Hypertexts and Closure

Tough problem.

This seems to work differently in every given piece, but I've begun to look for a cycle of some sort. What sort? I don't know, offhand. So far this hasn't happened the same way twice. But when events come close to repeating, people seem to consider that the end of a phrase, a stanza, a song, an essay, an epic, a story, a year, a decade, an epoch.

Happy hunting.

That exact same "problem" is why hypertext writing is so exciting and, like you said, addictive. I don't really think there is an end/closure when writing hypertexts because every word, place, character can have a backstory, and it all depends on the author(s) whether that backstory will be explored or not.

For my hypertext final project, I've written lots of pages and linked even more words. Every time I come up with a new place, I link that word as a potential new entry, but the problem is, will I have the time to give all these new links/places/characters their own stories behind the main frame? The whole project has seemed like an infinitely expanding one, much more so than writing a book. When writing a book, there's also the problem of linearity and making sure you don't all of a sudden go off on tangents. This hypertext writing process, though, totally encourages that, and the problem is to be able to do the text and backstories justice within our time constraints.

Another thing that I thought about was how the hypertext process could potentially discourage imagination for the reader. Well, I guess in a sense what I just said isn't true because there's an infinite number of things in any text that can be toyed with in the reader's imagination. What I meant to say, though was that if we theoretically managed to link every character/place and gave everything a backstory and background (which is theoretically possible in a hypertext), then we wouldn't leave anything to the reader's imagination. When reading books, I personally like wondering about certain things that the author doesn't mention or explain. For example, when I read Harry Potter, I have a million questions about minute details in the text which JK Rowling hasn't explained, but I can think of possible explanations in my head. Then again, maybe I'm being silly because there's an endless amount of imagination that once can put towards reading any text, including hypertexts.

Good luck and have fun writing!