Scissorbox

About Scissorbox and why it exists.

I realized not so long ago that, though Wikipedia is a loose form of what may or may not be considered the truth...It sure is a hell of a lot more interesting than reading a dictionary. Come to think of it, it’s the only reference “book” that I’ve read out of pure interest, rather than necessity. I can’t exactly remember the last time I got absorbed in a good encyclopedia.

Maybe it’s because loose truth is a bit more comfortable than the full--leave no possibility for error--truth. Maybe because it was built from a vast array of influence, rough in it’s childhood, but in the end became something much more than a bunch of opinions. It’s now something credible, something accepted by the masses as a valid source for information (well, unless you’re writing a term paper).

That’s not the entire reason I like Wikipedia though. I like it because it’s organic. Non-linear. Go in with one subject on your mind, come out with one entirely different. You delve into stories that seem completely unrelated, yet the link-to-link action has a special cadence that seems to bring the subject matter together in a unique way.

And that’s what I like about it. I like the crooked path.

And I thought that would be a sweet way of telling a story. Organically. Break the rules of linear storytelling and allow someone to absorb the worlds I create at an entirely different pace. Genius, I thought. How has no one thought of this?

...At the time, little did I know that there already existed a movement of this type of storytelling, and it had long-ago taken the name of hypertext (and also metatext). Though this was years ago, I still had to wonder: How the hell did I miss this?

In the end, after researching the articles on hypertext, and even reading through examples of the craft like The Heist, and the more experimental The Body, I realized that the craft has never really evolved into an easy pill. It’s still rough, still hard to swallow. I thought that maybe hypertext didn’t exactly describe what I wanted to do as an author. It’s so very niche, so very...uninviting, in a way. There was almost too much of a buffer zone before I could become absorbed, and honestly, I still like normal books.

Thus, Scissorbox popped into my mind. What I wanted to create was small doses of stories, still written/spoken/created in an organic fashion. If you want linearity, you can find it. If you want a truly wandering path of stories, you can find that too. It’s a lot like my thought process; my struggle to follow a project from start to finish. I work much better in small doses, with small rewards and bits of closure littering the way.

So what this amounts to, at the moment, are serial novels, free hypertext chapters, a codex of characters and locations, and even audiobooks. All telling a single story about broken characters and seemingly independent happenings. Whether they’ll tie together neatly at the end is yet to be seen. It’s all very subject to change.