Building a better story doesn’t require you working in the story itself. Sometimes, the universe around your narrative can offer all sorts of opportunities for greater scope and better engagement.

Image via Wikipedia

Of the three artifact types, I believe that narrative-parallel artifacts are the most common. They’re easy to create and deploy and they are the closest transmedia storytelling comes to easy franchising of a narrative. That is not to say that a well crafted narrative-parallel artifact is easy to create, the best are complex and deep narratives in and of themselves and used by prestigious authors, including Shakespeare.

A narrative-parallel artifact is narrative fragment that runs external to your main narrative but still relates to it. It can be accessible to your characters, but does not have to be in their reach. Essentially it is an artifact that runs parallel to your main narrative thread.

Why use narrative-parallel artifacts?

This specific type of artifact comes with a host of advantages for creators. It allows you to influence the readers’ perception without forcing characters into obvious foreshadowing, authors can create implications and pass judgement calls outside of the main narrative and without disrupting the reliability of the narrative voice.

Parallel artifacts also allow you to build a world around your narrative without forcing excessive exposition on your readers. It can also work to construct and reinforce a certain mood within a narrative.

Where have narrative-parallel artifacts been used?

Once again, I’ve assembled a list of both general and specific narrative-parallel artifacts in action to provide context.

Video games

There are a number of different implementations of narrative-parallel artifacts in video games. The two most common are in-game TV and book chapters.

Two prominent examples of effective in-game video use are Max Payne and Alan Wake. Here are two videos:

The first is from Max Payne. This is one of two compilations of one of the in-game TV shows that played on televisions left on throughout the game. The player could walk right past them, skipping most of the content, or choose to stay and watch them play out over a brief period. You can watch the first few minutes show two different executions of the technique.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The second video is from Alan Wake, where most of the TVs in the game play a very short episode of Night Springs, a story based on the inspirations for the game, Twin Peaks and The Twilight Zone. Players interacted with these videos in much the same way.

Click here to view the embedded video.

In Max Payne the videos sometimes foreshadows symbols or narrative elements that will appear later. Sometimes the videos just help set the creepy and sort of over the top mood. For Alan Wake, the videos provide all that and, sometimes, explain some of the more complex underlying concepts of the narrative.

The other narrative-parallel artifacts frequently found in video games are books. The best executed in-narrative books are found in Deus Ex. They both compounded emotion during the game and create greater depth. Sometimes they act as foreshadowing and at other times they provide background information for the narrative. In either case, they are also optional.

Comics

I could probably find a number of examples within comics, which are famously self-referencing and recursive. However, I’ll start and stop with the most prominent.

Reading a comic inside a comic

Watchmen uses many narrative artifacts between its two covers. In fact I could probably write a post just on Watchmen‘s artifact use. The most prominent and persistent of these artifacts is The Black Freighter. A comic within the narrative that provides subtext and depth to Alan Moore’s world, one that lacks morals and ethical direction. Moore used the horrifying text of The Black Freighter to help illustrate the apparent hopeless, heartless and self-destructive world of his characters. As revelations unfolded within the story, parallel revelations were occurring for and around the main characters.

In fact, the series of asides which contained The Black Freighter, independent from the characters, could be considered an artifact itself. The asides placed between chapters are also a form of narrative-parallel artifact.

Journalism

In journalism the most common implementation of narrative-parallel artifacts is the sidebar. I’m referring to a box to the side or otherwise separated from the story that contains information relevant to understanding the story, but not necessarily in the story.

In TV journalism the lower-third is a common location for narrative-parallel content.

Shakespeare

While there are earlier appearances  of the story within a story, the most popular in modern culture is Hamlet. The Danish prince crafts his own play within Shakespeare’s play, creating a narrative-parallel artifact that illuminates the character’s thinking and provides a significant plot point.

This blog

While I’ve done the occasional sidebar, I’d have to say that my most common usage of narrative-parallel artifacts is in the pink-highlight asides that are  throughout my posts.

Besides allowing me to address you in a different voice than use in most of my posts, the tooltips create opportunities for additive, but not required, information that can help you expand your understanding or find a chuckle.

Building your universe with narrative-parallel artifacts

The best place to start is to understand that your narrative does not live in isolation. Even if it just fell out of your head on to a piece of paper this very moment your story has background, context, a past and a future. If you can gain a better grasp on the universe of your narrative you’ll find opportunities for narrative-parallel artifacts will pop up frequently.

This is especially useful the more interactive your medium is. Narrative-parallel artifacts thrive on giving your participants a choice, so that they can take part in the slow construction of your universe.

Later: Narrative-additive artifacts.

Before: Building structures inside of your story with narrative-centric artifacts.

Related articles

• The Game Narrative Triangle [Design] (kotaku.com)
• Building structures inside of your story [Narrative Artifacts: 2 of 4] (hacktext.com)
• Artifacts: building dimension into your narrative [Narrative Artifacts: 1 of 4] (hacktext.com)
• What is a text and how do I hack it? (hacktext.com)
• Let’s Discuss Alan Wake Episode Two – Now [Game Club] (kotaku.com)

Related posts:

1. Artifacts: building dimension into your narrative [Narrative Artifacts: 1 of 4]
2. Building structures inside of your story [Narrative Artifacts: 2 of 4]
3. Catch up on Narrative Artifacts

I stumbled across a really nifty tool today called 750 words. As you may have noticed, I’m really trying to increase the amount of writing I do, starting with (hopefully) two blog posts a weekday. However, sometimes you may want to do regular writing without it being public. In comes 750 words.

The site stems from the idea that writing daily is good exercise for the mind and that sometimes you just want to dump your brain into a document without having to worry about coherence, SEO or an audience. It accomplishes its goal handily.

You sign up to the site using Facebook Connect. The user is then presented with what is pretty much white space with a word counter at the bottom of the screen. Then you type. Boom, mission accomplished.

The site has a number of other nifty features. It turns the process into a bit of a game, issuing monthly challenges, assigning points and a leaderboard, and even discovering all sorts of interesting statistics by running a semantic engine over your writing. You can also designate statuses in each post through what is essentially a short-code. You can also receive badges and see how other people (including followed friends) do with their writing.

It can also be set to lock after a period of no activity, so you don’t have to worry about your inner most thoughts being seen by the boss while you are on the way to the bathroom.

All that being said, I think the most beneficial element of the platform is its simplicity. The perfect setting to let the words just flow out. Burn those bad words and when you finally hit something good, you can bring it to the public.

On the other hand, there is always penzu if you are looking for military grade encryption for your thoughts. Of course, the caveat when it comes to ‘privacy’ on the internet is that your data exists on a server somewhere and it is therefore never truly private.

Credit goes to Kevin Loker, from whose tweet I found the site.

No related posts.

Sometimes it is valuable to have something inside of a story that both the characters and participants can manipulate. Building an artifact that intersects with your main narrative thread is more common than you might think and very useful.

The first narrative artifact-type I’d like to deal with are narrative-centric artifacts. These are narrative fragments that are internal to a story. Essentially it is a piece of the story within the story, one that both the characters internal to the story and the participants external to the story can interact with. I’ve identified them in a number of works and formats and they are essential to enriching your text.

Why use narrative-centric artifacts?

Image via ImageShack

The most prominent reason to use a narrative-centric artifact is to increase engagement of participants in the narrative. When the user interacts with an artifact together with the characters it deepens the universe and the characters.

Depending on the artifact, it may even lend a physical aspect to your universe, by giving your users something of your world that they can hold in their hands.

Where have narrative-centric artifacts been used?

I’ve put together a list of both general and specific examples of narrative-centric artifacts and how they are used to give this a little context. Hopefully it will also help build a better understanding of how to use narrative artifacts in your own work.

Video Games:

Perhaps the most common and easiest to explain narrative-centric artifact is the cloth map. In-game, your character and others would presumably have some sort of map to help them find their way around. By giving your audience a physical map that they too can consult with, it makes it feel like this universe matters enough to be mapped out with.

That solidity of cloth maps implies a whole spectrum of other elements: explorers, cartographers, illustrators, unexplored areas, and places beyond the map. Very effective.

General Entertainment:

TV, video games and movies all make use of physical tie-ins. While action figures don’t count, the existence of weapons from a narrative is fairly commonplace. Once again, this is all about deepening the world for participants. With this in mind, the closer to real the weapon is, the more effective an artifact.

TV shows, especially the USA Network’s shows, also do promotion through various media formats, most notably blogs, done in the voices of their characters. They were one of the first to allow participants to receive texts from in-narrative personalities. Character-audience participation that doesn’t break the fourth wall is often a narrative-centric artifact.

Journalism:

I found it surprisingly difficult to tie down examples of narrative-centric artifacts in journalism. I know they exist and have seen them, but I just cannot find them at the moment. I suppose data journalism is a good example, when the same data is known by the subjects of a piece and is available to the readers.

Perhaps the highest profile case of narrative-centric artifacts in journalism is WikiLeaks. This is a major case in which the primary topic of many reports is a document or documents that are available as easily to the reader as the reporter. For journalism, since you are already dealing in reality, narrative-centric artifacts help engage and educate readers while giving rise to a more intelligent discussion.

In some cases, infographics may also qualify.

Web-comics:

There may be other ways that web-comic creators use narrative-centric artifacts than Twitter but, from what I’ve seen, none are more effective. Participants follow characters’ Twitter accounts in droves. Two excellent examples are the casts of the Dresden Codak and Questionable Content (QC). In both cases the creators of the comics build mini-narratives into their characters’ Twitter streams, including interactions with other characters from the same universe.

Overall, in-character twittering seems to effectively increase draw (short-format narratives that exist continually inside the universe of the primary narrative allow for more frequent participation) and engagement. Besides increasing the web-comics’ reality, the tweets are also effective promotion, allowing fans to readily and frequently promote content through re-tweets.

Also, people just seem to really like following fictional characters on Twitter.

This blog:

Honestly, I don’t really use narrative-centric artifacts on this blog because I rarely deal in characters, fiction or factual. Except myself. I could argue that my Amps are narrative-centric since they present an artifact (someone else’s article) and my discussion around it.

Styled text and headers are also types of narrative-centric artifacts, in that they intersect with my narrative and are used by both participants and the author/character. However, they don’t really enlarge my content, so while they are great SEO, they are poor artifacts. I wonder how to enhance them to be more effective? Ideas?

Depending on how central linked content is to a post, links might also present narrative-centric artifacts. This is one of the reasons I really like playing with Apture. It doesn’t always work, but when it does it allows me to embed a fragment of other sites inside my own. I think that’s probably the closest to narrative-centric artifacts that I have on this blog.

Building your universe with narrative-centric artifacts:

Besides the various examples here the most common and easily executed way to place narrative-centric artifacts in a universe is through fictional documentation. Maps are the most common example, but creators can easily go beyond that. Video games and transmedia experiences commonly provide descriptions of ships, weapon specifications and other fictional texts that come from the story and with which both the participants and the characters interact.

Later: Narrative-parallel artifacts.

Before: What are narrative artifacts?

Related articles

• Artifacts: building dimension into your narrative [Narrative Artifacts: 1 of 4] (hacktext.com)
• What is a text and how do I hack it? (hacktext.com)
• Narrative Medicine and Blood Pressure (33charts.com)
• Thought police? Darpa wants to know how stories influence human mind, actions (networkworld.com)

Related posts:

1. Artifacts: building dimension into your narrative [Narrative Artifacts: 1 of 4]
2. Expanding your narrative with parallels [Narrative Artifacts: 3 of 4]
3. Catch up on Narrative Artifacts

It’s time to consider the other ways your stories can engage readers. Narrative artifacts allow you to build dimension into the universe of your story and are universally applicable. From journalism to video games, artifacts are key to pulling in and keeping your audience.

Narrative artifacts are the things that surround and add to universe of your narrative. In many ways they are one of the most important elements of a transmedia experience.

Definition:

A narrative artifact is a self-contained narrative fragment of a storyline that is separate, related or parallel to the central narrative.

It is often the first step in building the sense of a greater universe around a central story or character and comes in three formats:

1. Narrative-centric: A narrative fragment internal to a story, one that both users and characters can interact with meaningfully. A good example is a map of the continent the characters are on. Though it is within your central narrative thread, its very existence suggests a larger universe outside of the character’s perceptions.
   
   This is an artifact that intersects with your main narrative thread.

2. Narrative-parallel: A narrative fragment that runs outside of the story but still relates to it. This is often in a format that may or may not be accessible to characters of the story but is accessible to the reader. While it exists in the universe of your story it is not directly part of the narrative thread. A good example is a chapter from a book about something relating to, but not of the story, one that does not involve the primary characters.
   
   This is an artifact that runs parallel to your main narrative thread.

3. Narrative-additive: A narrative fragment completely external to the story. It is not accessible to the characters of the narrative, nor are they aware of it. A good example is an epigraph. It may be part of the same universe of the story, perhaps even involving some of the same characters, but it is not part of the actual story. It does not necessarily directly relate to the narrative either.
   
   This is an artifact that adds depth to your narrative thread without being part of it.

I intend to go into greater depth on each of these types of narrative artifacts, how they were used in the past and how they could be used in the future. Each narrative artifact type will get its own post in the series. Stay tuned!

Related posts:

1. Building structures inside of your story [Narrative Artifacts: 2 of 4]
2. Expanding your narrative with parallels [Narrative Artifacts: 3 of 4]
3. Catch up on Narrative Artifacts

• “Games as Language Systems ” – Moving Pixels has a very interesting article up comparing the design of video games to the design of languages. This article aims to help you understand that there are many elements through which a player expresses themselves in a game and how they come together.
• “Steal from Fable II! Using actors and writers in games ” – The ever excellent Sande Chen & Anne Toole look at Fable II’s use of actors. The Writers Cabal tells you how and why it matters.
• “Interactive Journalism ” – Hit Self-Destruct carries this article wondering what the hell happened to in-depth journalism. This article focuses on game journalists and what they’ve missed.
• “Interview: Daniel James on Three Rings’ Whirled ” – Meet the man behind Whirled a… something … that is “everything from a Flash game creation tool to a virtual world where people can hang out in rooms and stuff.” Is Whirled looking to become ‘the social’ for gamers, or is it something else entirely?
• “Little Big Mess ” – Oh, Sean Sands, sometimes you out and out insult me and sometimes you write a damn good editorial. This is one of those good times. Sands’ article on The Escapist asks an important question: For a game built on community content, why is Sony failing to communicate with it’s Little Big Planet users?
• “Decision Paralysis, Or Why I Can’t Get Out Of Vault 101 ” – Leigh Alexander always writes interesting articles, and this is no exception. Sexy Videogameland takes a look at decision making in video games and what happens when the options increase for “choice in games.” Also, this article is the reason I am know about to boot up Fallout 3.

Related posts:

1. Cool Things… Back to Work! [A Grim Doc]
2. Top Games for 2008
3. You Wanna Talk About Mirror Images?

The problem with Evernote is that it is absolutely horrible at taking notes. Actually there are more problems than just that, but the core of the issue is that, for a program that has the word ‘note’ in its name, it is pretty bad at just that.

For those of you not in the know, Evernote is an application for Macs, PCs and iPhones that is built for users to “Capture. Sync. Find” and “remember everything.” This sounded pretty cool to me, even without an iPhone. There was one problem, I already use note-taking software. OneNote has been my digital life partner since I first discovered it and I consider it the one piece of essential software on my computer. I use Microsoft’s OneNote for everything from work to play and its database goes deep.

However, right before the semester began, my aging Acer laptop literally melted down and I lost an entire summer’s worth of notes. It was devastating. I hadn’t backed up all of my OneNote directory and to lose as much as I did was horrifying. Evernote’s ability to sync up to the web was so attractive that I considered buying a subscription right away.

I decided it would only be fair to try the two products, side by side. So, I put OneNote on my new computer and restored my last backup. Then I installed Evernote and decided to split my classes between them. Evernote, I figured, should be targeted towards the student market segment, so it should work just fine.

The first thing I tried to do was import some of my old OneNote notebooks into the program. This did not work very well. OneNote uses a system recessed pages and my average notebook has sub-pages within pages within tabs. This just didn’t import into Evernote in a usable manor. That plan nixed, I went on to use Evernote in two out of my five classes.

The top six problems I encountered:

1. I missed half of my first class just trying to figure out how to add bulleted lists without copying and pasting them from another program. Also, I found that once I’d created a bullet, increasing the indent was an exercise in annoyance and using enter to exit out of indented lists was counter-intuitive.
2. Manipulating indents was a huge pain, because Evernote created them as a set of spaces.
3. Tagging my notes was a waste of time compared to the ability to recess notes in OneNote. I do like tagging, but doing so in class is a waste of time. Putting in enough tags to make class notes useful takes forever and not doing so makes notes impossible to find. I take notes because later I know I’m not going to remember what is in them, without tags I wouldn’t know what to search for.
4. Navigation was both counter-intuitive and difficult. There is a reason no one has ever tried to use two scroll bars for one axis before and it made navigating longer notes simply impossible, which had me almost screaming in frustration during mid-term reviews.
5. It had no sense of citation and pasting content in from other programs was just weird, often causing odd paragraph spacing.
6. Without OneNote’s multi-level structure, notes were just hard to find. Even with a search bar.

One of Evernote’s unique features is its ability to take photos, recognize text, and make them searchable. Everything I do on the web is already tagged and categorized. I never had the opportunity to use this feature of Evernote in the wild. When is there anything I need to take a picture of that I couldn’t just type out on my cell phone or text to twitter? I can even take a voice memo if I need to. What would I ever need to use this feature for? Every example I’ve seen has been on the level of “oh this is cool” but I’ve yet to see a useful photo. I certainly haven’t encountered one myself.

I already tag websites through services like Delicious, Digg, Friendfeed and Ma.gnolia and photos in Facebook, Picasa and Flickr; why would I want to keep them on my hard drive just to search their images? How much textual information is kept in images that this would even matter?

Is Evernote riding a hot air balloon of hype to the top?

I can’t imagine Evernote could ever become anything but a minor player without extensive adoption in the student community. Most PC users don’t know enough to care about the synchronize feature or are knowledgeable enough to use the photo feature if they even had the opportunity. With that in mined the only other thing Evernote has going for it is the writing recognition for tablets. One problem–almost all Tablet PCs ship with a very good handwriting-input program–OneNote.

The Apple student

The argument can be made that Evernote has a good chance with the growing segment of students using Apple computers, as OneNote doesn’t exist outside of Windows. However, almost all students who have Apples don’t bring them to class because of their weight and would never need a note-taking program. Of course there’s also the fact that for what the average student needs to do, Apple computers are high on price and low on function. While there was an increase in Mac users with this year’s freshman class, network compatibility problems and software issues have been driving them away. With the economy in the shape it is, I expect we will see a significantly smaller number of new students with Apple laptops next year.

Where’s the beef?

If all this is true and Evernote fails in appealing to what should be (in my opinion at least) its target market segment, who is it appealing to and why is there all this hype?

The reason Evernote has been so noticeable as of late is for one reason (besides the iPhone):

It is the perfect tool for hard-core bloggers who like pulling random info from the web to write about and sharing it with their audience and don’t like paying for OneNote or use Macs. These happen to be the same people who are writing the reviews. Unfortunately this function is essentially duplicated with a website like FriendFeed. This begs the question: what are people using it for?

Why is it still installed on my computer?

I discovered one amazing use for Evernote. Writing fiction. Especially this month, which is National Novel Writing Month. Evernote’s lack of formatting options, non-existent spell-check, and reassuring synchronization mean that this is a perfect tool for short fiction or speed writers. If Evernote added a word-count tool, I have no doubt they’d be able to capture the NaNoWriMo crowd with ease.

Other than that, I don’t understand what possible real-life use people have for Evernote, unless they own an iPhone. As for its future? I can’t see it going far without some serious changes, no matter how many people sign up for the service. No one will pay for it unless it is useful as a tool for… well… notetaking.

I’d like to know, how are you using Evernote? Is it in a way that actually helps your workflow or is it just a toy? I’m open to being proved wrong, but I just can’t see a way that Evernote in its current form can succeed as anything but a plaything for the techno-elite and perhaps some savvy writers.

Related posts:

1. Essays Need Not Apply [Finals]
2. Four ways to fail upward with content
3. Trove spectacularly fails to deliver.

If you’ve been paying attention, I’ve been covering the initial release of Brave Men Run, a novel which first released “in paperback, five formats of e-book free of digital rights management restrictions, and free podcast audiobook (podiobook) editions.” The book was picked up by publishing company Swarm Press and was for sale on Amazon this weekend.

For the novel’s release on Sunday, its author Matthew Wayne Selznick held a six hour live streaming video event in which over 100 people joined his USTREAM feed as he read stories from other podiobook authors and followed the progress of his novel in an attempt to drive it up the charts.

Though the novel didn’t reach number one on the overall charts, it got very high in the genre fiction and Action and Adventure categories, number one on ‘Movers and Shakers,’ and as high as #53 overall.

Even without hitting number one, Selznick left many well-known authors and novels in the dust as he shot up the charts. His novel easily sold out (though there are plenty more to come) and, as the participants can tell you, his virtual launch party was a great success, bringing the podiobook community together to really promote one of their own. I was there as well, rooting on Selznick from my BoltBus trip between New York and Washington D.C..

Almost 14 hours past the end of his promotion the novel has dropped slightly on the list, but still resides in the top 100 Amazon sellers, ranked at number 89. This weekend was a very impressive showing, not just for Selznick and Brave Men Run, but also for the podiobook community. At the end of the day, they’ve shown the Old Media just how powerful New Media can be.

Previous Posts:
“The Amazon Climb“
“New Media, Meet Old“

Related posts:

1. New Media, Meet Old [Brave Men Run]
2. The Amazon Climb [Brave Men Run]
3. Online Distribution for New Media

I’m logged into the USTREAM Feed for Matthew Wayne Selznick’s live coverage of his release of Brave Men Run and it is 1:00PM on Sunday, he’s been live for 3 hours and Brave Men Run is #5 in the Action & Adventure category and #280 overall.

This is a pretty remarkable release for this podiobook turned Old Media. I’ll be posting more updates as I more happens.

[2:20PM EST] – Selznick has started another short story, in the meantime, Amazon.com seems to be slow on the update.

[2:45PM EST] – Number 10 in Genre Fiction, Number 3 in Action and Adventure, and Number 139 overall.

[By the way, I can't believe this is working on a BoltBus.]

Related posts:

1. Media Collision Aftermath [Brave Men Run]
2. New Media, Meet Old [Brave Men Run]
3. Viva La Vida or How To Sell Music [Profit and Community]

So, if you listen to podcasts, chances are you’re heard about this already. If you haven’t, here’s the deal:

This weekend, podcast publishing gets its first true test. Novel-podcaster Matthew Wayne Selznick has had his “podiobook” book (titled Brave Men Run) picked up by Swarm Press. According to the publisher, and the author himself, this will be is “the first novel with an initial simultaneous publication in paperback, five formats of e-book free of digital rights management restrictions, and free podcast audiobook (podiobook) editions.”

Even if that isn’t true, This will be the first podiobook to published novel conversion that has the whole community behind it. Selznick has been running ads all over the podcast universe. He also has a stable of high-level, well-known and respected podiobook and podcasting writers on his side. He has had authors J.C. Hutchins (The “7th Son” trilogy), Mur Lafferty (”Playing For Keeps”), Nathan Lowell (The “Golden Age of the Solar Clipper” novels), Matt Wallace (”The Next Fix”), J.R. Blackwell (Voices of Tomorrow), P.G. Holyfield (”Murder at Avedon Hill”), and Jared Axelrod (The Voice of Free Planet X) write short stories in his universe to help publicize the release.

Selznick will also come online at 10 a.m. EST tomorrow (Sunday) to stream video readings of the short stories, progress reports on his books sales and “show solidarity for everyone who buys the book from Amazon.com on that day.”

Selznick’s goal is to launch ‘the Podiobook that could’ to the top of Amazon’s charts this Sunday. No small task.

This isn’t just a clever marketing ploy (though it is that). Many writers continue to labor in relative obscurity when it comes to podiobooks, some of them quite good. If Selznick succeeds, this could push publishers to look towards podcasted books, and other novels of the new media, for future publication.

In other words, this is not just a test of the content of the podiobook, but of the community’s strength. This is an opportunity for podcasters and podcast listeners to show that they matter to the mainstream media. Not only that, it is an opportunity to really subvert the old media for the the cause of the new.

It’ll be interesting to see how this turns out. If Selznick succeeds it could mean a whole new way of looking at publicizing and publishing books. It would also mean that a free release of a product can drive sales.

I’ll be on the bus back to Virginia for part of the day, but I’ll be watching. If you are looking to support Selznick, make your purchace on Sunday.

Related posts:

1. Media Collision Aftermath [Brave Men Run]
2. The Amazon Climb [Brave Men Run]
3. Online Distribution for New Media