Re: Non-linear / full-2d writing systems?

On 5/12/05, Sai Emrys <saizai@...> wrote:
> > Tension and release is essentially a temporal (i.e. linear) phenomenon: when there
> > is no temporal direction, there cannot be tension before release, simply
> > because there is no unique "before" or "after".
>
> There is: the timeline of reading / understanding. Any
> non-trivial-size writing (or communication in general) will require
> time to understand (unless you already know it, of course). So it is
> at least theoretically possible to play with that progression itself.
>
> Sorta like your jigsaw puzzle idea, except that I think this would be
> present even without any attempt to obfuscate.
I noticed this with the story someone attached to an earlier message
as an HTML table.  It has plot twists whatever order you read it in,
probably because it was more interconnected than most 1-D stories one
encounters (except stuff like Dirk Gently).  This could be a natural
consequence of attempting to write an interesting story in 2-D.  (The
story would have been physically smaller if cross-refences could have
been indicated by lines.)

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