Mediums of Storytelling, Part One

    There are many methods and mediums to tell a story, and each has its pros and cons. There's a lot of discussion on the Internet about Comics Vs. Prose, Books Vs. Television, or Movies Vs. TV Series. I'm not going to get into all that today.

    Instead, today's post is meant to be an exploration of different ways to tell story, from books to visual media of all kinds. Since the post quickly became too long, I'm going to start with a summary of the more common storytelling mediums, and then I'll write a second one about some of the more unusual methods I've seen.

    My favorite way to consume story is via books. If they're well-written, clean in their content, and original in their concept, I'll read them, enjoy them, and read them again. Remove one of those elements and it's a one-off book--one I'll read once and call it good.

    To subdivide books into two broad categories of mediums, we have prose books (including non-fiction, fantasy for all ages, etc.) and picture books (including the sorts meant for kids, comics, and graphic novels). Each has its pros and cons--prose books allow the reader to fill in visual details with their imagination and generally have more room to develop plots, characters, and settings in the writing. Picture books typically have fewer words and let the images carry the load. When you get into the territory of graphic novels, you basically have pages of pictures with some dialogue bubbles and occasional bits of narration, and that alone tells the story.

    I would say that my all-time favorite prose book is Forest Born, by Shannon Hale, because it and the other three books in its series are the books that inspired me to try writing my own stories as a kid.

    When it comes to graphic novels and picture books for kids, I have less experience, but for the graphic novel genre I've enjoyed White Sand, by Brandon Sanderson, and Rapunzel's Revenge, by Shannon Hale. For actual picture books, one of my favorites to this day is The Quiltmaker's Gift, by Jeff Brumbeau and Gail de Marcken.

    The obvious next step for storytelling is visual media, the most common forms of which are movies and television shows.

    Generally, television series have bigger story-arcs, on account of having more total minutes to tell the story in. However, each episode arc is very short, leading to a much more broken-up, segmented style of storytelling, and many series I've seen get distracted every few episodes and stray away from the main plot problem to go explore something different.

    Movies generally tell the whole story in one long go, with a few exceptions, such as Lord of the Rings, which, if you watch the Extended Edition as a great many fans do, is really too long to watch in a single sitting while maintaining your physical, mental, and emotional health. The advantage to this single-sitting style is that the story remains unbroken in its flow and requires fewer cliffhangers to keep the audience captivated than TV series do. Movies rarely stray from their core plot issue; they don't have the time to go exploring in the weeds on the side of the road. Personally, if I'm to watch something on the television, I prefer movies to TV shows for tat exact reason.

    I think my all-time favorite movie is How to Train your Dragon. The first is way better than the second, and the second is a bit worse than the third, so the first reigns supreme. For television shows, my favorite is the original Avatar: The Last Airbender.

    Stageplays get their own category. They're technically visual media, because the audience sits there and watches them, but I learned well from my Intro to Theatre class that a play (any sort of stage performance, really) requires energy from the audience as well as the actors in order to function. If the actors are acting to a dead audience, they won't do as good a job as if they can tell that the people hidden out in the darkness are enjoying their work.

    The same thing is true for performance art of any kind. I spent 3 years as an Irish dancer, and while I had the good luck to have a great audience for all my shows, it was vastly harder to get up in front of the judge at a competition and realize that they weren't really there to watch me--they were there to watch my technique, and that was all.

    Performers have an energetic need to know that their audience appreciates what they're doing. Working with an audience that doesn't care is utterly exhausting and leaves a person drained, whereas an audience that laughs at the jokes in the script or cheers when the boys come dancing onstage leaves the performer feeling a unique sort of buzz that I've only ever felt walking offstage after a successful performance in a show.

    (On the note of the 'boys come dancing onstage' comment, here's a true story: When I attended the Irish dance show that ultimately got me started in Irish dance, I went to all three nights of the show because I loved it so much. On the third night, the boys of the dance school came onstage to do their Boys' Reel, and the audience absolutely erupted with delighted screaming. As it turns out, around seven or eight of the female dancers in the school got their Young Women's groups to come to the show, all on the same night, and I guess it's not just me who thinks Irish dancing guys are hot! 😉 Though I will note that one of the boys complained afterward that on one of the dances where he was with the girls of his dance class, the other dancers couldn't hear his beats because the girls in the audience were screaming so loudly.)

    Of the stageplays I've seen, my favorite is Daddy Longlegs. Look it up; it's hilarious fun!

    Of the other, miscellaneous performances I've seen, my favorite is Riverdance. Unfortunately I've only seen a recording of this one (specifically the 1996 recording that has Colin Dunn in it [if I were to have a celebrity crush, it would be Colin Dunn]), but if Riverdance ever comes to Utah and I hear about it, you can bet I'm finding a way to go!

    For the sake of length and reading time, I'm going to stop this blog post here, but you can bet I'm not done! There are at least three more ways that I've seen people tell stories, and there are probably more out there that I haven't considered yet.