Storytrade » Composition

Category Archives: Storytelling

Getting ideas across, not the technical aspects of the vehicles

Treatments

By | | , , ,
Comments Off on Treatments

I’ve never really been able to do treatments. For stories, I can outline them all right; but for a treatment of a piece that’s meant to be a script, whether it’s radio or film of stage, I get carried away hearing people talk to each other. I get lost in writing the dialogue. So it’s not a treatment, it’s a rough draft of a scene. Which I suppose is all right. I mean, this whole thing is about figuring why things work, and how they work. By force it’ll just be my personal experience, because I can’t get in anyone else’s head about these things. So, in my head: treatments are hard. I feel stifled trying to keep everything to prose when I know the things I’m writing about are going to get done as dialogue. And I understand why a treatment can be useful; it gives a summary of … Read on! →

State of the state

By | | , , , , , ,
Comments Off on State of the state

Finding a voice sucks. Blog writing is hard. I imagine this is the case for a lot of people, but I end up trashing most of my posts in a fit of “who really cares what I have to say?” If this blog is a kind of signposting of my experience, then I’ve forgotten to take pictures of the whole first half of the trip. To be fair, it’s mostly the same — a lot of worldbuilding on the wiki, and then refining and tuning the storyline. I have some broad strokes written out already, and depending on what platforms end up getting chosen for the second half — production — I think we’ll only be able to do maybe an episode a month, including all materials. And by episode I’m not yet sure if I mean primarily an animatic, or primarily a radio-play style podcast. There’s a conference in … Read on! →

Story structure: linear vs spatial

By | | , , , , , ,
Comments Off on Story structure: linear vs spatial

I’m not the kind of person who usually outlines or plans. I start with an opening idea or scene and just run with it. This is fine if your deadlines are loose and the process is meant to be exploratory. No harm, no foul, in poking into a dead-end idea; just back up to a previous save and try a new path. This isn’t so tenable when you’re working to a deadline. When I’ve done work for hire, I’ve used an outline; sometimes those outlines were provided to me by an editor, and sometimes it was up to me to build the structure. There’s a sense of safety in having an outline. But if your deadline’s close, then veering from the laid out plan can carry some very big problems. I’ve never written transmedia before. It’s a new mode of thinking for me. Because I’m using Bakhtin‘s concept of polyphony … Read on! →

A more nuanced welcome.

By | | , , ,
Comments Off on A more nuanced welcome.

Now that I’ve had a bit more time to sort things out here, I want to explain a few things. This is, primarily, a professional site. It contains professional thoughts on professional things. But it is also my personal site, too. It will contain personal things that I am happy to have associated with my professional life. This means that there may be politics involved, sometimes. I promise to be respectful and rational in the commentary that I post. This site is also a research site. Behind the scenes I’m working on practice-based research into the nature of transmedia. How does it work? Why does it work? What does it mean to write for multiple platforms to get a single story across? What are these platforms? Which may lead you to the question of just who the heck am I? (Me as in me the writer, not you asking yourselves … Read on! →