Most of the links that I inserted into my Calvino "incipit" were done so to enhance the story. I didn’t want the link to be completely pointless and have some incredibly vague connection. Instead, I chose links that would give the viewer some sort of a visual image of the word of phrase I was linking to. In the case of clasemates incipits that I linked to, each had either a common word or common idea between them. I wanted a direct, clear relation to be found in what I was linking to.
Take my "yelling in my face" link for example. The line from my incipit was "My eyes shot open, and I found a very large man in my face, yelling in my face, although my face wasn’t quite sure what he was yelling about." Clearly, the link to yelling in my face has a very graphic example of someone yelling in another persons face, bringing a sort of visual enhancement to the story, making it feel a bit more intense.
With another link that I inserted, the "escape plan" link, I wanted the reader to see that "escape plan" can refer to more than just escaping from something. The line from my incipit reads "Being stuck on a bus doesn’t afford many opportunities to devise an escape plan, I was stuck." Obviously everyone knows what escaping from a bus is, and an image of a bus or of someone running or escaping wouldn’t add too much to the story, since it wouldn’t convey the point very well (that is, that the "I" wanted to escape but that he was stuck and couldn’t). Instead, I chose to link to a wallpaper for a band "The Dillinger Escape Plan".
Another link that I included came in the sentence "This was good, since I no longer had a large, angry man trying to turn my head into what would resemble a lump of dough, swelling and taking on funny shapes." With this link, I figured a visual image of a lump of dough being worked over by a pair of hands would be a great visual image to supplement the line of text. My thought was that it would give readers a great idea of what I was aiming to get across with my writing.
The last link that I included in my incipit came in the last line and reads "And that is when all hell broke loose, or, I should say, all hell slammed into the front of a crowded building." With this one, I wasn’t quite sure if readers would clearly get the point that I was referring to the bus hitting the front of a building, and so I wanted to visually represent that with an image. Like a lot of my links, I was aiming to add visual stimulation to the story.
So did my links work? I think that most of, if not all of them, worked fairly well. I was mainly trying to convey a meaningful addition to the story, giving the reader another tool in enhancing what they were reading, beyond their own imagination. Some of my links were a bit more vague, but I feel that they all make sense if you take at least some time to think about them.