But on this wintry day, as the green cursor blinked on and on, the ordinary question sounded profound, baffling, strange: How was I going to number the pages of this new script I was about to begin?

I was eager to begin and already had my opening scene clearly in mind. I'd received a commission to write this play, which was scheduled to open in a year in Portland's magnificent and historic Pittock Mansion, the most luxurious setting a play of mine had ever called home. What an incredible space for which to write a play. What an incredible opportunity this was for me.

If only I could figure out how to number the pages of the script . . .

The foundation of my confusion was this: the action of the play was not going to be linear, one scene happening after another, but simultaneous, with many scenes occurring throughout the mansion at the same time. This was what made the commission so unusual, the dramatic form was modeled after a strange new kind of play that was selling out in Los Angeles, a play called "Tamara."

If many scenes occur at once, I was asking myself, what does it mean to have a "page whatever"? And how was my director going to read the script - how was I? - if two or three or - the number, at one point, would turn out to be eight! - many scenes were happening at once? How is a non-linear script read within the confining format of textual pages arranged in numerical order?

Without knowing it (I had never heard the term before), I was having my first experience with "hypertext."

Out of desperation, I finally settled on a methodology for numbering the pages of "Chateau de Mort," and several years would pass before I learned how cumbersome, awkward, and labor-intensive my solution was. I came to learn that "hypertext" was the form in which the dynamics of nonlinear writing came into focus and under control.

"Hyper"-text. The prefix means "over" or "above," and early in the century was used in physics to describe the strange new kind of "space" that was being defined by Einstein's relativity theory - "hyperspace." Einstein's space is space seen in a new way, a new kind of space - hyperspace.

So with text. Hypertext is text seen in a new way, a new kind of text.

[...]

Hypertext is about giving the reader options. "What do you want to read next?" is the question that hypertext asks again and again.

Different readers, of course, will respond to these repeated questions in different ways, each defining an individual path through the material. This is the sense in which hypertext is called "non-linear," because there is no one "linear" way to read the text, such as from beginning to end. Instead there are alternative "webs" that weave through the material according to the individual decisions each reader makes in answer to the question, "What do you want to read next?" Or, in the cast of multimedia where sound and graphics and video can be part of the sequence of information, "what do you want to hear or look at next?"

[...]

Hyper-text: text that is more than text, which is more than one word after another, from beginning to end, with no variation allowed. Hypertext is like the nation's system of highways and roads. There are many ways to get from the west coast to the east coast, depending on whether or not we are in a hurry, depending on what kind of scenery we want to look at, depending on what may intrigue us as a side trip from moment to moment.

Hypertext is a web of possibilities, a web of reading experiences. Hypertext is like life itself, full of choices and consequences, full of forks in the road.

Hypertext is the language of exploration and discovery - and therefore is the perfect language to become the mother tongue of the Information Age.

For writers and readers alike, hypertext may well define what it means to be literate in the 21st century.

For a complete version of this very interesting essay Click Here.

Also take a look at Deemer's essay "The New Hyperdrama".