Multi-Dimensional Story: Writing Across Platforms

Fiveandfour said in the comments to the Arrow post:

I am completely certain it’s possible in the here and now to tell different parts of a story across the platforms of tv, internet, comics, dvd releases, books, what-have-you and have the audience participate in whatever ways they choose and be satisfied and feel they are being told a complete story no matter how little or much they follow each of the platforms. It’s something I’ve been waiting for, actually, and I’m well beyond the teen and 20-somethings in terms of age. (I think there have been some shows/stories that have gone across platforms, but I can’t think of any where it’s been planned from the start that the launches will be more or less simultaneous and the different media versions of the story are intended to operate both independently and as part of the whole.)

The key will be having a master plan that outlines what will be told where, then launching it with proactive intelligence, not reactive “well, we didn’t show this to you but you need this piece of vital information to understand that…”.

For example, tv could be the place where all of the foundational elements are laid out, then the internet could be where different but related explorations on themes, characters, or alternate pov’s could unfold . . .

I’ve been thinking about this, too:

I am really interested in this, this idea of exploding story. One of the restrictions of print is that it has to be cost-effective; printing stand alone short stories just isn’t feasible. And while I love graphic novels, most of the ones in my area of romance and women’s fiction haven’t been graphic novels, they’ve been illustrated stories. So I love the idea of doing a novel set in a fantasy world with graphic novels for shorter stories from that world and twitter fiction as snacks, so to speak. As a writer, I could have some control over novels, graphic novels, and twitter, and that has a great deal of appeal. Maybe set up Twitter accounts for people in contemporary novels and do conversations there. I would really, really love to do short stories in a series and release them once a week, like a TV series, then put them in a book with extras the way TV shows do DVDs. There are just so many options for telling stories now, for creating a world across platforms. VERY exciting.

Argh Nation is pretty much all readers and writers, so I wanted to throw this open to all of you. How would you feel about reading across platforms? What’s good and bad about it, where would you feel left out because you couldn’t participate, where would it liberate you as a reader? And then as writers, boy howdy, would that set us free. Or would it just be more work for us with a smaller audience? What do you think?