Authoring a massive Narrative.

Third Person Authoring and exploring vast narrative




Unsuprisingly This book is divided into Authoring and Exploring. Each section is made up of a serious of essays/interviews with individuals who are either practioners , accademics or commentators on vast narrative. the first of these essays is titled

"Truths Universally Acknowledged: How the Rules of Dr Who Affect the Writing p 13- 24 by Lance Parkin."



This is an intersting essay discussing some of the issues and challenges faced by anyone attempting to take on the challenging of writing a character who is already part of a vast narrative. referencing in the main DR who ( the British SF program) Lance Parkin takes through some of these challenges.



The first issue raised is that of writing within the rules of a serious.



"A long running fictional serious requires a writer to take in to account a set of rules that don't apply to stand alone stories as well as almost all those that do.........As a serious becomes long running the involvement of the original creators diminish and the weight of the internal history and audience expectation begin to affect the story themselves.."

This certainly seems obvious and true for the long running TV serious , but can and is the same true for a massive transmedial project , which can and in the SEER does seem to compress much of the narrative energy that one would expect from a long running serious into a much shorter period. Is the weight of internal history and audience expectation increased exponentially when audience participation is part of the substance of the project? I think the answer must be yes. When creating a world as complex as that which compasses the SEER it is almost the pressure of internal history pressing in around the story that creates the world within which it lives. It is the interaction between different media streams which creates the world of the transmedial narrative.

Really the transmedial narrative is an example of what Lance Perkins calls the continuing narrative (Sherlock Holmes - Dr Who - Tarzan ) or unfolding text
" a fiction based around a common character, set of characters or location that has had some form of serial publication. The works that make up an unfolding text  can often have a single author at the start as things progress they are typically written by many."

Again the transmedial narrative seems to compress the concept of unfolding narrative in sense of time and space . With different narrative strands operating simultaneously what would normally take months to unfold across a single narrative can unfold almost instantaneously within a transmedial narrative.

One of challenges faced normally by the writers of unfolding text is that of contempory taste - so keeping a character fresh when they have exsisted across a signifiant period of time - this is not a real probelm  in the transmedial space , because although a massive narrative , the fact of compreshion , at least as regards time means that this at least for me is not one of the rules of transmendial narrative - clearly it could become an issue over time. I think what is far more important is consumer expectation. Making sure that there is some kind of consitatncy across the transmedial narrative. Again Lakin raises an intersting concept , metanarrative. A story about a story , and perhpes it is developing this idea of metanarrative , that we find the consistancy required to hold the transmedial narrative togther.

Another interesting idea raised is that of core conecpts - tso what makes a bond movie a bond movie , no matter what medium what are the core concepts within Batman? In some ways the idea of core concepts seems to equate to that of narrative rules that I mentioned at the satrt.
Core concepts for the SEER
1.Set in the heath
2.Contempoary setting?
3.Involves the battle between Drake and Hendrix?

more to come on this later.....................