Transmedia Storytelling Notes Part 3

Part 5: Negative Capability

When applied to storytelling, negative capability is the art of building strategic gaps into a narrative to evoke a delicious sense of 'uncertainty, Mystery, or doubt' in the audience. Simple references to people, places or events external to the current narrative provide hints to the history of the characters and the larger world in which the story takes place. This empowers audiences to fill in the gaps in their own imaginations while leaving them curious to find out more.

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Negative capability ties directly to Ruppel's migratory cues, which I touched on near the end of section 1.3. To recap, migratory cues are "a signal towards another medium – the means through which various narrative paths are marked by an author and located by a user through activation patterns". While negative capability need not actually lead to anything at the moment in which it's written into the story, it clears a space in the narrative for those cues to be planted .

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Thanks to negative capability and the ‘writerly’ nature of the text, the story continues to function without audience members having experienced either the anime or the video game, as they can imagine their own answer to the question of where exactly that letter came from. They retain the option to go and track it down, and their understanding (and enjoyment) of the story would be increased by their doing so. One possible way to merge these terminologies is to understand any reference to external people, places or events as utilizing negative capability to craft potential migratory cues, and become actualized as migratory cues when those extensions are made available.

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A storyteller looking to craft a potential transmedia narrative should carefully craft the world in which that story exists, and then make passing references to elements in that world during the course of the narrative to simultaneously spark audience imaginations through negative capability and provide potential openings for future migratory cues.

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Writerly vs Readerly Text (?)

Part 6: The Hermenetic Codes