This would normally be the place in an academic assignment where I would summarize my work and draw some conclusions, however tentative, but conclusions do not seem appropriate to hypertext in general or this project in particular. Indeed, I think now that the project as I conceived it cannot be finished, so instead I'll indicate some future directions.
Let me say first that the story "Holier Than Thou" can be finished, and I intend for it to be. As I've said, notwithstanding its being a "new thing" by virtue of its being a hypertext at all, within the field itself it is on the conservative end of the continuum. In Michael Joyce's terms it is an exploratory rather than a constructive hypertext fiction--it invites readers to explore multiple reading sequences, but not to become co-authors. Even without Joyce's definition of the term, the story is also exploratory in another sense: it is my first exploration of writing hypertext fiction. In all respects it is a transitional work, a story that was uncomfortable in print reconceived for pixel. Finishing it will mean heavily revising the nodes of two narrators, writing one almost from scratch, making minor changes in any number of others, and deciding whether or not to scrap one narrator entirely. It will also likely mean making the web of links denser, as has happened to me continually as I've worked on it--the more I look at it, the more connections I tend to see. Finally, it will mean deciding at some point to close off other avenues of development opened by technological changes, from new HTML specifications to new tricks provided by the latest Web browsers. This has already occurred: I made decisions on two techniques that were introduced while I wrote, to include Netscape's client pull feature but to exclude frames. The temptation to work these in would make it truly unfinishable. Coming from an artistic world framed by print, which demands finished works, I still retain a thick residue of wariness and uneasiness at the thought of an artistic work I can never lay down. This feeling may go away in time, but for now I still have the urge to complete my work on a piece.
As for the overall project, "Writing Lives," it cannot be finished as I've conceived it. I only realized this as I worked on it, not when I began. In the beginning I thought I would come to some definitive statement of what I thought about hypertext fiction at this moment of my life, what I thought this particular interaction of art and technology portended for me as a writer. This has not happened. What has happened instead is that I've erected a scaffold, or network of bare girders, a framework for reconceiving my vocation. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I've temporarily altered something that previously appeared to a whole with a uniform surface, my writing life, into a cantilevered structure, extended various beams and levels from the main body to highlight first that they exist and second that they stay in place only by support from one another. These cantilevered levels consist in examining writing as a technology, a process for making texts; examining the writer's life and how an artistic career fits into it; and examining how both of these are part of an art world including audience, colleagues, and publishers and distributors. In my case, in my initial encounters with writing hypertext fiction, the attempt has been to see how the electronic technologies through which hypertext is currently instantiated alter this architecture. Hypertext's newness and strangeness provoke a useful distancing, causing me not only to step back and see the printed medium as merely one--rather than the only--technology for distributing writing, but more importantly to see writing itself as a technology, to temporarily reverse its age-old interiorization and see it again as the shaping and forming tool it once was.
Although he was talking about truly interactive hypertexts, Joyce's constructive hypertexts rather than the exploratory ones still most common on the Web, Jay Bolter could also have been describing "Writing Lives" when he said "for writers of the new dialogue, the task will be to build, in place of a single argument, a structure of possibilities" (Bolter 1991, 119). The structure of possibilities I've built includes several areas in which I expect to be developing my thoughts for a long time. I think the most important of these is what I have called here the cognitive space, that inward-looking solitude where I turn to write. I have already indicated some of the changes I perceived in writing my first, exploratory fiction, particularly in trying to conceive writing that diverges into multiple paths rather than converges upon one. That is just the beginning. As the computer more and more radically alters the way I write day to day, the way I put texts together from all the wordplay and scraps of stories and readings of new texts just posted to the Web yesterday, alters my ability and even inclination to add visual and aural elements, and enables interactivity with writers, readers, and readers-becoming-writers, it will more and more radically alter my concept of not only what writing is but also my concept of the mind so closely identified with this most personal of technologies. What Walter Ong says in comparing writing to playing a musical instrument can equally be applied in moving from the "natural" or "traditional" technology of print to the "artificial" technology of the computer:
The fact is that by using a mechanical contrivance, a violinist or an organist can express something poignantly human that cannot be expressed without the mechanical contrivance. To achieve such expression of course the violinist or organist has to have interiorized the technology, made the tool or machine a second nature, a psychological part of himself or herself. This calls for years of "practice," learning how to make the tool do what it can do. Such shaping of a tool to oneself, learning a technological skill, is hardly dehumanizing. The use of a technology can enrich the human psyche, enlarge the human spirit, intensify its interior life (Ong, 83).
Abstract | Bibliography | Glossary | "Holier Than Thou" | Project Entrance
Initial release: June 10, 1996
Last update: August 2, 1996