Some linear words about non linear writing

10 May 2010

Having joined Intrepid pretty recently it's nice to find that some of the things we are concerned about here echo the stuff that bothered me in my previous incarnation as an overgrown anthropology student. The meerschaum pipe and wood panelled rooms have gone but the same problems remain. The big one being ‘how do you tell a compelling story about people and what motivates them whilst still reflecting the complexity of the lives they lead?’

Coming from an academic background I’m used to trying to deal with this through writing narratives. Writing is ok if you just want to tell a story but if you want to present a model of human behaviour it becomes seriously limited. The problem with writing is that If you want to talk about all of the things that influence a particular behaviour you have to introduce them one word at a time when in reality they exist simultaneously. Writing give a nice linear structure with a beginning, a middle and an end, but actually everything is much more messy than that. Important things happen simultaneously but the only recourse we have to dealing with this problem in a traditional narrative structure is to say ‘meanwhile…’ which feels like a bit of a cop out. The alternative is to break out of the narrative structure and try something a bit different...

Ok, so this diagram is probably a bit of a horrendous mess (maybe that’s sort of the point?), but it’s what I produced for my dissertation on wheelchair rugby and it is at the heart of what I’m trying to say here. I put this right at the very start to show how I thought the whole sub-culture of wheelchair rugby worked to produce particular kinds of people, but I still had to submit a linear narrative describing the thing. This led to the usual tedious recourse to overstretched metaphors and bad jargon to try and get the point across.

What I think would have worked much better would be a hypertext document that placed this diagram at the centre, with links to each of the topic headings that would allow the reader to explore the various facets of the culture at their own leisure. This would give the reader a bit more freedom in his or her own thinking about the subject and also avoid the artificial hierarchy of information that linear texts impose on their subject matter.

If the author is dead, why not chop him up into little bits and stick him on a flow chart?

Sam Dwyer
Posts: 1

Re:
Reply #1 on : Sun May 16, 2010, 06:40:31

what this really calls for is a new idea of authorship. the author isn't dead, it's just that his role is different.

I've written a bit about this at my blog (warning that it's a little meandery): http://samdwyer.posterous.com/is-education-making-us-stupid

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