Aram Zucker-Scharff

Sometimes it is important to maintain a character or narrative over multiple stories. The tool for that is story arcs. Story arcs are most common in TV and graphic novels, however, with the easy linking of stories, there is an opportunity to expand the use of arcs. A quick review: A story arc allows you to move one narrative thread […]

Related posts:

1. Thinking about how we could use musical cues with online content
2. Building structures inside of your story [Narrative Artifacts: 2 of 4]
3. Decompressed Storytelling and Sandbox Games

I’m thinking for Fridays I need to do something different. Perhaps put out a few quick ideas, pulling on previous posts. I’m going to give it a try today and you should tell me what you think down in the comments. The idea is this synthesis post. Since I’m trying to build new ideas that […]

Related posts:

1. Brick-and-mortar bookstores have a future. It’s mobile.
2. 4 Step Social Media Strategy – MEGA [Re-post]
3. Expanding your narrative with parallels [Narrative Artifacts: 3 of 4]

I’ve been thinking of how to engage more of a participant’s senses as they read printed content. I’d really like to figure out a way to go beyond the standard tricks or video clips and animated text. If you are not familiar with the term, a music cue is the use of sound, usually musical, to signal a performer […]

Related posts:

1. Story arcs beyond TV [Thinking]
2. Old vs New Media – Creative Commons, Wikipeidia and Post Scraping – What is Grand Theft Content?
3. Remix Project [Assignment]

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