Expanding your narrative with parallels [Narrative Artifacts: 3 of 4]
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
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