Content Adventures

To Write in Lines or Circles

James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake begins and ends in the middle of a sentence—the same sentence. The beginning of the sentence is at the end of the book, and the ending of the sentence is at the beginning—making the novel a continuous loop.

With today's hypertext, Joyce could have made his novel an actual continuous loop by publishing it on the Web and, rather than establishing a beginning or end, merely allowing the reader to jump to any point in the novel and begin from there. . . .

But would he have wanted to?

We've only begun to explore and discuss the Web as a medium for the written word.

Journals and diaries have sprung up everywhere, as have sites promising "interactive" poetry and novels. Online classes seem to be the next wave of education, and writing courses seem especially well-suited to the Web. Zines (the Web's informal news sites) on a wide range of topics, as well as personal Web sites containing self-published writings of various qualities, seem about to revolutionize publishing.

In the business world, many (especially writers) say that Web content has not been given the precedence it deserves—while at the same time studies are conducted to see how a surfer's eyes glance through a page, discovering what she reads and how much.

So, what exactly makes writing for the Web different from writing for print?

A great many things, actually, and in this column we will attempt to explore Web—writing's idiosyncrasies—and the different kinds and presentations of written works that the Web affords—one by one. Links to example sites will be included along the way.

"The World Wide Web and the Internet are not linear, they are holistic."
—Leonard Schlain, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess

This "holistic" quality of the Web is behind the many differences between writing for print—which is mainly linear—and writing for the Web, which can be any combination of circular, linear, or tangential. Unlike the printed page, each Web page is potentially interactive with almost all other pages, and almost every page is accessible to anyone with a computer and an ISP.

Hypertext allows the Web surfer to jump quickly between the Web's millions of pages. With the short attention span this creates, the reader seems like a hyperactive child.

The hyperactive Web child tends to scan, rather than read, pages. To grab her attention, the written Web word needs to be shorter and catchier than its printed counterpart—or else your article, story, diary, or poem will be quickly passed by for the next flashy, memorable item.

This becomes especially important in Web articles, for which usability gurus of course recommend:

• A great, response-oriented lead
• Well chosen and catchy headings and subheads
• Short, punchy, one-idea paragraphs
• Writing in general that is short, light, and witty
• Where appropriate: tables, lists of points, and key phrases styled in bold

Luckily, the hyperactive Web child can potentially become randomly well-educated. Hypertext can augment your text with huge blocks of knowledge, rather like mega-footnotes, or definitions, or tangential meanderings. In creative works, this allows texts to be non-linear, like some interactive novels.

Interactivity also allows texts to interrelate with other media such as graphics, animation, and sound clips. Sounds and images can also be placed alongside written words to enhance their meaning. One example of this is Flash poetry.

The "holistic" Web also allows the "whole" world to interact with itself. Writers can collaborate on and critique each other's works (in interactive novel and poetry sites) and teach each other writing techniques (in online classes). This interactivity can even take the form of randomly generated poems—a kind of interactive collaboration with the computer. One common interactive story type, interactive fiction, is the online version of the old "choose your own adventure" books.

The Web also provides a wider, more easily accessible audience for written works. Two great examples of this are zines, or informal newsletters, which if printed would have limited geographical circulation, and journals/diaries, which in print would either be private or formally bound instead of updated periodically as events happen.

Publishing written works on the Web is far easier than getting works printed. Just as anyone can read a Web page, almost anyone can create one. Of course, there are no quality controls—marginal writing is linked alongside stellar writing—making the medium at once more formal than the spoken word and more informal than the printed word.

What does this mean to us?

Will stories become circular and amorphous rather than linear? Will the concept of single authorship be drowned out by a million voices clamoring in collaboration?

Will the general quality of Web works always be more hit-and-miss than that of printed works? And do we want to curb this avenue for informal exploration?

These questions are far from being answered. Some think the answers will not be as revolutionary as Internet soothsayers once believed-that the linear story will always hold precedence in the human psyche.

Joyce didn't have the option of hypertextual Web publishing, so he used the technique at hand to achieve a continuous effect. Perhaps our generation believes in the primacy of the linear story because our psyches are too adult to warm to the scattering of hypertext at this late date. Surely our grandparents' grandparents would have found life with TVs, modems, and cellular phones a bit unnerving, and yet these devices seem eminently natural to us.

However extreme or tame, though, we're witnessing the birth and early years of an entirely new medium. And for authors of the written word, which seems particularly suited to the Web, these are definitely exciting times.

Thanks to: Melanie Scott, Z. Sharon Glantz, Robert E. Shenk, and Wendy Blake
Editors: Melissa Zimmermann