Planting Story Seeds Part 1: Platforms

I won’t tell you how to tell a story. Oh, I could, but there are thousands of books, websites, and street-corner literary professors who can drop those pearls of wisdom with greater skill and authority than I can. What I will do is give you some pointers on telling stories that fit into a greater storyworld.

When planning one of these stories, you need to ask yourself two questions:

• What aspects of the storyworld does the story explore?
  
• What’s the best platform for telling the story?
  

Or, in other words:

• What story do you want to tell, and what’s the best way to tell it?
  

By “platform” I’m referring to the means by which the audience receives the story. Is it a novel? A short story? A serial novella delivered one page per day via carrier pigeon? Is it a movie, a web-short, or a TV miniseries starring Tom Selleck? Is it interactive — a video game, a tabletop game, or an alternate reality game?

Each platform has its own strengths and weaknesses. A story that works great on one platform might fail miserably on another.

For example, if you want to tell the story of the brave jet fighter pilots who protect us from alien flying saucers, focusing on different types of jets, saucers, and aerial tactics… serial fiction might not be the best platform. But a video game would rock. Likewise, a story detailing the dirty politics of how the United States and Russia combine their militaries in 1954 to defend the Earth could make a riveting novel or Tom Selleck mini-series, but a terrible video game. (“Press X to bluster!”)

In a perfect world, you’d decide what story you want to tell, then find the platform to match. But in the real world, stories are products, and products are defined by their platforms, so it’s more often the other way around: you’re assigned a platform, and have to decide what story — and what aspect of the storyworld — fits it best.

It doesn’t have to be a tough decision. Just remember that the storyworld is big enough to hold all the stories… and not all of them have to star Tom Selleck.