Making Isn't Enough

You've probably heard a common refrain in the transmedia scene: "Just make something." It's the wisdom of centuries of artists before us -- you can talk forever, but you never become a creator if you don't actually apply all that theory. Writers write. 

There's also a honing-your-craft angle to it; we writers say you have to write a million words of crap before you start writing anything good. Practice makes perfect: You have to try and fail a few times just to get the hang of most things, much less to make anything you're proud to hang your name on.

But a conversation with Transmedia Talk's own Nick Braccia a few days ago has me realizing that a lot more goes into climbing the skill ladder than just milling out content. There are writers who churn out millions of words of manuscripts in a year, each worse than the last; there are transmedia creators who likewise make disjointed and unfocused projects that never quite hang together into a cohesive whole. So here are five things that an ambitious creator will do, even above and beyond that old standby, "Make something."

1. Learn from work like yours. One of the most common ways of breaking into transmedia is inventing it. But when you do work in a vacuum, you're doing a huge disservice to yourself, your project, and your audience, because you aren't climbing onto the shoulders of those who have gone before you so you can see a little further. There's no sense reinventing the wheel. When you're wishing there were an easier or better way to do something, check to make sure someone hasn't already found one.

2. Talk to other creators. Sometimes learning from public examples isn't enough; become friendly with others doing similar projects, and trade information about roads not taken, close calls, war stories that might change how you do something. Sometimes a project that looked OK on the surface was a nightmare behind the scenes, and that's important to know if you don't want a nightmare on your hands, too. 

3. Make every decision mindfully. Make sure you very clearly understand all of the parts of your project and how they fit together. At every step know what work is being done -- characterization, exposition, furthering the plot, making the user experience better. That applies to written and video content, to design and interface elements, to challenges, everything. If you can't explain why you're making the choices you have for everything from platform distribution to font choices, then you haven't yet thought it through well enough.

4. Seek out criticism of your work. This one is hard. Really, really hard. Partly that's because it's difficult to hear criticism of something you love; it can feel weirdly personal and put you on the defensive. (You have to get over that, sunshine, if you want to go pro.) But the other reason is that honest and robust criticism is rare in the transmedia space. There's snark between friends in private, to be sure, but very little moves into the public sphere. Try to get your hands on that honest criticism, be it from your audience, from other creators, from your dev team, or anywhere else you can find it. Feedback is valuable above jewels, and you should make it a priority if you want to actually get better at this stuff.

5. Own your failures. This one's hard, too, but mainly because of pride: Don't buy your own hype. Don't believe your press releases. Know when you've totally screwed up, and admit it to yourself. That's the first step to working out why and preventing a repeat. Even when you haven't totally screwed up, though, even for magnificent and award-winning work, turn your analytic eye to every part of a project once it's done to see what could've been done better. And then make something else -- better.

Of course, it's true that none of this applies if you haven't taken that first step, that step where you actually make something. But there's a lot more to doing good work than putting together any old inspiration and tossing it in front of an unwitting public. I can't guarantee that these five steps will turn you into a rockstar transmedia creator overnight, of course. But I promise you if you aren't doing these things, your path to the top will take a whole lot longer -- and you may never get there at all.

Time and Transmedia

Transmedia narratives have a distinct problem with chronology, and the more fragments you break a story into, the harder it becomes to manage. The problem is on two fronts: How you expect your audience to consume the narrative, and the timeline for your actual story. I've been mulling over the passage of time and its implications for transmedia a lot lately, and thought I'd share where I am so far.

Expected Vectors

West Coast Hollywood-style transmedia tends to exist as a series of inter-related snapshots, each existing at a single point in a story universe's chronology and presented to the audience in single, finished pieces -- often a single tentpole piece of media that spawns a sequel, and then another, and then spins out from there.

One begins the Star Wars experience by watching Star Wars, the movie. Right? One can safely assume that anyone reading any Star Wars novels or comic books, or playing any video games, has already seen the films. That means that as a creator, you can use a sort of shorthand for knowledge you can reasonably expect a reader to have -- you don't need to explain what a Jedi is in every book, or who Darth Vader is, or the fact that Coruscant is where the senators all hang out. Your audience will remember.

Except that there is a generation of kids whose first contact with Star Wars comes from Clone Wars, the animated series. Which means their path into the universe could be completely different, and if a Clone Wars viewer were to pick up a copy of Tatooine Ghost... they might be a little lost. Context is everything.

The solution for this is to signal to your audience what era of the story universe each piece belongs to, either subtly (by putting one character vs. another on a cover, for example) or overtly (by tagging the title with 'The Clone Wars.') It's as good as a label saying "This is for YOU." Audiences are accustomed to series conventions, so they can reasonably be expected to seek out a natural starting point for beginning their journey into your narrative; the first movie, the first episode, the first book.

A clever creator would make sure to have many, many viable entry points, so watching Star Wars: A New Hope, watching the first episode of Clone Wars, or playing Lego Star Wars would ideally all give you adequate context to wade further and deeper into the story universe. Beyond that, the careful creator will keep an eye on likely paths through the story and story world and make sure to always provide information in a comprehensible sequence.

As an alternative, there's always Nancy Drew storytelling: Every Nancy Drew book provides you the same key facts about her titian blonde hair, attorney father, and her two best friends: the girly-and-plump friend Bess, and the thin-tomboy George. It's OK if you've never read any other book, they get you up to speed in no time. ...But that's not much of a way to build a deep, rich narrative, if you ask me. Change over time adds depth and immersion to the audience experience.

The most difficult task would be making sure to keep your story straight on who was where doing what and why as the universe grows. Making sure a character's home planet isn't different in the book and the game. Making sure that an off-handed reference to the greedy species from Goobleblot isn't in direct conflict with another reference to Goobleblot, the holy planet of sacred contemplation, where money is forbidden. This is not easy. This is why IP owners hire companies like Starlight Runner.

Living Stories

The question of timeline gets more complicated, though, when you're talking about narrative that evolves over time. This could be the alternate reality game that plays out in real time; but it could also be a weekly TV show or web series, a video game that releases monthly episodes (a la Telltale Games), a monthly or bimonthly comic book, or really any web presence (even for transmedia narratives otherwise told in completely self-contained capsules).

Consider Mad Men and Twitter. The characters exist on Twitter (as fan creations) and as the series progresses, those characters and their relationships change over time to reflect the events of the show. This is gorgeous. This is that performance art that makes my creative motor rev up: Spinning a narrative in multiple media in real time. And from the creator's point of view, you already have a master timeline to synchronize the pieces of the transmedia narrative: the structure of TV airdates and seasons, unfolding over weeks and years.

But it's not always possible to do precisely that -- particularly for bigger and more sprawling projects, or those based on cinema. If you're making a social media presence for Luke Skywalker, is he the innocent dreamer of A New Hope, the surly teenager of Empire Strikes Back, or the calm, confident Jedi of Return of the Jedi? You could have him evolve over time... but what happens when he reaches the end of his character arc? Do you start over? Stop entirely? And how fast do you play it out?

The simplest and most satisfying answer might well be to consider past canon as over and done, and make sure that any living components tie into the most-recently-released elements, and lead directly onto the upcoming-soonest elements. It's elegant and avoids the problem entirely. It also helps make it easier to incorporate those components into an ongoing and comprehensive marketing campaign, natch.

But I would like to tentatively propose that you don't need to bow out of making social media elements for done-and-past parts of your story as a blanket rule. In the Luke Skywalker example, my take would be to take a single iconic moment and run with it in perpetuity. In this case, I might pick the period between Empire and Jedi. (YMMV.) In Romeo and Juliet, you'd pick the couple pining for each other for all eternity.

The trick would be to keep the content fresh enough to not stagnate; nobody is interested in reading three years of archives of the characters in your film living boring lives before the film starts and anything interesting ever happens to them. The social media element still has to be a vehicle for compelling story... or nobody will care about it.

And then again, in some cases, you might also just plain ignore the problem of chronology and consistency entirely. After all, audiences are more used to muddled or outright fractured chronology than we might at first recognize -- look at the many comic book reboots, crossovers, and retcons out there. I increasingly feel like the desire for completely consistent canon is a current storytelling fashion and not an objectively correct way to do it; after all, how many Batman-and-Joker origin stories do we have?

So yeah. That's where my head is right now: All about when. Have anything to add or correct or argue on how to manage timing in a transmedia narrative? My comments are open as always, and I'd love to hear what you have to say.

Pacing for Transmedia

Pacing, you think. Pacing isn't so different for transmedia, is it? I mean, you still need the same basic structure of rising tension and rising stakes, followed at the end by a climax. Interesting stuff needs to keep happening all the way through the story.

But... not so much the same, as it turns out.

Writing for transmedia has all but ruined me for writing flat fiction. I'm working on a novel manuscript right now, and do you know what the most common feedback I get is? It's too fast. It is too action packed. Seriously.

And these aren't people making up a problem like "Oh, Andrea, your problem is you're just too smart and beautiful," or "The problem with this risotto you made is that it is too delicious." It's a real and comprehensive problem. I don't describe settings, I gloss over transitions. Stuff keeps happening, but it happens too quickly for the medium, so the reader never gets a chance to catch the breath and digest what the heck is going on. It's uncomfortable to read.

But what is it about transmedia, dear reader, that has changed me so?

Web-Sizing Text

On the web, where much of transmedia lives, copy has to be relatively short and snappy. You don't get a lot of room to fool around before you make your point. I just opened a Dan Brown book I had lying around (it's not mine, don't look at me like that) to a random page. I found nearly two pages that could be boiled down to "He fell into the icy river, but clambered out by snagging a branch." Two whole pages, you guys.

If you tried that in transmedia, you would be left talking to yourself, because somebody would have clicked away about three sentences in. The discrete story unit of something-happening in transmedia is the update; that might be a Tweet, a blog post, a video clip, a photograph. Something interesting has to happen in every single one of those.

That something interesting doesn't always have to be plot -- it can be characterization, it can be world-building, it can be supporting your theme. But when you write a novel after you've grown accustomed to writing a story beat every 140 characters or so... it's going to feel weird and off.

Conversely, if you go to write transmedia when you're accustomed to having pages and pages to noodle and have your characters introspect, that, too, is going to feel weird and off.

Make of this knowledge what you will.

Oh, and I gloss over descriptions because I'm so used to that being somebody else's problem -- the sense of a place happens in the art design, and only the mood comes from copy. Yet another way transmedia has shaped me as a creator.

Anyone else have this experience? Is it only me whose flat-text pacing has been ruined by transmedia? How else do you think your transmedia projects have changed your single-medium work?

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Passive Construction in Transmedia

If you've ever read a book on writing, if you've ever taken a creative writing class, if you've browsed the deeps of writers' forums, you've run into this advice: Use stronger verbs.

This means that you should write 'Penelope galloped to the swings' and not 'Penelope went to the swings.' It also means avoiding passive sentence construction; use 'The seagull dive-bombed Victor,' and not 'Victor was dive-bombed by a seagull.'

But let's assume you're a pro at this already, and talk about my spin on this advice for the net-native social media narrative. That version is...

Let the Player Do It

The basic principle here is to look for places in your story where you (or if you prefer, your characters) are connecting dots, spelling things out, discovering or analyzing or arranging. Once you find those places, rework them so that the player is doing it. You're taking passive pieces of a story and making them active.

Now, I don't mean adding puzzles or minigames or challenges willy-nilly; that's just silly. Here's an example of what I do mean:

Nisha's husband Rinaldo 'works late' an awful lot lately. In a passive-transmedia version of her sad tale, she would post a sobby blog or vlog or series of Tweets about how she discovered that he's having an affair. In a more active version, she might post the receipts she found in Rinaldo's wallet for jewelry, dinners at a romantic restaurant, and a series of 3-hour motel stays.

It's the same information, but in the second version, the audience has an active role in working out what happened, instead of only seeing the reaction shot after the character puts the pieces together for them. This is true whether or not you intend to spin an interactive narrative  -- you can convey the information actively without, say, requiring that the player report in the correct answer before the story can move on.

If you're running a puzzle-driven version of this same story, you might present a challenge in which your players need to gain access to a fictionalized credit card bill, and then hit the URLs of the motel, restaurant, and jewelry store in order to piece together the same old narrative.

Learning Curve

The new-to-transmedia writer typically struggles with including these hooks for world-building and interaction. This is arguably the single most difficult thing to wrap your head around when you move into transmedia storytelling from good old static fiction. In traditional forms of narrative, you have perfect control over all of your characters. You are the god of your story. You know precisely what is going to happen, in what order your audience will read your words, etc., etc.

But in a great transmedia narrative, your audience members become characters in your story, too.  And heaven knows you don't have perfect control over your audience. Their part might be central or peripheral, but if they don't have a role to play, something to do, then you just might be telling a flat story that happens to be hosted online.

As with using active sentence construction, sometimes it's possible to go too far. 'Anja was devastated by the news of her father's death' arguably flows better than 'The news of her father's death devastated Anja.'

Likewise, if the player is so active that your characters never do anything under their own power, your story will suffer; there's an artful balance to it. Remember that your guides and protagonists have to sometimes act as something more than puppets dancing to a player's strings. But it's not really so different from balancing your cast of characters in the first place: everyone needs a role to play.

As always with this series, this is stuff that I've concluded based on my own small window into transmedia storytelling, and you might have a completely different take on it. So what do you think, does this apply to all kinds of transmedia, or just the game-infused variety I make? Any examples or fun anecdotes?

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2010 in Review

It's a bit early for year-in-review posts, but you'll have to forgive me; for various reasons, my mind is in a taking-stock and planning-for-the-future mode. Let me tell you about my 2010, and tell you how I can use your help in 2011. And when I'm done, I'd love to hear about what you've made in 2010, and what you're planning for 2011. Any and all shameless self-promotion short of outright spamination welcome in comments!

So, About 2010

This has been a curious year for me. I've worked on no less than a half-a-dozen distinct for-pay projects in the 2010 calendar year, and not a one of them will be launching until next year. It's been a little disappointing to me; I hate to look like I've been idle a whole year. On the other hand, I'm going to look like some sort of dynamo in the spring -- but don't be deceived, that'll be all of 2010 going live at the same time. I'll say more about each of these projects as the time comes.

I've also launched a number of half-baked personal initiatives, as is my way. Of them, I am most proud of Will It Be OK? and The TSA Choice. These have a common goal: trying to make the world a slightly nicer place to live in. I am modestly proud of myself, and very proud of the team that turned The TSA Choice from a half-baked scheme into reality.

I also learned this year that I'm capable of juggling several projects at once. I've long been reluctant  to overbook myself; but this year I discovered that I thrive on being just at the brink of overbooked. This has brought me serious food for thought in deciding how I budget my time; more on that in the next section.

And finally, this appears to be the year that I hit the big time, so to speak; after laboring at roughly the same work for lo these many years, suddenly in 2010 I tapped into the zeitgeist, or achieved notoriety, or something. Or maybe it's just that I finally became willing to hit the conference circuit. At any rate, I had any number of incredibly flattering invitations to speak, and my blog and Twitter readership has grown by leaps and bounds. Thanks to all of you who have helped make this possible. I certainly couldn't have done it in a vacuum.

What's New in 2011, Andrea?

I am so glad you asked! I'm still planning 2011... and I'm going to need your help to get very far.

First, I need your help in obtaining a little filthy lucre. Of late, I've been involved in a lot of fantastically rewarding projects, both personally and on a professional-development level. Alas, one cannot pay the bills with work that is solely personally rewarding, and so I need to start hustling for work in 2011 that actually pays in cash money. If you could use my services, or know of somebody who might, now is a good time to put your dibs on my time for 2011. Email today!

However, in 2010 I've also done a lot of soul-searching about having a career that relies solely on hanging around and waiting for marketing or entertainment folk to call me up. I worry it's not ultimately sustainable; and certainly hustling take a lot of time and energy away from the stuff I actually love -- telling stories. So I'm also trying to move into bigger and more ambitious personal projects, now that I know I have the mental bandwidth to do so without abandoning my freelance career -- and hopefully create some alternate revenue streams while I'm at it.

The lowest hanging fruit for me seems to be in wading into traditional publishing. First up: a nonfiction book based on my Writing for Transmedia series. I'm already getting requests for such a book, and I've roughed out a proposal. I'd love to make this thing happen.

I'm also in the final stages of polishing a traditionally structured, non-transmedia novel -- Revision, about a wiki where your edits come true. I don't know where to go with it when I'm done, though. I've given serious thought to self-publishing on Kindle; but I also crave the legitimacy of traditional publishing. Especially considering my next move: I'm starting preliminary work on a transmedia book series, probably young adult, and probably with a structure related to (for example) Cathy's Book. But... I'm not sure how to proceed, not exactly.

I'm confident I don't have the savvy to navigate publishing waters entirely on my own. It may be time for me to seek out an agent or manager. To be honest, I'm not sure what a relationship like that would look like for transmedia. Still, if you're somebody who would be interested in forming that kind of relationship with me -- or you can introduce me to somebody who you think would be a good fit -- then I would appreciate hearing from you tremendously. Please do reach out.

What About You Guys?

So that's where I'm at, and where I think I'm headed. Now I'd like to hear about what's on your plate. What have you done in 2010 that you're proud of? Any big lessons learned? And do you have a whopping 2011 in motion, or is at all still very ambiguous? Spill it all!

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