“How I spent my weekend”

I spent last weekend producing a LARP experience for the Steampunk Symposium, a steampunk-themed convention held on the Queen Mary in Long Beach, CA. My contribution ended up being a lot of narrative work and experience design, plus a minor role as an NPC (David Bainbridge of Sotheby’s).

The Queen Mary

For details of the LARP, Lauren Scime (who played one of the lead NPCs) has provided a great summary of the LARP, Angelique Toschi published a lovely collection of photos, and April Arrglington (Transmedia L.A.’s Content Curation Director) provided more coverage of the event.

This was my second time behind the design table of a LARP (the first was a Runes of Gallidon-based LARP I ran for Wyrd Con 2), and it was unique in a couple of ways.

First, it was layered on top of the Steampunk Symposium, so we tried to create intersections between our LARP and the overall theme of the convention, which was that Victoria II, Queen of Steam, was taking her annual birthday celebration cruise. I wanted to make sure anyone playing in our LARP could easily carry the story with them into other LARPs being run at the convention without disrupting the other experiences. This meant crafting our LARP and its NPCs to be coherent even when its participants stepped outside the LARP to pursue other activities (e.g., shopping at the dealer’s area, attending performances, dancing at the masquerade ball, etc.). The upside of this was that players and NPCs could also recruit new players for our NPC and do so totally in character.

For me, the coolest part of our LARP was having the Queen of Steam herself, accompanied by her entire entourage, knight two of the players in the LARP for services deemed worthy of the crown’s attention. The icing on the cake was then having one of the knighted players play “Happy Birthday” for the Queen via his musical hat (a hat with a music box that would “play” strips of hole-punched paper, much like a player piano).

Player showing Queen of Steam his musical hat

Playing "Happy Birthday" for the Queen of Steam

This kind of unplanned, serendipitous encounter is a perfect example of why LARPing can be so rewarding.That player would likely never have had the chance to play his tribute to the Queen in character (she was only available for limited times during the convention, and most of that was filled with pre-scheduled obligations), and being able to show of his creativity in character was simply a fabulous way to wrap up the LARP.

The second difference between this LARP and my Runes of Gallidon one is that this LARP spanned three days, which included three set/scheduled events plus activities for players to pursue in-between the events if they liked. Instead of trying to fill a two-hour timeslot, we had to fill multiple-hour time slots Friday night, Saturday night, and Sunday, plus string them together in a way that allowed us to accordion the rollout of the story based on how fast (or slowly) players were moving through it.

Lastly, I was working with a team of creatives instead of going solo. We had a diverse group of talent to draw from, and roles were assigned based on skillset, interest, and availability: producing or procuring props, handling social media components, playing NPC characters, writing the story, designing the experience, etc. This allowed us to do some pretty cool things a one-person show could never have achieved. A bonus was that many of the team members I already knew through Transmedia L.A.: Aaron Vanek, Lauren Scime, Phil Gable, and Angelique Toschi.

As I suspected, working on this LARP was almost entirely a different experience from the Runes of Gallidon one, but it was just as rewarding.

Aside from having a blast, I learned first-hand some of the challenges (and solutions!) to designing a multi-day, multi-event experience that ran parallel and intersected with another persistent experience. I’m still getting my head around LARPs, but I’m finding them to be great sandboxes for playing with narrative, testing design ideas, and exploring the possibilities of collaborative, improvisational storytelling. And what I’m learning from LARPs is influencing my ideas about telling stories in other formats and mediums.

Stripped down, LARPs can be fairly short (less than a half-hour), they don’t require props of any kind, and you can focus just on story if you have limited time/resources. If you’re at all interested in playing with story, I highly recommend trying your hand at designing a LARP if you have the time!

Two types of choice make up the storytelling world of today: The first is the creator’s choice: the choices that we as content creators make to build the world of the story we’re telling. The second is the audience’s choice: limitless, and changeable at the click of a mouse or swipe of a finger.

Everyone is a storyteller. What separates the clicked on from the clicked away is how we build a symphony of story and choose to perform it.

The tools of expression are everywhere. In every device we hold. In every screen we look at. Whereas previously it was enough to look at a big screen, or a small screen, or the light pages of a bunch of pieces of paper bound by staples and glue, today’s world is a different place. We are now faced with something none of us (save novelists) have experienced: Near limitless potential.

As a former composer, the symphony was the holy grail of the compositional world. To write one signaled you either had too much time on your hands or had reached “the big time.” Or both.

What symphony implies in the digital storytelling world is the complete convergence of all members of the orchestra into one coherent being capable of giving pleasure to a group of people for the duration of the event. In the new digital age of filmmaking (a title I’ve long abandoned), symphony is the new world order.

A feature film, once thought to be the symphony of the visual storytelling world, is now a section in the orchestra of convergence. Comic books, once the bastard stepchildren of everything, are now regarded as viable storytelling platforms (and indispensable in my current project, Whiz!Bam!Pow!). Mobile. Games. Shorts. ARG. Twitter. Facebook. Blog. Book. Short story. Social networks. MMORPG. It’s unending.

What separated the great composers from the mediocre was not what they used in their symphony but what they left out. Great works are created within chains, so now the trick is not to use everything at our disposal, but to select each piece carefully and methodically, embracing its nuance and capabilities to best reach the intended end goal: Symphony.

We have to not only be composers in this transmedia world, but disciplined and gifted conductors, knowing those nuances inside and out, molding and shaping them into the pinnacle of story symphony for the venues we choose.

Each and every instrument we choose to play, each and every medium we choose to implement, must compliment and build within the chains we have to mold around each work. In the digital world, where our greatest enemy is not lack of choice, but too much, it’s only through discipline and organic story creation – being the sharpest tool in the shed – that we cut through the surfaces that the dull instruments can’t reach.

The unlimited potential of digital creativity is a wonderful thing – but not because of its unlimited potential. What makes it great is how we choose to utilize the tools at our disposal – through a disciplined (and highly creative) exploration of their nuances to build each and every one of our digital symphonies.

If we successfully do that, we place ourselves in an infinitely better place for the audience to make their choice – and not click away.

TYLER WEAVER is a storyteller whose chosen medium happens to be that expensive form called film. He’s made some stuff, like THE FOURTEEN MINUTE GAP, IL MIO CANTO LIBERO, and GATHER ‘ROUND THE MIC. He lets the world knows what he thinks as the founder and EIC of Multi-Hyphenate and takes great joy in helping other people get their stories told as a marketing strategist. He’s currently developing a transmedia project called WHIZ!BAM!POW! that pays tribute to his lifelong love of comic books. Because he’s slightly insane, he’s simultaneously developing a new documentary. He yaks about that and more on Twitter under the creative guise of @tylerweaver.

*****

A few months ago, I woke up in the gutter, feeling a little confused and not a little surreal. Who knew reading Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics could be so dangerous?

If you aren’t familiar with this book, it is a commentary of meta: a comic that discusses the history, fundamentals and theory of comics. One of the many concepts McCloud discusses is the ‘gutter’ – the space between panels or images. McCloud goes into a wonderful explanation (pretty heady stuff, actually) about the theory behind gutters and how they are used in comics.

Ultimate Game by xkcd.com, CC BY-NC 2.5

McCloud explains that the gutter (what’s not on the page) is as important as the images it separates (what’s on the page). It’s a terribly Zen kind of thing. The image not drawn has as much to do with the unfolding of the story as what’s actually shown. Instead of being blank, empty space, the gutter has a form and shape as much as actual images.

More importantly, the gutter is where the magic of comics happens, because that’s the space the audience has to fill in. I say ‘has’ to, because as soon as the reader moves from one panel to the next, they automatically begin stitching the two panels together.

Don’t believe me? I challenge you to try this experiment with any comic: try moving from one panel to the next without mentally filling in the blanks. Your brain doesn’t say, “Wait a minute, how did I go from this guy flying over a building to that woman tied up on the railroad tracks? This second panel must be the start of a new comic!”

Instead, your brain infers that there is some logical connection between them, and it immediately begins helping the artist by coming up with the narrative linkages needed to connect the panels. Your brain helps maintain the narrative continuity and coherence of the individual panels.

We are creatures of pattern recognition (hat tip to WIlliam Gibson). We can’t help ourselves.

Of course, this concept of consciously deciding not just what to show, but more importantly, what to leave out, has applications across so many artistic endeavors. How much of a character is shown in a film/TV scene? What’s the rationale for scene cuts in a film or TV show (i.e., what is the audience expected to perceive or fill in between the two scenes)? For fiction, how do authors sort through the immense amount of information they could tell and filter it down to a subset selection that renders a better, tighter, more fulfilling story?

As creatives, we are forced to frame our story before we can share it, and the act of framing necessitates an act of editing.

image by jin thai, CC BY 2.0

There are three things I took from this Eureka! moment after reading McCloud’s book.

1) Before we can create, we must frame/edit.

2) Editing is at least as important as creating, probably more.

3) We rely on and must trust audiences to fill in the blanks in our stories. We don’t have a choice, and neither do they.

These are not earth-shattering revelations to artists, especially the good ones. But these concepts take on tremendous importance and have critical implications for telling multiple stories across multiple mediums. Storytelling that crosses media. Storytelling that unfolds in a transitory way, if you will. A kind of trans-…well, you get the point.

One of my early, but indirect, exposures to the importance of the gutter in transmedia storytelling was Geoffrey Long, who likes to refer to the ‘negative capability’ in transmedia storytelling. Long defines negative capability as, “the artful application of external reference to make stories and the worlds in which they are set even more alluring” (Transmedia Storytelling: Business, Aesthetics and Production at the Jim Henson Company, June 2007). Long is talking about how individual pieces of content can reference each other, thereby pulling audiences through a series of content pieces. For example, a comic may have a single reference to a character that does not appear in the comic but does appear in the video game. The reference in the comic becomes a migratory clue to the video game, where part of the narrative can continue if the audience member chooses to follow the clue. Now, Long was talking about the gutter indirectly by discussing how to leave the equivalent of bread crumbs for audiences to help them move between pieces of content within a transmedia property.

Then there is the concept of implied spaces, which refers to the tendency of audiences to proactively fill in the blanks of commercial entertainment through user-generated content (UGC). Fan fiction and art are the most common examples of audiences contributing their own stories as way to flesh out the world beyond what the original author/creator provided. Audiences look to the implied spaces and fill them with their own ideas and stories.

The reasons why audiences like to draw outside the lines of commercial entertainment and the ways in which they do so are varied and, at times, complex. What’s important to recognize is that audiences are acting less like passive consumers and more like active collaborators.

These aspects of the gutter are fascinating and have been explored by many in great detail. In fact, they’re crucial to the collaborative commercial entertainment model my company works with, but that’s not the nuanced point I’m trying to get at.

I’m intrigued by the gutter itself and the creative side of this process. What are the narrative challenges and possibilities that the transmedia gutter poses to creatives? Whether you are fracturing a story across multiple mediums or telling multiple stories across multiple mediums in a shared world, as soon as you decide to produce more than one piece of content, you have the artistic challenge of determining the relationship between those pieces and the audience.

It isn’t the simple matter of trying to guide audiences from one piece of content to another, with audiences stringing the content together to form a story (though that’s also important). Rather, creatives must critically look at what was not shown between the pieces. If the ARG precedes the comic which precedes the novel, how will audiences fill in the blanks between them? What can creatives do to shape how the audience connects them?

As I mentioned in a couple of previous posts, creatives have lost absolute control over not just the order that audiences experience their content but also the format for that experience (on this post and also on this one).

And my last post already highlighted the challenges for transmedia storytellers attempting to guide audiences through a particular, preferred narrative sequence.

So, how do transmedia storytellers overcome those challenges? I propose that the solution to the challenge is in the creative potential of the opportunity. Creatives should be working on the transmedia gutter itself as much as they do on what’s in between the gutter.

As audiences move from one content piece to another, what information do they have? What information is missing? How does the missing information affect the story? Is it trivial (John prefers his eggs over easy), important (John has a history of violence), or purposefully misleading (John was framed for the attack on the night clerk and is actually pretty harmless)?

The gutter can be filled with hints, suggestions, or intrigue. It can swallow time. It can bridge creatives with their audiences in a personal, one-to-one way (after all, we can only fill in the blanks with our own personal thoughts, beliefs, and experiences). It can be dark, even scary. But the darkness is something to be narratively mastered, not feared.

At the risk of repetition, transmedia storytellers must incorporate the gutter between content into the story as much as they do the gutter within content.

For native transmedia, the gutter can be a beautiful place to craft stories, one which can work to integrate multiple pieces of content and support multiple narrative sequences that maintain coherence and continuity. And it’s there, in the gutter, that collaboration between story tellers and audiences happens almost without notice.

You can find magic in the funniest of places…

The day I saw “10191987″ spelled out in my bowl of Cheerios, however, was the day I knew I was different.

Okay, to be accurate, October 19, 1987 was the day I knew I was different. I saw “10191987″ about a week or so before Black Monday, but it wasn’t until the crash that I realized what it meant.

Other numbers followed. Could be dates, could be just numbers. Sometimes good, sometimes bad. Always important. Never actionable.

11091989
5335
08021990
12251990
07252000
2

I’ve seen these numbers in rain drops on windows, in fields, in Christmas tree lights.

Once I figured out what I was seeing, I spent a lot of years trying to predict the importance of the numbers. I built spreadsheets and maps, read about numerology and cryptography, scoured every news source I could find. I never did come close to predicting anything.

After a while, I gave up. Too many possibilities, too many moving pieces.

And there’s the problem: I know ahead of time some key piece to a world-changing event, but I never know what the event will be. I can’t help avoid catastrophes; I can only verify my prediction after the fact. Hardly something to write home about.

I started ignoring the numbers. I avoided news in any format I could. No TV, no web, no print. I was happier living in ignorance and denial. Things got better for a while.

So, why I am writing about all of this now? Because recently I started seeing the same number, over and over: 10102010.

This is the first number that keeps repeating itself. I believe it’s important, perhaps the most important number I’ve ever seen. And I have no idea what’s going to happen on that date.

But maybe you do…

Adding to the challenges was the fact that November included two back-to-back long weekend trips and a long weekend holiday. The timing could not have been worse.

How did it turn out? Pretty well, surprisingly, but not how you might think.

Yes, I now have a complete first draft of a fantasy novel. I didn’t have that 34 days ago. I can also honestly make the claim, “I wrote a novel.” I couldn’t claim that 34 days ago. And I can say that I did it in 29 days. That’s something I never thought I’d be able to say.

And make no mistake, the draft is what you would expect from an amateur’s first attempt. It’s crap, it’s utterly unusable in its current form, and it ended up taking so many twists and turns, I’m not even sure the ending has anything resembling a logical connection with the beginning. The real hard, dirty work – editing, polishing, wordsmithing – spreads out before me.

But the draft was, in many ways, just the by-product of something else. The process of writing the novel was a huge learning experience for me. The lessons I take with me are the real treasures from my NaNoWriMo experiment. Below are a few.

[Disclaimer: The observations below are unique to me and are not meant as anything resembling guidelines, advice, or suggestions for how to go about courting your own muse. Each writer's path is unique and must, in the end, be walked alone.]

1) When pressed, I actually had what it took to write a novel. Success in this case is measured by completing at least a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. The simple act of completion and closure during NaNoWriMo was a surprising confidence booster.

2) For me, writing during NaNoWriMo is a labor of labor. Love doesn’t much enter into the equation. Mostly due to time constraints, the process was a genuine struggle. Certainly, there were fleeting moments of what might be called bliss (say, when a new idea popped out of nowhere that worked really well at taking the story in a new, more exciting direction), but the whole thing felt more like a cross between nailing Jello to the wall and trying to hammer a lump of mud into something functional, if not attractive. My walls are now permanently stained green, and I believe I tossed my hammer through a window somewhere around 35,000 words.

3)  I read a lot of “how to” books and articles before attempting to write the novel. I thought they were going to be more helpful than they were. Looking back on it, I think their value is more downstream rather than up-front. In other words, I understand a lot more about planning and plotting now that I’ve slogged through a novel than I did before. When I revisit those how to resources, they will take on a new, deeper meaning.

4) Writing was both easier and harder than I thought. I tripped over the smallest of challenges and easily vaulted the largest of hurdles. Where NaNoWriMo really helped was in preventing me from stewing over problems. Big or small, hard or easy, I had to keep writing if I was going to win.

5) Despite all the dire warnings to never get bogged down during the first draft, I still found myself correcting spelling, grammar, and even going back to previous passages to retroactively bring in a new idea or better integrate earlier work with later developments in the narrative. I’m no where near skilled enough to say whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing for me, but it definitely made the NaNoWriMo challenge a lot harder.

6) I completely underestimated the frequency with which new ideas would emerge from my writing. This was both boone and burden, as it greatly extended the scope of the plot. I ended up with a lot of “extra” material to work with, but every new idea meant more words. This was not a problem in general, since the more you have to work with, the better chance you have of constructing a more imaginative, engaging story. But this becomes a serious problem when you’re under a 30-day deadline. It forces you to walk away from certain storylines simply because you don’t have time to explore them.

7) I did not make use of the NaNoWriMo website or write-ins. I did not have time to hit the forums, extend my writing buddy network, play much in the #nanowrimo twitter stream, or meet my local NaNoWriMo writers. This was disappointing, since I feel that all of that can be a part of and can deepen the NaNoWriMo experience. But at the end of the day, I was forced to admit thatI needed every spare minute to write, and none of these activities were adding to my word count.

And most importantly, what I learned from NaNoWriMo is that (at least for now) I am definitely not a writer. I’m someone who writes. It’s a good distinction for keeping one’s ego in check.

Did I enjoy the NaNoWriMo challenge? Will I take the challenge next year? Do I think it was a helpful tool for writing? Yes, hopefully, and a qualified yes. As someone once said about NaNoWriMo, it’s a great way to write a novel in 30 days,  but it’s not a good way to write (even Chris Baty doesn’t suggest its use as a permanent state of writing).

I’m already looking forward to next year’s competition, and if I’m ready to write another novel before November 2010, there’s a good chance I’ll self-challenge myself to a 30-day window. But I certainly would not want to earn my living by writing under these conditions.

UPDATE: One of my fellow NaNo buddies, Drew Lackovic, kindly forwarded his suggestions on how to tackle revisions. Drew is a man of many talents, including writing and teaching. His thoughts are definitely worth a read in general but especially applicable for anyone suffering from a NaNo hangover…

Min. Daily Average Word Count: 1,667

Word Count Goal: just over 3,000

Actual Word Count: 3,045

Daily Word Count Score (words in excess of min daily average): +1,378

Total Word Count Score: 50,067

Chapters complete: 21

With a day to spare, I inched my way across the 50,000 work goal and promptly collapsed. Yes, I could spend another day stringing together yet more verbiage that will most likely never get used…or I could get back to the rest of my life that I essentially ignored this month. I’m leaning towards the latter.

My head’s still swimming from the experience, and I hope to post some thoughts about it (as well as lessons learned) later. For now, I’m just thrilled to have finished my first novel. It’s something I never thought I would do.

So ends my first NaNoWriMo adventure, and, yeah, I’m already looking forward to next year!

Min. Daily Average Word Count: 1,667

Word Count Goal: 2,500

Actual Word Count: 2,101

Daily Word Count Score (words in excess of min daily average): +434

Total Word Count Score: 47,022

Chapters complete: 20

Wrapped up the climax chapter, but I’m still staring down a 3K work final chapter, which feels long. Will write the final chapter until it seems done, then backfill any word shortage across earlier chapters. I left a lot of areas undescribed in my race to cut the plot and get to the climax, which means there are plenty of opportunities to explore the world – lots of flavo-bits to add.

Presuming no big problems, should have this wrapped up a day early!

Min. Daily Average Word Count: 1,667

Word Count Goal: 3,000

Actual Word Count: 3,435

Daily Word Count Score (words in excess of min daily average): +1,768

Total Word Count Score: 44,921

Chapters complete: 19

In to the home stretch. Just started the climax chapter, which leaves a chapter for wrap-up. It won’t be much past 50K words, but I’ll hit the mark.

Aiming to wrap up the next two chapters by the 29th (somehow I doubt much will get done on Monday 30th).

Min. Daily Average Word Count: 1,667

Word Count Goal: 2,500

Actual Word Count: 2,073

Daily Word Count Score (words in excess of min daily average): +406

Total Word Count Score: 41,486

Chapters complete: 18

Just slugging out words at this point and trying to get Mia/Kenji/Sora to the climax location. Planning on one chapter of denouement, which means about four chapters left, total.

Min. Daily Average Word Count: 1,667

Word Count Goal: 3,000

Actual Word Count: 3,203

Daily Word Count Score (words in excess of min daily average): +1,536

Total Word Count Score: 39,413

Chapters complete: 17

Definitely made up some lost ground today. It felt good to get this much writing done, especially as I’m not confident I’ll get much written tomorrow. The tensions and dynamics between the three characters are starting to emerge, though not exactly as I predicted. Or planned. Oh well, who says the writer knows how the story ends any better than the reader on the first draft?

Heading home to officially start the holidays, but I’m hoping to squeeze in some more writing tonight…