Do You Have Onscreen Dragon Money?

While traditional novels and short stories are the things I always come back to eventually, I’ve spent a lot of time working in other storytelling and writing mediums. I wrote plays as part of my theater education, audio-dramas as part of a larger team, and, for a number of years, narrative video games. And while obviously these all have these very different approaches to writing, the big blaring different between text-only and multimedia storytelling comes down to what you can “get away with.”
If you want to write a book with twenty dragon characters that all speak a secret draconic language where they paint fire in the sky, you can just…do that. No one will stop you except maybe your editor. Try to write that into a movie, however, and you’re looking at a vastly different production process. Adding a character to a book is just about finding space for them in the narrative and putting some text on a page. In a video game that is hiring a voice actor, setting aside time in the booth or volume (which comes with comes with paying the director and engineer their hourly wages), adding another model, and just on and on and on exponential growth of stuff just to add a character that delivers a few lines. So that either has to be done as cheap as possible (which is doable) or you find another way to write in this narrative puzzle piece.
Also writing for multimedia is often a team effort. Unless you’re taking the writer-director-producer route, you’ll have a director or an art team or a costuming and set design team that, ultimately, will be interpreting your narrative vision. It’s very likely, being a writer on a team, that you’re not getting the final say on how something is executed. Even if you’re only ever adding actors to a project, I can tell you from experience as a voice director, the instant an actor gets ahold of a character, you’re now in collaboration mode. You’re always going to be sharing that character with that actor.
So when we’re talking multimedia writing, there’s always going to be a gate somewhere down the line, the keeper just looks a little different. Money, time, labor, algorithmic audience data. While this feels very frustrating conceptually, it actually presents a very interesting creative challenge for a writer
As the lead and only official member of my narrative game atelier (on hiatus for reasons that will probably be obvious), I did everything from writing to art to programming. So I didn’t have someone to account to. It was just me. You’d think that would be a creative dream come true. I have to reiterate, however, it was just me. When you’re staring down the planned work, and you start seeing how many environments you’ve assigned yourself to create, you start making some hard decisions about what the story looks like. Can you do it in five settings instead of eight? Does that specific scene actually need to take place in a library or can it also take place in the park? Does this character actually advance anything, or can their narrative role be taken over by a larger character? If I need to include “invisible characters” for asset creation purposes, how can I write around them stylistically? You really to break down was is a non-negotiable for the story you’re trying to tell versus what can be wiggled a little bit.
This approach to creative consideration also affects how you might play to certain strengths as a writer. If you study plays and screenplays, they are mostly dialog. Video game narrative writing (as opposed to environmental writing) is mostly dialog. Things like scene setting and costuming are presented in a very straightforward fashion because you’re not writing to an audience, you’re writing to a technical director who just needs basic information to build off of. Blocking (or the way an actor moves through a scene) has a whole code-set to make it as easy as possible to convey. But really, in the end, someone else is going to be making those final decisions, anyway.
So while, for some, conveying a story through dialog only is daunting, the dialog expert might convert easily to a play-write. Someone who hates writing the more pastoral elements of a story might thrive in a dialog only environment when given the opportunity.
At the same time, an author who struggles with dialog might find they benefit from meeting the challenge of a medium with different restrictions and expectations.
So from a writer’s perspective, it’s a way to reevaluate your preconceived notions on how to write a story and structure a narrative. From a consumer’s perspective, we find an exploration of how a story might be delivered in multiple different ways.