Adventures in Hypertext
For my experiment in creating a hypertext story, I wanted to play with the idea that the person engaging with this interactive story (reading it and making decisions) plays a role as the story’s writer, too. In an interactive fairytale like the examples we looked at in class, the reader of the story takes on the role of a character and makes decisions for this character. In the end, though, the reader isn’t just part of the story — they have actually helped write it!
My hypertext story plays with this theme of interactive story authorship. The text in my interactive story all comes from one author — the musician Beck — but the reader of the story makes choices about how to put the text together into a poetic narrative. These choices affect the mood of the text and build a (albeit relatively short) narrative arc. Because they have a significant amount of control in putting the story together, the reader becomes an author of the resulting story. I chose to work with Beck’s song lyrics because I think that authorship and ownership seem to carry a lot of weight in the realm of song lyrics, so giving readers partial ownership over stories created out of song lyrics felt interesting to me. I also chose to use Beck’s lyrics because they offered a lot of textual material. Finally, my textual edition for ENGL 285 focuses on Beck’s work as well, and I wanted to tie the two projects together!
My project is not a traditional fairytale, and so it is perhaps a bit more difficult to understand this textual work as a story. I hope this explanation helps you understand my thought process and the way in which my reflections on authorship of interactive digital texts informed my idea for this project!
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