I’ve been working on an experiment in web-based story telling called Story2Oh!.  Some of the content is rolling out today so you can get a look at what I’ve done.

The story is laid out in different media on different internet platforms.  There’s a blog, a video blog, a lot of content on Facebook, a photo spread on FlickR and so on.

It’s a baby step into a new world.

Trying to tell a story this way is something I’ve never done, though I like to think I have done everything in this career of mine.  Even telling you about it now, I know my thoughts are scattered (okay I’ve been up all night fighting with Youtube and wireless routers and all kinds of craziness that should not be the domain of the writer, but this is the internet and there are no P.A.s, not even a story department coordinator).

I sure miss the support of a writers room in all this, but I’ve been lucky to have writers like Karen Hill, Bobby Theodore, Briane Nasimok and Julie Strassman-Cohn helping out with some of the writing and talking me through the ideas.

I envision this as entertainment for your office hours.  An alternative to checking your email while you’re on hold or stuck on a word or when you have five minutes to kill before a meeting.  All the bits are short.  The videos are in the two minute range.  The blog posts are just a few paragraphs.  The Facebook wall-to-walls are just barely the length of a short scene.

Ideally I figure each of these bits should be a morsel of entertainment.  It should give you a laugh, a character insight or an emotional fix.  I’m pretty sure there are fair number of empty calories in what I’ve done but I understand that the ideal is to entertain with every click.

I started by beating this out the way we’d beat out any episodic television story.

Once I had the beats, the question was how do I express this emotional moment or piece of business?  Normally, I’d set up a scene, but part of the challenge here was to use video very judiciously.  The video segments — which all masquerade as posts on Simon Beals anonymous blog, boytellsall — are very important parts of the story.  They give me a level of comfort and I think the audience will feel comfortable with them too.  We’ll get to see the characters walking and talking and we’ll just be on familiar ground.

Almost everything else in the project is in the first person.  There is no omnipotent or objective point of view in a blog post or a Twitter or a Facebook profile.  So that adds an interesting dimension.

The blog belongs to Ali Barrett who weaves knitting into every post — even the one about masturbation (or did she weave masturbation into knitting?).  Her writing is very on the nose.  No subtext here.  I haven’t quite worked out the art of blogging fictionally.

I thought a character who Twittered could be quite funny.  A modern take on Tony Robert’s Dick from Woody Allen’s Play It Again Sam.  But in the end, I gave the Twitters to Devon, who is less articulate than some of the other characters and needed a way to express himself, which he does in phrases like “listening to Jamerson and trying not to dial that phone number. Again.”

I noticed this weird thing reading people’s Twitters, underlying them seems to be both a coyness and a desire to share intimately.  Devon is an open book, a bleeding wound.  And since he’s in the midst of a breakup his Twitters have turned into something more like whimpers.

Another fun story convention I’ve been using is Facebook status updates.  Simon even launches his first video post by telling us that there’s a red hot redhead he knows and he noticed on the Facebook mini-feed that her relationship status had changed: ?suddenly single.” (In case you don’t think this is real drama, that’s the inciting incident.)

Two minor characters, Jory Goudge and his fiancée Nakita carry on a running dialogue in their status updates.  We know from some wall chatter that Nakita had a dinner party that didn’t go too well a few nights ago.  The next morning, Jory’s status reads “Jory is hoping that chocolate will soothe the savage beast.”  A few minutes later, Nakita’s status changes too.  “ Nakita is quite certain that chocolate won’t do any good after you call someone a savage beast, but she wants the chocolate anyway.”  Later that day, Jory had another status change, “Jory wants you to know that the chocolate did the trick.”  Followed by a new status for Nakita:  “Nakita wants you to know that it wasn’t the chocolate it was all the begging.”

Okay, so it’s not The Wire.  But it sure is fun.