The problem with online fiction is that you can’t tap into the native features of the medium, namely, hyperlinks.

In fiction, the author creates a dreamscape for the reader to inhabit. Even the smallest interruption to the narrative flows dismantles the fragile dream.

Hyperlinks are a hard break.

I was thinking about this in relation to this article by @vgr on hyperlinks as a new type of grammar. But it’s a type of grammar uniquely suited to nonfiction and unsuited to fiction.

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I was thinking about this in relation to this article by @vgr on hyperlinks as a new type of grammar. But it’s a type of grammar uniquely suited to nonfiction and unsuited to fiction.

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/07/01/the-rhetoric-of-the-hyperlink/

I think this explains, too, why eBooks haven’t caught on as much as early proponents predicted. All the new features that eBooks can bring to the reading experience are just more ways to break the dreamworld.

I think this explains, too, why eBooks haven’t caught on as much as early proponents predicted. All the new features that eBooks can bring to the reading experience are just more ways to break the dreamworld.

https://countercraft.substack.com/p/maybe-the-book-doesnt-need-to-disrupted

Nobody wants to watch a video in the middle of reading a story. It shatters the flow.

It’s like putting a commercial in the middle of a movie (a travesty).

But it’s worse than that because it takes sustained effort on the reader’s part to conjure the fictive world, unlike in visual narratives (which are a hot medium, in the McLuhan sense) where content-switching is so fast as to be almost immediate.

Content switching of that sort is impossible in written fiction. Or maybe just really hard? Perhaps someone will unlock new internet-native fictive features. 

But I doubt it.

I think this is why nonfiction has been in a long internet-fueled Renaissance (first with blogs, now with newsletters). 

Non-fiction has a lot to gain by hyperlinking, and hyperlinking is arguably the engine driving its success. Nonfiction is an internet-native medium.

But fiction writing feels eclipsed.