The primary link in each text "page" leads, then, to the next "page" of the original story. To meet these ends, I chose a structure for the hypertext version of "A Teenager's Dreams" based largely upon the linear structure I began with. I hoped to create a reading experience that provides alternative readings of the same story, while simultaneously side-stepping some of the issues of closure and confusion emphasized in many essays on hypertext fiction. My primary goal was to maintain the narrative structure of the original story but still take advantage of the linking capabilities of hypertext. Since Storyspace had already forced me to construct the text in very small portions to eliminate the need for scrolling within the text window, and asked me to name each piece, I imagined that I could translate these pieces into separate HTML files and then create a new, wider, more varied version for the web. At this point, "A Teenager's Dreams" was still essentially unilinear, with no links except the default, making it easy to convert it back into a word-processing program to hand in to Professor O'Brien.Īfter impressing myself with the thirty-seven block Storyspace Map of "A Teenager's Dreams," I decided to use it as the jumping-off point for my first real foray into HTML and hypertext, and the final project for Professor Randy Bass' "Text, Knowledge, and Pedagogy in the Electronic Age" course. Although I wrote the first few pages in a standard word processing program, I soon began using Storyspace as a brainstorming tool, and found that it lended itself quite well to my vision for the narrative, and it forced me to think in some interesting new directions about the narrative structure. The original, strictly linear form of "A Teenager's Dreams" was created as an assignment for Professor George O'Brien's "Fictional Poetics" course here at Georgetown University. Fiction: A Teenager's Dreams: Author's Preface Author's Preface to "A Teenager's Dreams"
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