficult and frustrating to maintain this sort of upon-awakening meditation through all the hustle and bustle of getting ready to leave the house, going to campus, and finding a place to work. Instead of the time between awaking and working being minutes, it can stretch to hours. More often, the day beckons and the work gets crowded out of the morning and put off till evening. Maybe this is temporary--maybe I'll suddenly buy all the hardware and software I could possibly want, and upgrade every time the cutting edge recedes before me. In the meanwhile, a profounder question begs to be answered: what is happening in the interior writing space?
What is true for Nelson in the story is true for me as I write: using a technology changes the user. As I've struggled with first the story and then the theory on this project, a curious pair of thoughts have frequently come to mind. The first is one I've grown used to over the years in writing papers, articles, and even stories--it usually comes as something to the effect of, "I've got to pull this thing together." Until now, that thought has not been followed by any internal disagreement: that is the intent of writing for print, to work with the words and ideas to get them into a single, permanent sequence. But as I worked on the project, the "pull together" thought was virtually always answered by, "No, I've got to blow this thing apart." The image of fireworks kept coming to mind, especially those with multiple explosions: one color explodes in a globe shape, then another color and perhaps a third explode even further. Elsewhere I describe what was probably the single incident that gave me the idea for Nelson's story. From that one anecdote, the story expanded into one told by more than a dozen different narrators. Several years later, when I began to reconceive the story as a hypertext, the original dozen or so sections grew into som eighty or so sections when I decided to make explicit the various webs of images in the story. And finally, as I've rethought the whole process, a web of theory has blossomed from the original story.
"Blowing it apart" is not satisfactory, either, at least not by itself. Conceptually the two urges create an ongoing tension, and it's not one I'm sure I want to resolve. Or rather, I want to resolve it only by incarnating it in the very structure of the work. In his introduction to Writing Space, Jay Bolter argues that
ambivalence must be suppressed as a condition of writing nonfiction for publication in print. An author can take a position and add qualifications, but he or she cannot both take and reject a position in any convincing way. We shall see that an author can do this in the writing space provided by the computer. Indeed, a many-voiced text that is large enough to contain and admit its own contradictions may be the only convincing form of writing in the electronic medium (Bolter 1991, ix).I think he states the case too strongly about not being able to express ambivalence in print--I think it may be more related to the politics of academic publishing than something inherent to the book. But he is entirely to the point about the many-voiced text's appropriateness for the online writing space. The mystery--of life, of human thought--refuses to be solved.
In The Writing Life, Annie Dillard says that
The writer knows his field--what has been done, what could be done, the limits--the way a tennis player knows the court. And like the expert, he, too, plays the edges. That is where the exhilaration is. He hits up the line. In writing, he can push the edges. Beyond this limit, here, the reader must recoil. Reason balks, poetry snaps; some madness enters, or strain. Now, courageously and carefully, can he enlarge it, can he nudge the bounds? And enclose what wild power? (Dillard, p. 69).Probing that area of ambivalence, that tension, is one of the places where the exhilaration is in writing hypertext fiction.
Abstract | Future Directions | Bibliography | Glossary | "Holier Than Thou" | Project Entrance
Initial release: June 10, 1996
Last update: July 30, 1996