An pseudo-academic paper that attempts to bring the process of writing into a structural
form for a more detailed analysis in the context of hypertext and the web. It is
constantly being written and rewritten to try to bring its point across more effectively.
Placed here to generate discussion, to explore the process of writing and to have someone
else write/rewrite it so it can be academically accepted.
With the advent of computers and the popularization of the web comes the possibility for
many new media inconceived of until now. One such form comes to us with the written
word no longer being a permanent fixture. Typewriters have become almost obsolete with
the advent of word processors where, in a matter of a few keystrokes, an entire sentence
can be erased, rewritten or reworded. The written word is no longer fixed. With this
realisation comes the realisation that stories, poems and books no longer need to be fixed
either. There is potential for change in everything we write now-a-days.
Collaborative authoring of written works has been around for almost a century (oral
collaboration has been around since the dawn of time). The Surrealists in the 1920s took
great pleasure in the idea of a group of authors working on a work together. Games like
Exquisite Corpse served not only to illuminate through random associations, but through
the random associations of a group of people. Group authored stories have been an idea
that has been played with for decades. With the popularity of the web, however, these
creations are now proliferating in cyberspace.
In the traditional collaborative work, there are limitations. Though the group creates,
only one person, sometimes no one, edits the work. This is why, as one person recently
was talking about continuing stories on the web, all such stories saunder their way
eventually to one topic, sex. Inevitably, when stories are opened for all to contribute,
things go awry. Characters are not developed, plotlines wander.
Likewise, in the traditional media of the book, publishers took great chances finding an
author who they thought would be able to communicate their idea to the greatest number of
people in the most effective fashion possible. There was no room for mistakes. If an
author wanted to experiment with two or three different presentation styles, he had to
use his personal judgement on which one was most effective. Feedback on his writing
ability was usually had not by those who were eventually going to read it, but by those
immersed deeply in the world of books, writing.
Today, though, in this new form of technology there are new methods possible for these
situations. The ability for multiple editors to comment and edit a work together is now
easily possible. Dynamic feedback from the audience of a book is only a mouse click away.
The methods of writing and the form the final work takes are now infinitely greater. With
the advent of computers and the web, writing is no longer something that has to be finished,
set in stone. It can be an on-going process of change, reflecting the world at large with
much more accuracy than any single person could create.
So I've called it Evolutionary Literature for now. The name doesn't really matter. Here
I try to provide a basic structure to describe various methods of writing. This is not
so much to limit and say this is how writing is done, but rather to build a framework and
look at the holes; the methods of writing that in theory can exist, but which people
may not be using and to try to use them to explore and experiment with writing.