Live To Write Another Day by Dean Orion (free ebooks for android .txt) 📕

we saw were plays, novels, and other written materials turned into movies, and movies eventually migrating to television. But for well over a decade now, we’ve seen an explosion of two-way migration between all sorts of original properties, from comic books and graphic novels, to video games, to movies, to television, to the web. We’ve seen interactive marketing campaigns of all different types, using all different technologies, pitching all different kinds of products. And we’ve seen the emergence of casual online and mobile games that are not only available on both platforms, but are able to be viewed and played on each, within the course of the experience (for example, you can make a move in Words With Friends, either on your phone or on your computer through Facebook, and the game tracks your progress on both devices).

All this cross-pollination of creative content has also given birth to a new form of narrative called transmedia storytelling in which a fictional universe is created that allows for a story to be told across multiple mediums simultaneously.

What’s exciting about the transmedia movement is that stories are now being developed that are intended to be delivered across different mediums from the initial conception of the idea, not just as a way to take advantage of a secondary market. When you add to that the speed of technology advancement and the openness of younger generations to consume entertainment in new and different ways, it’s not hard to imagine a world in which these kinds of platforms could become extremely popular.

Recently a very forward-thinking company hired me to write an animated television pilot that would also lay the foundation for what I thought was a very smart transmedia strategy. The challenge was to write the pilot in the traditional way, using a four-act structure that allows the resulting twenty-two-minute episode to have multiple commercial breaks while having each act be somewhat self-contained so that it could potentially be viewed online as a five-minute webisode. In addition, each script had to contain at least one set piece that could serve as the framework for a casual online game. In other words, we had to create a story that could stand on its own, be broken into four stand-alone parts, and have at least one scene with a clearly exploitable gaming element. There would also be a social networking component built into the website, merchandising, sponsorship opportunities, and the potential to create a full-length feature film based on the property.

This strategy not only gave the producers the option of delivering the linear content either online or on television, it also carved out space for original stories to be delivered via interactive games, opening up the possibility of allowing the larger narrative to unfold and expand simultaneously across the mediums.

This new paradigm is one of the most exciting developments in entertainment to come along in many years, especially for writers with the interactive gene. Only time will tell how this kind of narrative will be received, and what formats will eventually take hold and break into the popular culture, but make no mistake, transmedia storytelling is coming soon to a cell phone, iPad, and computer near you!

 Story as a Living Three-Dimensional Experience

Finally, I think it’s only appropriate to conclude our little adventure by sharing with you my own vision of a future storytelling medium that I think has very exciting potential. I like to call it:

Story as a Living Three-Dimensional Experience.

Using the advanced processing power we will begin to see in all the new devices in the next few years (computers, smartphones, tablets, and computerized televisions), I see us being able to create photorealistic worlds that can be navigated in much the same way you navigate a video game. But this isn’t a game I’m talking about. It’s a story you essentially step into and experience voyeuristically.

Imagine a live HD video feed that allows you to move through space as if you are the camera. You have the ability to go anywhere within this world—walk down the street, go to the park, go into retail stores, enter private offices, apartments, bedrooms, basements…anywhere. As you do, you encounter various characters playing out various scenes. You then have the ability to follow these characters and watch their stories unfold. In fact, you have the ability to experience every character and every location the world provides. When you return to certain locations at a later time, you see new beats of the story that you hadn’t seen before. All these beats build on one another, forming an interconnected narrative that is revealed scene by scene based on what you have previously experienced—a narrative that starts to make more and more sense the more you explore and the more time you spend in the world.

Instead of being a passive linear experience that you sit back and watch, you actively seek the story out and watch it unfold all around you by essentially living inside it. It’s an active, non-linear experience in which you choose to receive the various facets of the story in the order you want.

Creating such an experience would be similar to writing a television show with a large ensemble cast, where many storylines exist in parallel and intersect at various points along the overall arc of the larger narrative. And like television, these stories can continue in perpetuity, for as long as you (the creator) want them to. The difference is, once you launch this new type of “show,” you would not be restricted to writing episodes in self-contained thirty- or sixty-minute units. Instead, you would simply begin to add more scenes to whichever storylines you wish, whenever you wish, creating a living three-dimensional experience that continues to expand and grow in different directions.

The technological framework on which this system would be built would also allow you to track the parts of your world where your audience is spending the most time, as well as enable you to communicate with them directly. In this way, you and your