about Twine

Twine heavily encourages you to think of a page as a dynamic interactive space, not just a sequence of prose followed by choices. Twine encourages you to place links and interactive elements in the midst of prose, not just at the end, and to use them to change the prose in surprising and unusual ways – inserting or removing text in a previously-read paragraph, changing the styling of words, changing just the link itself, and other such effects to reveal new meaning in the text and communicate your story in a manner unique to hypertext.* 

I was looking for a different way of producing unstructured or hybrid texts, something like a word processor that would let me play with the structure of writing. Someone suggested using a text game making tool called Twine so I had a look and they were right. Twine offered all sorts of potential.  It took me a while to get to grips with this thing. It seemed to offer a way of not just writing and structuring, but learning about, the writing of texts. What sort of texts? Anything from poems to novels to non-fiction to essays to artworks to verse novels to crazy mixed up experiments. Anything. Poem War part of I think the main pleasure and potential is to build a text, a document, in which the words themselves and the ‘pages’, the parts, the chapters, can move around, appear and disappear, link to other parts or random parts, loop, twist, shudder, change colour, size. In short, texts can contain an internal logic, a route that is different to any printed text. What you do with this is up to you, just as the twenty-six letters of the alphabet can be combined in billions of ways to make every text ever written. These texts, call them stream of consciousness or concrete poetry or experimental novels, or hybrid texts, are not new in the world. But everything you produce will be. I am going to be encouraging people to use Twine and other tools to write literary texts. It will be fun. About Twine