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Submitted by Lulu on 10 December 2006 - 3:30am.

When I was writing my hypertext for my final project, I couldn't figure out a way to end it. That was because when I usually write anything, I don't go in with a clear plan. I normally just sit in front of my Microsoft Word document and write in a stream-of-consciousness way, letting the ideas rush out as I'm typing. So, when I needed to finish writing my hypertext, I was having a lot of trouble ending it, which was also due to the fact that it IS a hypertext and that format isn't very closure-friendly.

Anyway, I kept asking my friends what I should do to "end" my hypertext, and I got at least half a dozen responses telling me to kill off the main character (which was a problem, because she starts out dead anyway). But anyway, people seem to think killing people is a good way of ending any type of narrative.

Anyway, what does this have to do with our wiki? Well, I was wondering how people would feel if we killed off some characters? Would that be too convenient? Too horrible? I don't think our wiki needs to have a nice, clean ending, but I just feel uncomfortable leaving all the characters hanging. Right now, I see that we're heading towards some type of closure in the Alice/Rob storyline, but the Grant/Godfrey/Nurse storyline is still all over the place. And I can't figure out what happened to the plumber.

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Well... we can't exactly

Submitted by marmalade on 10 December 2006 - 6:54am.

Well... we can't exactly kill off the devil himself, now can we ;) ?

And doesn't the Gabriel! storyline potentially lead to some ending for the Grant/Godfrey/Nurse one, too?

But then we could def. start killing off people. Who gets voted off the island this week? ;)

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yes to marmalade

Submitted by tophat1 on 10 December 2006 - 10:25am.

I think marmalade is right that the Gabriel story can help us bring some closure to many of our characters. I'm not sure the closure needs to be death! On the other hand, I'm not opposed to killing one or two characters in a tasteful, relevant way.

When I imagined an end to the wiki, I guess I imagined a more open-ended end. I'm just not convinced everything needs to tie up neatly but I understand the need for a feeling of closure.

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Hmm. I feel sad when I

Submitted by silversprung on 10 December 2006 - 5:48pm.

Hmm. I feel sad when I think about people writing endings to the wiki. Endings seem to go against the very reason why we'd write a story in wiki form in the first place-- the multilinearity, the possibility for complexity, the avoidance of the need for closure. Also, the endings will be less effective (and have less of a point) when they probably won't come at the end of a reader's reading of the wiki.

But then, my bias as I wrote my hypertext was against linearity and against easy closure and since I've had the opportunity to write something that abided by my own notions of what a hypertext or wiki should be, I'm not going to try to impose it on everyone else in our wiki. But here's my $0.02 about endings in the wiki: I don't think they'd add much in terms of overall structure, and I think they'd detract some from the marvelously convoluted world we've built.

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