Principles of Storytelling

Andrea Phillips's A Creator's Guide to Transmedia Storytelling offers many interesting and helpful tips related to character and story development. Since our characters and stories are still in their early stages of development, we have the opportunity to apply the author's advice on the principles of storytelling to our work. For instance, Phillips describes the value of worldbuilding in storytelling. Phillips states, "In transmedia storytelling, though, the most effective tool is to actually create a small piece of your world and give it to your audience to play with" (pg.43). Allowing the audience direct interaction makes the world feel more real and, therefore, more interesting. One way my group could apply this approach to our story is to create a website where the audience can view our videos, recordings, and print records of paranormal activity. Maybe they could even contribute their own paranormal experiences and evidence in a comment section or chatroom. We should design a unique logo to create the illusion we're a real organization. I also liked Phillips's description of conflict and it's importance in storytelling. Reading this section made me realize my group hasn't really come up with an idea for conflict that will drive our story. Phillips suggests, "think very hard about your characters and what their utmost hearts' desires might be...dangle that possibility in front of their noses, and then come up with a situation in which they can't have it" (pg.59). I suppose the desire all of my group's characters would have in common is finding evidence of paranormal activity. The conflict would be the fact that such evidence is very difficult to find. However, all of our individual characters should probably have their own unique desires and minor conflicts if we want the story to be engaging. The individual desires could possibly even create conflict within the group. In conclusion, these two sections gave me many ideas about how to involve an audience in our imaginary world using various media and write an interesting story. Phillips also prompted me to think deeper about my character and her desires/motivations.