A New Series: Writing for Transmedia

When you're writing a novel, you have to wrestle with tense and point of view. Generally agreed-upon hallmarks of good writing include 'show, don't tell' and the rule of Chekhov's Gun. I feel I have, if not complete fluency, at least a good grasp of the limitations and advantages of my toolbox for writing traditional text.

But the stuff I do now is fueled more by blind instinct and guesswork. I'd like to do what I do much more intentionally. To that end, I've recently been trying to think very methodically about the tools and advice widely given for writing static fiction to see how it translates to the work I do now.

As long as I've got this stuff on my mind, I thought I'd share it with you. 

I'll mainly look at the kind of experience where your story world is embedded in the real world -- you might call it social media storytelling as much as transmedia. That's because that's where my bread is buttered, but also because it's the least explored territory.

Writing for some kinds of individual pieces of a transmedia experience -- particularly the big commercial sequential kind -- are already well-examined. Just look at writing for comics, for film, for TV. There are books to buy and classes to take for that stuff. They're fairly mature forms, and better brains than mine have already picked them over.

Finally, I warn you this series will be rife with bias and oversight, so reader beware. I've been doing this a long time, as these things are measured, but I still have a lot to learn. This is more in the way of exploration than education. Please, please comment if you have anything to add that might help me or anyone else. We're all learning together, aren't we?

Comments

[RyanMcFitz]

This thread, combined with the gold nuggets at YSA Transmedia, promises to be interesting.

I'd been debating the "Chekov's Gun" rules of transmedia for a while, ever since suggesting that puzzles (especially of the redonkulously difficult kind) were starting to feel like they are getting in the way of the narrative.

But then I started to wonder if they are the "musicals" of this field. I've never walked down the street and spied a wedge-shaped throng of rakish pretty-boy dancers all snapping their fingers in prelude to a gang-on-gang knife fight, but in West Side Story, it's what passes for a day in the life.

[Andrea]

Sorry, Ryan, didn't mean to leave you hanging! I have my first up today. Here's hoping the series is useful to people. ^_^

That's an excellent point, though, about musicals and puzzles. I've never thought of it that way, but it does make *perfect* sense, in its fashion.