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Transparency as a Critical Goal in Blog Fiction

October 19, 2010 By Mark Leave a Comment

When you pick up a book you know you only have to turn a few pages in order to begin to enjoy the contents.  You don’t even have to engage the contents of those pages if you don’t want to: you can simply look for Chapter 1 and dig in.

If the contents are fiction, you know once you immerse yourself in the story that you will not be interrupted by authorial asides or editor’s footnotes.  You will be allowed to forget about the book as a mechanism and as you embrace the contents.

When you watch a movie you expect the movie to believe in itself — unless it’s an art film whose raison d’etre is disrupting the audience’s “easy relationship with the cinema”.*  Scenes play out without commentary from the director or actors, allowing the audience to believe in the world of the story.  Editing, a musical score — everything is aimed at supporting the audience’s suspension of disbelief while making the medium itself transparent.

Even bonus commentary on DVD’s can do damage to an audience’s ability to suspend disbelief.  While it’s interesting to hear how a movie is made — at least once — it’s also a bit of a letdown to learn that a gripping scene was the result of accident.  “We only had one copy of the Magna Carta on the shoot.  When the AD fell off the crane and split his head open, somebody grabbed it and used it to stanch the blood.  What you see the dying wife holding in this scene is actually a place mat from a diner down the street.”  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Blog Fiction Tagged With: blogs, Fiction, medium, suspension of disbelief, transparency

Transmedia, Level 26, 90-9-1 and Transparency

September 24, 2009 By Mark 1 Comment

One of the hallmarks of storytelling over the past few thousand years is that the majority of people who are drawn to stories are not interested in creating stories on their own. They don’t even want to confront the means of delivery, or to understand how stories are imagined, created or produced. What they want is an imaginative, emotional narrative experience that is transparent to all of these mechanisms and processes. They want to consume in the same way that you or I might prefer to consume a meal without having to gather ingredients, cook, season, serve, or do much of anything except taste and chew.

I mention these points to re-frame the context surrounding transmedia storytelling and a recent example of that exploratory narrative form: Level 26, which you can see here, and read more about here and here.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Fiction, Interactive Tagged With: transparency