Aram Zucker-Scharff

Building a better story doesn’t require you working in the story itself. Sometimes, the universe around your narrative can offer all sorts of opportunities for greater scope and better engagement.

Of the three artifact types, I believe that narrative-parallel artifacts are the most common. They’re easy to create and deploy and they are the closest transmedia storytelling comes to easy franchising of a narrative. That is not to say that a well crafted narrative-parallel artifact is easy to create, the best are complex and deep narratives in and of themselves and used by prestigious authors, including Shakespeare.

A narrative-parallel artifact is narrative fragment that runs external to your main narrative but still relates to it. It can be accessible to your characters, but does not have to be in their reach. Essentially it is an artifact that runs parallel to your main narrative thread

Related posts:

1. Artifacts: building dimension into your narrative [Narrative Artifacts: 1 of 4]
2. Building structures inside of your story [Narrative Artifacts: 2 of 4]
3. Branching narrative schema and similar narrative structures

In print, your narrative thread may be enough to sustain a reader, but when you go beyond a single book, it’s time to consider the other ways your story can engage. Narrative artifacts allow you to build dimension into the universe of your story and are universally applicable. From journalism to video games, artifacts may be the key to pulling in and keeping your audience.

Narrative artifacts are the things that surround and add to universe of your narrative. In many ways they are one of the most important elements of a transmedia experience.

There are three types of artifacts: narrative-centric, narrative-parallel and narrative-additive.

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