Our Story and Stuck to It.

In story, first one event happens involving a person or thing, then another, and so on.

Let's break this down.

If part of our sensory field tends to retain durable characteristics, we may call that a thing; if the characteristics change abruptly, we call that an event. The distinction's fuzzy, even sort of arbitrary in terms of physics, but it exists in our language as as surely as we have nouns and verbs.

Verbs change with every clause, right? Nouns do not. We can use a dozen successive sentences without repeating a noun, simply by plugging in a pronoun. In fact, if an author unnecessarily repeats a name or even a noun five or six times in a paragraph, that's obtrusive. This can only be true because we assume by default that the noun remains the same until something changes it.

(Footnote: Readers typically drop this assumption with paragraph shifts. I've never read this in a grammar text, and I see a lot of grammar textbooks. I found out when I discovered that my texts needed editing when I chopped them into lexia.)

So, how does this noun-verb stuff change story?

First, an author describe things as things partake in some event. The author thus allows readers to classify and qualify said things as readers take in the language applied to the things.

Next, author describes things as they partake in another event. Readers reclassify those things because the new event reveals new aspects of them.

Then, in a good story, because readers actually care about the things and the reclassification actually calls the classification system into question, the story forces readers to reevaluate ways they think about what they care about.

To to this, the reader (if not the text) performs a sequential operation that resembles syllogism, premise(a) + premise(b), ergo conclusion.

The combination of information is not usually nearly so clean, of course, but the principle of connection and extrapolation remains the key.

In this form as it exists in fiction, conclusions tend to be implicit, not explicit. That's why the moral at the end of a fable sounds stupid even when one agrees with it, and that's (I assume) why Shelley Jackson forbid anyone to label a body part in Skin. Stated differently, readers create new observations about Things in Event A and Event B without being directly told that these observations are so. Stated differently once more, fiction allows us to indicate observations in which the whole does not equal the sum of its parts.

This sequentiality presents difficulties for hypertext even as it baits the contemporary author searching indeterminacies. Readers derive the dynamic payoff of fiction by combining events A and B. In our cause-and-effect interpretations of common experience, time does not roll backwards, so A then B does not equal B then A.

The environment in which the reader confronts sequence is nonhypertextual: it involves realtime.