You re providing readers a very specific, individual premise about how life is, she says. They re not going to see that until they get to the end of the novel. If they start into it and think, Oh, let s have some more of this woman or Let s have some more of this dreadful person, then what you re trying to say is going to get lost. This is why we re engaged by it, because it is a controlled universe to which we are responding. To create hyperlinks to other portions of the text, or to films maybe, radically changes the relationship between writer and reader.
Some writers go so far as to invite readers to participate in creating the text.
In 1991, fiction writer Robert Coover mounted a famous online work called Hypertext Hotel . Readers could visit the hotel and augment the story by adding new rooms of their own devising. Then the world would never have gotten to know that very recognizable, very unique thing we think of as Bob Dylan. At the same time, the idea of receiving passive online feedback from readers proved enticing to most. Here, readers do not have the opportunity to tinker with a writer s work.