4.8 Writing Transmedia Fiction
( Due: Sun, 19 Dec | Status: Not Completed )
1. Writing Transmedia Fiction is easy – you already know how to do it. What you may or may not know is what it is.
2. There was a time when people thought of media almost entirely in terms of “dominance” – a very aggressive, winner-takes all approach to how media related to each other: print was assumed to have been “dominant” until the advent of film, which stole the spotlight with it’s visual appeal; radio rivaled film because you could listen at home, but then TV displaced radio; pulp fiction adventures did well until the advent of the serial comic book, which had more visual appeal, but that came to an end with the Saturday morning cartoon show and the video game, which were even more “appealing.”
3. Historians have long known that, while new technology will displace old (as the CD displaced the 8-track, and the MP3 has decreased CD sales), distinct creative forms endure. Tempera painting hasn’t vanished with the advent (now over a millennia ago) of oil painting, and vinyl LPs continue to have a niche market for reasons having to do with their analogue audio properties and their long-term storage potential.
a. Example: After considering all sorts of digital possibilities, the Library of Congress recently chose analogue records (made of shellac, not vinyl) for long-term audio storage. Why? Because shellac doesn’t deteriorate the way vinyl does, and because have an analogue LP, you can figure out how to play it even if you have to re-invent the phonograph. Whereas digital contest is pure gibberish if you don’t have the specific software it was encoded with. If you find this fascinating, there’s more information at:
4. Media compete, but they also complement each other and a single story (song, etc.) can be meaningfully different in different formats. “Cross-media” fiction is as old as the idea of adaptation: turning a novel into a movie, or arguably, taking work of oral fiction or myth and drawing scenes from it onto a wall or a piece of pottery. “Cross-media” is frequently used as an industry term synonymous with adaptation, most often in business contexts, like “cross-media marketing.”
5. “Transmedia” is a hot new buzzword that reflects a different kind of approach to storytelling in multiple media. The term originated as a scholarly term to describe storytelling where different works in different media are all part of a larger “world” or story, often in a de-centralized way where individuals have an opportunity to contribute to the story. Read this interview with Henry Jenkins, one of the professors who help define and popularize the term:
6. Then listen to this panel discussion of the concept (including Jenkins and other scholars).
7. The term “transmedia” is new, but the concept isn’t entirely new. It’s more that new technologies (and, Jenkins argues, the convergence of those technologies and work done with them) make it easier than ever before. Carl Bark’s “duck” comic books for Disney could be seen as “transmedia” as they were completely original stories that introduced new characters like Gyro Gearloose, Flintheart Glomgold and Uncle Scrooge that would eventually appear in Disney cartoons (especially Duck Tales, which started by adapting Barks’ 60s-era comics into cartoon episodes and went on to create new stories with those and other characters). Arguably, turning an oral myth into an image of conflict on a vase is also “transmedia” rather than simple adaptation, adding to and extending the original. But I’ll leave that debate for others.
8. To conclude, you write transmedia fiction the same way you write any other work in any medium. The techniques are the same. The difference is how you think about the story you’re telling, and what you do (or don’t do – add or leave out) in order to facilitate transmedia extension.
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