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Writing is in some ways the most democratic of the arts. No specialist equipment is required: no expensive musical instruments, no paints and canvases, no clay or stone. It can be practiced in confined spaces and at odd moments of the day. Anyone with a pen and some paper can produce a work of literature, which must be one reason why there are such enormous numbers of amateur writers. Publishing is another matter. Self-publication has become much more affordable in recent years, but although amateur writers may be able to bring out magazines, poetry-collections and short stories comparatively easily, it remains extremely difficult to distribute them widely or sell them in large quantities. Profitable publishing remains a tough nut to crack.
In the meantime, the big publishing companies are becoming less adventurous. Increasing commercialization has meant increasing reluctance to take risks. Despite the fact that digital technology has opened up the possibility of a print-on-demand revolution, the trend has been towards fewer titles with bigger print-runs. Large publishers have swallowed up smaller ones, and large chains of bookstores have made it hard for small independent bookshops to stay in business. More and more bookselling is now being done via book clubs and the internet itself, which again tends to emphasize high-profile, big-turnover titles at the expense of new and experimental work. Many publishers now refuse to consider unsolicited work unless it comes through a literary agent, and most literary agents are reluctant to take on new clients. New works of fiction are judged on the basis of a synopsis, a sample chapter and whether they seem to have good "selling angles." New and experimental writers still do get published – but only the lucky few. Many more are being driven into the same underworld as the self-published poets and the little magazine proprietors.
All of this is regrettable without being blameworthy. Commercial publishers don't owe anybody a living, and the fact is that the market is not as receptive to new writing as it used to be. In its heyday, the nineteenth century, the printed word was the dominant form of mass entertainment. Experimentation could go hand-in-hand with commercial success because the market was expanding all the time. Nowadays literature has to compete with radio, television, video, film, computer-games and so on. The market is still large, but it isn't expanding any more. What tends to happen under these circumstances is that the marketing and financial people get the upper hand over the creative thinkers. Innovation is marginalized. Things stagnate.
What has dramatically changed the terms of the equation is the advent of the personal computer, which in turn has given rise to the phenomenal success of the Internet and the World Wide Web. Personal computers are by no means as cheap as pen and paper, but in the wealthy nations of the first world they have become almost as ubiquitous. As Peter Finch mentions in the quote above, the first impact of the PC revolution on self-publishing was that it put inkjet printers and desktop publishing software within the reach of ordinary people. But of far greater long-term significance was the fact that it gave writers access to the World Wide Web and e-mail – new forms of communication and distribution. Perhaps just as importantly, because texts on a computer can be structured differently from texts in print, it also gave rise to hyperliterature, which is a new form of writing.
The increasing popularity of hyperliterature as a literary form actually predates the World Wide Web by a few years. A program called Hypercard was supplied free with all Macintosh computers in the 1980s, before the World Wide Web came into being. It allowed users to create "stacks" of virtual notecards (hypercards) on a subject, and to connect them with each other via hyperlinks. Writers who were interested in computer technology soon began to use this system as a means of creating nonlinear stories.
In conventional fiction, each story is designed to be read from beginning to end in a fixed sequence: the format is "linear." This linear form of writing has come to dominate our method of storytelling, because our texts have nearly always been presented to us in the form of books, and in books the pages are bound together in a fixed sequence. Of course, it is entirely possible for a reader to read the pages of any book in a random sequence, but to do so would be an act of conscious sophistry, and presumably at variance with the wishes of the author. The way in which conventional narratives demand to be read is from beginning to end, taking all the pages and all the sections in the order in which they are bound. But this is not the only way of presenting a text. Before books became the predominant medium for the presentation of texts, they were often stored as collections of scrolls – the Bible is an example – and although each scroll had a beginning, a middle and an end, the collection as a whole would not be sorted into a fixed sequence. There are many different ways of reading the Bible, and the more-or-less chronological sequence into which it has been sorted for the sake of publication in book form is only one of them. Furthermore, the Bible contains what is perhaps the most famous example in our literature of a single story being told in a nonlinear fashion: namely, the story of Jesus as presented in the four Gospels. The Gospels do not have to be read in any particular sequence, and they tell the story of Jesus from four different viewpoints, sometimes with quite substantial differences of style, detail and chronological sequence. Despite these differences, or because of them, to subtract any one of the Gospels from the collection would be to diminish the narrative as a whole. They do not have the same unity as a conventional linear narrative: they have a different kind of unity instead, more ambiguous, more fragmented, and more challenging to the reader.
Linear narrative is an enormously powerful tool for holding the reader's attention and driving him or her forward through the length of a story to its conclusion, but precisely because of its emphasis on forward motion – which is a consequence of its sequential structure – it does have certain limitations. Any piece of writing which moves forward in a straight line from point A to point B is bound to place great emphasis on beginnings and endings. Linear narrative as a form also tends to presuppose progression from one state to another: the story has to get somewhere. And it tends to insist on chronological sequence. Flashbacks and parallel storylines can be accommodated, but never without a certain amount of awkwardness, and the overall movement has almost invariably got to be onwards, in chronological terms, rather than backwards or sideways.
Linear narratives are poor at showing the kind of existence where people just muddle along from one situation to another, without getting anywhere in particular or learning any valuable lessons. They perpetuate a myth of personal progress – the idea that life is leading us somewhere, even if it's to tragedy. And because they oblige their writers to simplify the stories they tell for the sake of forward momentum, they also perpetuate a myth of reality.