A Creator's Guide to Transmedia Storytelling: How to Captivate and Engage Audiences across Multiple Platforms

8 Writing for Transmedia Is Different

Writing for any major stand-alone pieces of a transmedia experience is already a well-examined topic. There’s no great mystery about how to write for comics, for film, for TV. There are books to buy and classes to take; they’re fairly mature forms.

Each of these media comes with its own particular challenges, too. When you’re writing a novel, you have to wrestle with tense and point of view. Generally agreed-upon hallmarks of good writing include “show, don’t tell” and the rule of Chekhov’s gun. If you’re writing a screenplay, you need to develop a visual sense for how your scenes and sequences will carry your meaning.

Many of these storytelling techniques for single media still apply in transmedia, but others ...