This month, Lon, Janet and Marianne join JP and Crys for another book club, this time reading You’re Gonna Need a Bigger Story by Howard Houston. Beware Furbies and butt boosting pants as we talk about how to maximize your IP and utilize different mediums as authors.
Show Notes
- You’re Gonna Need a Bigger Story by Howard Houston
- Lon Varnadore
- Janet Kitto
- Marianne Hansen
- Tami Veldura
- The Super Story Podcast
- Next month’s book club: The Heroine’s Journey by Gail Carriger
Transcript
Crys: Hello friends. This is episode 34 of the Write Away Podcast and it is March 10th, 2021, as we are recording. I’m Crys Cain and with me today, it is book club.
We have read, You’re Going to Need a Bigger Story, by Houston Howard. This was a beast of a book. I know that everybody has lots to say. So I’m going to let everybody introduce themselves.
JP: I’m JP Rindfleisch.
Janet: Hey, I’m Janet
Crys: All right, friends. Did we all actually finish the book? Because I think I was like the last one as of yesterday. I zoomed through.
Marianne: I didn’t read every word, but I read every section, if that makes sense. That’s what I do too, with just about every book. Hot takes. I know we have them.
Crys: JP, can you give us a quick rundown on what is this book that we just read?
JP: Sure. So I guess the key component of this is crafting a story world, as opposed to novels. So the key component is crafting this universe that you can then build off of through what he calls transmedia. That would be using things like film, graphic novels, comics, novels, et cetera. All these different platforms of media and each one has either its own unique story or its own unique connection to the other platforms, but they are not adaptions. They are simply different venues of entry into your core story world.
Crys: And I brought this book up because it had been recommended to me as a book about how to build a franchise. Thinking of Harry Potter, Star Wars. The science fiction and fantasy ones are the very clear examples, but how to take your books beyond stories and into experiences and into merchandise and being able to license your book in more ways.
What is the initial feeling about this book?
Lon: It was a lot of information to take in, gave me some good ideas, but at the same time, that’s definitely one person’s opinion.
Janet: I thought it was too movie focused because I would’ve liked it had he gone through… he talked about Tolkien and I wish he could have chosen just like any book and taking it through, not a book that had a whole brand new world or that had already had this done to it.
I would have liked to have seen a book that this hadn’t been done to, and then seen what he could do with that.
Crys: JP, you can’t just answer in hand gestures.
JP: I know. I felt like this book gave me permission because this is literally everything that I have been thinking of at 50%, because I’m terribly organized. So it was as if someone took my thoughts and then made it 5 billion times better. And like I’ve already been working on a lot of these pieces and already after reading this, I am like going crazy and probably annoying my co-writer with all the crazy thoughts I have.
Janet: Yeah. I enjoyed reading this through the first time with many post-it flags, but I really want to go back and read it again and think about it for my own projects. Like definitely it was blowing my mind, a lot of things that I thought were great ideas and I saw how they could be extended. So like my first purpose was let’s read this so we can talk about it, but how do I feel about it for my own projects?
Oh, I’m going to take such a deep dive into this.
Marianne: Do you think you can do it without a team? I think it’s so much work, but because if you think about his examples of star Wars, one group does movies, a different group does the books, a different group does the comic strips, and yes, they all work together, but you’re talking about so many people doing these things.
And I thought lil ol’ me trying to take my book and add other media types to it, more experiences to it, that’s a lot. And I feel like I have to learn so many more skill sets than I have. I still have issues with how to print on Word kind of thing. And so I feel like I have to take classes to learn how to build websites or write comic book strips or I don’t even know.
JP: I think just to take one quick step back for listeners, a key component of this book is all about your story world, as opposed to your story.
Crys: I think Marianne, in response to that, is less about, do I have to do all these particular things, and more about how do I create a world that is addictive. That’s how I look at it more. And it’s less that I have to do any of these particular things, but more that I leave space for any of this to grow out of the world I’ve created.
Agreed.
JP: So I think one example that I’ve been thinking about for my story world is there is something in the co-writing project that Abe and I are working on that would work really well as a graphic novel. My thought is potentially if the series were to take off and if people had interest in that story world, to then do some type of a Kickstarter and then find someone who may be an illustrator. Obviously I would love to illustrate, but I think that this kind of exceeds my current learning.
But I would do that in the aspect of, I would find someone on that team who could then provide pieces to that media. But the core story would still be with Abe and I.
Crys: Janet, you’ve been quiet so far. I know you have a lot of thoughts. It’s hard to sift through them all.
Janet: It is. And yeah, and just like in the book, it’s hard to know the jumping. point, where do we jump off from that question? I think the biggest takeaway that I have to keep reminding myself every time I think about transmedia and not confusing it with multimedia, is that, how can I tell more of the story?
Because I’m never going to tell the same story with transmedia. That was a huge thing for me to learn.
Crys: So why don’t you share your interpretation of the difference, as he says it between multimedia and transmedia.
Janet: So he gave an example of Twilight as a good example of multimedia. What you’re doing with multimedia is you’re repurposing the same story. So with Twilight, they had a video game, they had books, they had movies, but it was still all the same story. And you never, anytime you adapt the story, you have to remember that it’s multimedia.
Crys: And then transmedia is different pieces that extend the story.
One that comes to mind is in Witcher. They have a card game that’s really popular, Gwint, and that card game was created and is available to download and print your own. I don’t think they’ve actually licensed anybody to produce it. I could be wrong. I think you can play it in the games.
So you have multimedia where the games and the TV show tell the same story, but then you have a transmedia element where you can play the game, the card game that exists outside of the world of which you’re extending the experience.
JP: It’s huge. Oh, just a huge trans media example would be Marvel or DC, where you have just so many comics. You have games, you have the movies and they’re all not telling the exact same story. They’re all. Sometimes the comics even tie directly into follow up movies. Or other pieces along those lines even a Wanda vision is a perfect example of Marvel expanding transmedia in their current movie universe to include TV shows.
Crys: So that’s a story that would be considered a West Coast media that feeds into this kind of trail. Of their series and JP just mentioned West Coast media and East Coast media. I don’t really want to get into the definitions of those because that gets a bit into the weeds and he does a really good job in the book.
And it’s not super pertinent to our conversation, but they are different ways of extending your story.
Marianne: Okay. So I have a question. So say with Twilight, when I found out about Twilight, I drove down to a bookstore. And the whole bookstore was full of guys dressed up as vampires and girls in prom dresses.
So if Stephanie Meyer had come out with a line of prom dresses, would that be transmedia?
Janet: Does it extend the story?
Marianne: I think it would just make more money. But it would add to the experience.
Crys: Unless they actually created a prom experience, I don’t think it would count necessarily as transmedia. Unless there was a… something hidden in the dresses that added to the story of Twilight that didn’t exist in the books.
Like some kind of like secret message, which wouldn’t work for the Twilight world, but if there was some kind of secret message sewn into the hem of a dress that would add another story to that, and that could make address transmedia versus just merchandising. Let me think. Okay. Does that sound right to everybody else?
Lon: Yeah.
JP: I think he calls it out somewhere because it’s, it’d be like a very tiny subsect of trans media where you’re expanding the world.
But through these minute or anciliary pieces just can’t find the right term, but you’re right in the aspect that it’s, you have this kind of like upper echelon level where you’re telling stories, but then there are pieces that would directly feed into the narrative, but they’re not telling their own stories.
Crys: You Hereferenced the song where the singer had his phone number that led to a voice machine that was actually this singer’s. And he said that wasn’t transmedia. But if they’d had a response, like in a story element added on the voice message that you got, when you called that, that would have elevated it to transmedia.
Have you given thought to, or has this changed how you thought you want to approach your writing? Has anything in the book changed how you want to do things?
Lon: Little bit not a lot, but it’s. It did help make me think a little bit more about some characters that are in this series that I’m working on that are going to be like who pop in and pop out. And I know that I’ve got stuff written about all of them from other projects and it’d be nice to… I could put this to, either put it out for free, put it on a Patreon, email something, and it would add to the story world, but it would, and it would be like a novella or series of short stories that tell their own story in this bigger world, but not be just a retelling of the same story.
Crys: Because I’m obsessed with TikTok, I’ve given a lot of like little side thoughts to how I could tell mini stories in a serialized version with my terrible acting and maybe some wigs on TikTok, because I think that would be a lot of fun. And that’s a form of marketing as well.
But if it is telling untold bits of my story that will never appear in print, then that would be a really fun way to get people interested in my world. And just for me to have fun on TikTok, because that’s what I do.
There’s a couple creators I follow who have like original cosplay characters that they do. And I want stories about these characters to be written and they’re not, and I’m very angry about it.
Marianne: My main character is a real estate agent and I thought about creating a website with her postings. I’d have to look into legal aspect about taking a picture of somebody’s house and then creating a totally and completely made up, posting of it.
Cause there’s no way like just a three bedroom, two bath house… it would be. Do not mind the dead body that you walk over. I’m sure that it will be removed by the time you buy the closing date.
Lon: It was disclosed in the papers.
Marianne: The carpets will be steamed cleaned.
Crys: So the thing that this book did for me, more than anything, was it validated my magpie desires. And what I mean by that is I’m going to read a little quote here and then I’ll explain it.
“Every time you create another revenue stream in a different media and platform, you will naturally attract a new demographic.”
And he talks about when DC produced a comic book that linked to a movie and that’s not important. And he says, “now you have full fans of comic book fans entering the house through different doors there by creating two revenue sources instead of just one. This is great, but you haven’t incentivized either group to travel to the other product. What you’re left with is two sources of revenue and without incentive to travel simply to transactions.”
He goes on to talk about creating links through these different things. And he also talks in different areas about creating kinds of stories that actually attract different demographics. They talk about the four quadrants, which I’m going to be very politically incorrect, according to what was it? Grammarly told our friend that he couldn’t use “old woman.”
The four quarters are basically old women, old men, young women, young men, and the different types of media that they attract to. Most of the humans we know have gotten into Star Wars at some point in their life because it either it became a socially acceptable thing to do or whatever, but he talks about how you can start getting those groups to cross over versus what we indie authors are currently taught is like narrow in on niche.
He talks about how to build the kind of stories that can pull those different demographics into niches that they wouldn’t necessarily have looked at and gone, “yeah, that’s me.” But because it extends the story that they love, they might come over.
And so I feel like my magpie desires are completely validated and will make me more money in the end. Tada.
Marianne: I wrote down, I hate the words, brand art form and consistency,
just Oh, everyone tells me that I need to be singular. And so I feel like, yeah, I feel like my brand right now is author and Donny Osmond fangirl.
Crys: That’s definitely on brand. I feel like it would be a fun drunk author game to go around and describe each other’s brand, write down each other’s brands and then mix them up in a giant pile.
And then we pull them out and people have to guess who it was. And we get points for how many we guess.
JP: Maybe that can be next book club.
Crys: Yeah, excellent. What was the other the other new author game I made up was guests who, but we describe people by and I stole this from TikTok.
We describe people by completely arbitrary characteristics. ” Does your character look like they belong to a fraternity when they were in college? And stuff like that.” Get to tell little stories about people.
Anyways, back to the book.
Janet: There’s a great example in there, and I might need some help with how it worked out, but there was a grandfather and his grandson and how they both came into this story world.
One came in through a game and one came in through was it a book or was it a movie?
Crys: History book. Yeah. Assassin’s creed. And the grandfather was a fan of church history specifically, but US history in general.
Janet: Like if we’re talking about singular in our brand, this book has opened that up now to say here, you have to think about that crossover.
Crys: Yeah. Cause the recommendation, he said he made the recommendation to the Assassin’s Creed guys, ” hey, you should write a history book because that would attract both those demographics.” The kids want to learn history in a way that will help them unlock more story or gaming ability and the history nerds just like history. And if you presented in a appealing fashion, there you go. Get that crossover.
JP: Yeah. Cause cause in that example, the Assassin’s creed one, it had direct correlation to actual historical events, to the point where even dialogue choices were impacted by certain aspects of characters that the grandfather was able to, if I remember correctly, he was able to almost suggest ” Oh, this person did this.”
And that led the the grandson to, to make a choice that he went to normally made because now he has this historical act information. And then it peaked the interest of the grandfather to play the game because it was historically accurate. Except for the assassins.
Lon: So they say sec.
Crys: One of the arguments he makes is that by expanding our knowledge and how to tell stories and how to deliver stories that we can help engineer our success. I like that phrasing a lot better than like “here’s some marketing tips for you.”
I liked the idea of engineering success and delivering stories to readers rather than like “here’s marketing!” Because like Marianne I have certain words that I. Get itchy with and marketing is one of them.
He goes into a lot of depth on how his, I don’t know, team or agency, whatever they build these story worlds. And he has a lot of guidelines and rules. And that was probably the part that I skimmed over most because I’m not in the implementation phase of this yet.
If I dug in, I would have wanted to start implementing immediately. I think it’s good to read, but I also don’t think that you necessarily have to subscribe, like any writing teacher, you don’t have to subscribe to their, “this is how I do things” ever. He’s got some really great ideas and some really great guidelines, both one of those things take what’s useful,leave what’s not.
Marianne: Yeah. Part of me wondered if I was ready for this book. It overwhelms me immensely. And I think it’s because I was looking at it so big. But once again, I think it’s because the examples were so big in my opinion. And so when I looked at what I was doing, it was just hard to bring it down to, you know, my little book.
Crys: I shared in our chat and I’ll share it on the podcast notes, an episode, they have a podcast as well, and they have an episode on how Bridgerton could be a Super Story or a Story World. And I thought that was fascinating because it’s very easy for me to see how in science fiction and fantasy worlds, we expand and create like all these different elements and new stories and new worlds.
It’s harder for me to see in more of a contemporary or historical view, but I found that episode was super helpful in helping me to grasp how something like a cozy mystery series or contemporary romance could elevate itself to a story world.
Marianne: I’ve already seen t-shirts about Simon Duke Simon. I don’t remember his full name. People are doing their own, at least merchandising of Bridgerton. And so the producers really said give in on it. You could have said… no, I’m not going to say that.
Crys: No, I want to know. We’ll put it in the extracted comments of Marianne.
Marianne: You could have Simon bum tightening pants,
Crys: You know what? They have those leggings, they call them the TikTok leggings and they’re there on Amazon. But they’re for ladies.
JP: Not always.
Crys: It’s true. There’s a lot of gentlemen. There’s a lot of gentlemen grabbing the butt boosting pants.
Marianne: I think we all need help sometimes. Yeah.
Crys: Now I need to figure out how to put butt boosting pants into my scifi world. Cause that needs to happen now.
JP: Perfect.
Crys: That’s part of my story world. Deal with it.
JP: I think if I, so I went crazy as opposed to Marianne where I just like my brain exploded and I thought of a thousand ideas including things that I know there’s no way that I could achieve with just Abe.
I think I were to view it as to what could marianne do or like what could any writer do as just one singular person? It would be a series in the story world. Maybe short stories and or anthologies or something in that story world in your newsletter containing either behind the scenes, extra scenes, video recordings of your audio for extra scenes or information, or even a whole new story.
All these different pieces of media that still fit within that story world. And it doesn’t force you to reach out to, like a graphic designer for a graphic novel, if that’s not what you do. Just even those pieces, but containing it all within a story world keeps people, keeps the door open for other people to find the short story versus your series.
And then it also just keeps feeding in on itself.
Marianne: Yeah. This book literally made me go to bed.
Crys: I find that’s my reaction. When I read a book before I’m ready. Doesn’t matter what kind of book, if I read it, if I read a craft book or a business book before I’m ready, I sleep. That’s my way of dealing with overload. I sleep.
Janet: But he does say that to think about this, to make this story world, to take it and think about what it is before you try and okay. Let me put this in the right way. But he talks about having the outline first and then thinking about the best platform for it.
So maybe because we’re coming at it with a series that we already have started, that’s what’s making it more difficult. His approach might be easier to do if we thought about first, okay as a marketing strategy, we know we want to have a series.
Do we want to have that in a movie? Do we want to have it in a book? And we’re just, our listeners are our novelists .
From that point it’s easier to think about all of the extensions that we want to add into it, but. I get it, Marianne, because for myself, like I was just thinking, okay, I’m going to write a series because that’s the best marketing strategy that I have right now. So now I have to think what, why did I choose the stories I’m telling within the story world?
So it’s, it is doing that, that the puzzle backwards, right?
JP: I think too, like when Abe and I started this, we had originally thought of a three book series that turned into a six book series. But my approach to writing is always, there’s a history and there is a future that you haven’t told.
And it’s always those little story seeds I love putting those in there. And not as things to drag a reader and not answer questions on, but just pieces to show that there is there’s something that existed before and something that existed after. And so by reading this, it just gave me permission that what I was doing was right.
And I don’t know story world approaching it in his method where he like creates the Storyworld history first and then jumps in and he’s okay, what’s your core story? And then all of these pieces.
I don’t know if that’s my method and I don’t think anyone has to follow one singular method, but I think just definitely having that approach of whatever you write has a history, and it has a future is like the first thing you need to always think of.
Crys: Yeah. I think that people who are world-building geeks will get a lot out of this because it will fit right in with how they approach things. My co-writer Tami Veldura is a world-building geek. And when they read this book, they immediately created a story world for us based on his guidelines, because it fit really well for them.
And I’m like, yeah, I’ll just write in whatever world we, you know, you mostly create and I’ll add fun things. That works really well for us because I’m not a world building geek. I love worldbuilded things–world-builded things?
I love things that are well built. Worlds that are well-built, that’s better way to say that.
I love them. I don’t like doing all the work of it cause that’s a lot of decisions and I get decision fatigue in normal life. So adding that to my story life on top of the normal story decisions I have to make is very exhausting for me.
I think that this book doesn’t have to only apply to the world building geeks, though, you could take out his whole, “how I create a story world” and all of the strategies and layering and business and ancillary stuff will make a lot of sense.
Marianne: The story that I’m writing, I took where I live, Helena, Montana, and just adapted it. And so part of me was wondering if I did bits and pieces about Helena, if that would then give insight into their world. But at the same time, create the like street map of the Helena that my characters live in. Cause I kept a lot of the things that are here. Just changing all of the names. Okay. In case I killed somebody in one of them. Bad for business.
JP: But I think like your core is Helena, then. You could tell stories throughout Helena. You could tell it without your main character. And you’ve introduced enough characters, I assume in your series that you’re able to pull in and maybe make a short about the old lady down the street who murders people or whatever you want to do.
And I think that like you could use Helena as like your anchor and then you could create your story world around it.
Marianne: That lady moved.
JP: There you go, how’d she move? Why’d she move?
Janet: They’re really? You need to have the local newspaper, have all of that reporting. Why she moved. I’m also thinking do your readers, are they reading a paper back? Are they reading on their phone? Are they going to go from the story and go, okay, I want to see this house on the map.
Are they going to go right to the Google map?
Crys: I will say one of my major frustrations with this book, and I know they seem to have done it on purpose, though. He did reference like if you’re reading the ebook version of this…
There is no ebook version. There is no audio book version. There is only the print version. And I think this is partly like a meta example of not telling the same story in multiple formats.
But I have very strong feelings about accessability and that is different than just not telling, making people crossover or like choosing the best format to tell a story like, as far as books go, if you can afford it, I believe you need your book in ebook, print, and audio simply for accessibility.
Audio costs money, so at this point, so that’s, understandable that a lot of things are not audio. But if I can just get audio to break even, I’m going to do it every time, because I’m such a… I don’t even know what the word is. Like a, I don’t know, a stick in the mud about having things accessible. It’s why I do the transcripts for this podcast even though it costs me money to do them. I don’t care. I want them done.
That’s my rant about him only having it in paperback.
JP: No, that was so frustrating. I even like… I scoured the internet, just in case there was maybe like… somewhere. There’s nowhere, it’s paperback.
Crys: I bought the print version. And if there exists a, like, scammer copy of a PDF out there, I will buy, like, I not buy it. I will. What is it? Stealing at that point? I’ll just download it at that point. Cause I’ve bought the book and you don’t have an ebook. That’s the point of frustration I was at.
Marianne: I feel like that’s a bigger announcement than the fact that the lady on the end of my street used to kill people.
Crys: In real life or just in your book?
Marianne: No!
Crys: Okay.
Marianne: You know how every neighborhood has someone who has the signs that say, ” Your dog isn’t allowed on my yard. Your children are not allowed on my yard.” And then they’re looking at the window all day long to make sure that their signs are obeyed.
JP: Where do you live?
Crys: Montana.
JP: Okay.
Crys: What was your most useful thing that rises to the top of your head, janet?
Janet: You don’t want me to talk about how I also don’t like that it was only available in paperback?
Crys: You’re welcome. You’re welcome to join the rant.
Janet: Sorry, ask me again.
Crys: What’s the most useful thing for you? The first thing, that floats to the top of your head right now, because I know that you’re immediately ranking all the things, but the first thing that comes to mind.
Janet: But that was the problem with this book.
That every time I read it, there wasn’t one thing. It was always so many things. Like I had to, it was like I was on, cookie rations or something. I had to divide the book up into, I’m going to read this many pages each day over this period of time. Cause it was just overwhelming otherwise. So I don’t think that’s a fair question.
I can’t give you one thing.
Crys: Okay. Fair. That is a fair rebuttal at least.
I have a lot of books that he mentioned that I have highlighted that I want to buy, but one of them appears to not actually exist. He just made it up and then put the picture of the cover in the back of the book. There’s another mini rant. I don’t know. This book is confusing in a lot of really weird meta ways, but the content is solid.
Marianne: I did like how he gives lists of like different mediums and then he’ll give lists of what your story needs. And so then I just, I put sticky notes where the lists are, so then I can just go straight back. And so when I’m not thinking about different types of media, then I can just open it up. So in that way, it is nice.
He does say you need to open, broaden your story and then he does list ways, the generic ways of doing that.
Crys: Yeah. I think that the list is a good thought starter because he’s listed of all the mediums he’s listed film, and then sub listings for that. Television, sub listing for that. Animation, music, publishing, comics, games, performance, fine art, tech, audio, video. Sublists for all of those. And that’s not even an exhaustive list because there’s new mediums popping up all the time.
TikTok is a medium right now. I’m really confused by clubhouse, but it could possibly be a medium right now. I don’t know. There’s just… we’re never going to have something created in every possible way we could have created because then something like Pogs will come back and then you’ll have to have Pogs with your story thing element.
Marianne: As long as Furbies don’t come back, I’m okay.
Crys: I love Furbies. I love making the noise in the dark when no one’s expecting it.
Janet: It drives home. The point he makes in the beginning of the book, this book was written in 2017 and look at how much of the information in there seems so dated now. And he’s talking about, I can’t remember the days when there wasn’t 24 hours of programming on TV and they’re used to just TV used to just shut off at midnight.
What is it, the example that we create as much content as we consume?
So when you’re talking about all of these things, this book is going to be like, don’t you think that there’s going to have to be another book to cover all of the mediums that aren’t even covered in this book?
Marianne: Or an addendum or something like that?
Crys: I think in some ways that’s what their podcast is.
Janet: Oh, that’s right. That’s true. Do they talk about Furbies?
Crys: They haven’t yet. Clearly this is a missed opportunity. Furbies wearing butt boosting leggings.
See, there’s a story world opportunity right there.
JP: You got it. First one.
Crys: It’s gonna be the Write Away story world.
JP: No it’s not. No association.
Crys: There’s going to be some stickers soon.
I bet they’d sell, too.
JP’s like good thing I’m the artist. Cause that’s not happening.
JP: No, it will.
Marianne: Oh. And we can call the character, Donny.
Crys: Donny Furby. Alright, unless anybody has any last thoughts to add, I think we are getting to the silly portion of our overwhelm with this book and I, this is one I’ve had for a while. It went missing at a friend’s house and I think I put it off for quite a while cause I wasn’t ready for it.
It is quite overwhelming. So if any of our listeners pick this book up and then just start like, fuck no, drop it. That’s okay. Keep it. At some point it might be relative. Pick through it a bit at a time. Or listen to their podcast instead, which might be a easier way to digest the content. It’ll be different content because it’s trans media. They’re not going to tell the same stories. But that’s good. So any more thoughts?
JP: I liked it.
Crys: Excellent.
April 15th will be our next book club episode. And we’ll be reading the Heroine’s Journey by Gail Carriger . This book is available on audio ebook and print. So we’ll all be able to consume it in our preferred mediums. And I’ll have links in the show notes. Thanks everybody for joining me tonight and thank you to our listeners.
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