Quantum Storytelling

“The year was 2345. Mankind had solved all problems… or so they thought. Until a great evil arose and threatened the fate of the universe! Only one man could stop it!”

Why are stories presented in this way? “Only one man could save the world!” is rather obvious isn’t it? Of course there’s a hero. Of course there’s a bad guy. If it’s action or adventure of any kind, there will be a hero and a villain in most cases.

It would be silly to call the existence of a hero and a villain in stories ‘unoriginal’. It’s part of the form. Get over it.

My problem has more to do with presentation. Why present the obvious?

There’s no better example than film trailers. Some of them are great, some of them actually cause people to avoid a movie. The better trailers grab your attention with something interesting, lure you in with a bread-crumb trail of high details, and then they cut you off with some kind of mystery. They leave you thinking “What’s going to happen!?” or “I definitely need to see that to find out what happens.”

Why can’t that kind of attention-draw be applied to any description of the story? Take for example, the blurb on the back of a paperback novel. If I read another meaningless description of something all stories have, I’m going to kill somebody in marketing.

It goes deeper though. I think one of the reason story blurbs use only the most generic elements that all stories have is that they don’t have anything unique about the characters or world to sell. Instead of “Only one man could save the planet!” put a twist on it. Why is that one man interesting? Tell me. Please.

Again, it comes down to giving the audience a new perspective, and that can’t be done if the creators don’t have a handle on unique perspective themselves.

I already have this mapped out for Quantum. It’s out of a passion for the unique perspective of the themes and story itself. Hopefully people will be able to tell from the blurb alone that I had a lot of fun with the creative process. To me that’s what is missing from a lot of story blurbs. It’s a shallow hard sell without any indication that the creator has any passion for what they created.

That could be the fault of some marketing department, or it could be the fault of the creator. I tend to blame the creator because marking departments often only work with what you give them. Either way, it’s something I value and wouldn’t give it up to the banality of somebody who doesn’t care about my story and is just “doing their job.”

Passion and perspective are dually important in how you present the pitch of your story. Oh, and marketing begins at the beginning, not the end.