Over the last few years, it has not been uncommon for me to hear a YA author or an aspiring YA author to lament that no one is interested in publishing their work unless it is part of a trilogy. This complaint is usually made with the grave shaking of the head and an implication (unstated although much more often stated) that publishers are not interested in literature these days so much as they are interested in a franchise. The publishers are not, these authors claim, looking for the next To Kill a Mockingbird so much as the next Hunger Game or Divergent series that can be packaged and repackaged as movies, TV series, games, or toys.
But what if it turns out that this mania for series and the ubiquitous YA trilogies is not driven by a publisher’s attention to a bottom line (well, maybe just not entirely driven by that) as by actual changes in the expectations of the audience? What if today’s younger and maturing audiences are actually demanding not only a good story or an interesting character but their expectation of literature is that it affords them a playground with space for them to interact?
In The Convergence Culture, Henry Jenkins quotes a Hollywood producer who noted that, when he began, he looked for a good story; then he began looking for an interesting character that could be at the heart of a series; most recently, his holy grail is an intriguing storyworld that can not only accommodate the original storyline, but stories that go back, forward, and run parallel–places like the Star Wars universe where the studios have not only taken us back in time from the original films and forward beyond them, but into the side stories and crevasses of story that were once throw-away lines in the original.
It is easy to blame a preference for this type of world on economics–that is the most obvious and tactile motive. But what if today’s young readers are simply more likely to demand the ability to become involved in the worlds their favorite stories take part in–through fan fiction, through transmedia experiences like video games, amusement park or location experiences, and online forums where they are allowed to explore and even create more of a world that captivates them. If this is the expectation of younger (or older) readers, do creative writing programs have a responsibility to talk with aspiring writers about creating for audiences who do not want to be passive–who may demand to become involved?
The MOOC I am taking from the University of New South Wales on Transmedia Storytelling offers these questions to block out a transmedia story:
- What is your central story idea
- Who are the characters and what are their motivations in the story?
- What are the rules that define the larger storyworld surrounding the immediate narrative in your story?
- How did you develop your story idea?
The third question is the one that stands out as being different from the typical questions I recall in my creative writing class. Of course, part of this comes from the absolute bias against anything other than contemporary, realistic fiction in many academic creative writing programs–the assumption that, of course, you would not be writing about where superheroes exist or where wizards could transform you into a ferret but could not, for some reason, transform their own unfashionable clothes. But thinking about storyworld is not just for authors writing fantasy, scifi, or historical fiction (Jane Austen’s novels arguably are the basis of one of the largest participatory cultures in existence).
This week and next week, I am reading a lot on the teaching of creative writing–something that has become standardized (some argue fossilized) since the University of Iowa launched their world-famous Writer’s Workshop in the 1930s. The workshop method has its staunch supporters but many critics who feel that the workshop might be constructed to serve the author in better ways–perhaps in addition to (or even instead of) offering a dissection of an author’s text, the brain trust of a writing workshop could serve the text better by playing in the storyworld rather than dismantling it.