Why I'm leaving slow fiction behind to tell real-time stories

Last year I started formalizing some thoughts around why fictional stories are not ascendant in our modern media consumption environment. I landed on three reasons:

1. Volume: Narrative fiction quantifiably cannot compete with non-fiction. Storytellers can’t make as much narrative fiction content as non-fiction content that gets made everyday which crowds out narrative fiction in our content feeds.

2. Content diversity: There is not enough diversity of fiction content compared to non-fiction content. Today, anyone can pick up a phone and record themselves going about their lives or commenting on any topic, making non-fiction inherently and infinitely have more audiences the content can reach. Fiction requires more time and resources, limiting the pool of who can tell fictional stories.

3. Format conditioning: People expect fiction in traditional formats (theaters, TV, novels), so on growing modern content distribution formats like social media, fiction stories feels "wrong" or inauthentic.

Fiction stories will never go away entirely but they have taken backseat in our culture. That matters. Our stories are how we communicate the aspired values that hold society together. It’s important to have a shared vision of what a hero represents. It’s important to experience together characters that give us insight by how they navigate impossible situations.

Our stories are important but only if they can reach people. Every filmmaker, dramatist, and writer knows that it’s increasingly difficult for our stories to meaningfully make an impact. Today, even when it does, the world moves so quickly that any impact is fleeting.

Like my three points outline, the distinct challenges faced by fiction stories in our modern media consumption environment are structural. At the enterprise scale, firms are trying to meet the moment by consolidating. Netflix's acquisition of Warner Bros. is an example. But we saw it as well outside of film and TV, like a couple years ago when Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster tried to merge.

I don’t think the answers will come from corporate mergers or nibbling around the edges. Better marketing and mining old IP won’t solve this. The only way will be to build new ways to tell stories, leaving behind "slow fiction" - the old formats and structures that aren’t resonating with today’s consumers. It means defining new ways that are made for our modern media consumption environment.

In a post last year, I wrote that speed is the key to unlocking creative innovation. In that post I summarized that “There is untapped potential for narrative storytelling that can realize the dynamism that can come from creating in real-time and piping that creativity through an outlet that can present it in real-time, creating a live feedback loop between story and story consumer.”

This year I’ll be kicking off an experiment to explore telling fictional stories in real-time.

My hypothesis is that the way for fiction stories to compete in our modern media landscape is for there to be a lot of it (volume), in a new dynamic format (format conditioning), for everybody (content diversity). This means fiction stories being distributed and consumed as quickly as they’re made. As fast as anyone can livestream themselves, fiction stories need to move at the same velocity. The stories have to be good, too!

I’m still in the early stages of building out this experiment but I'll be sharing updates throughout the year. If you’d like to learn more, shoot me a message!

Building new things means leaving other things behind. My journey with Cinevite has come to an end. Cinevite started as a mobile app I built for bringing people together through film. I built it during the pandemic and it was the first app I built that was on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.

I learned a lot building Cinevite. Beyond the technical aspects of developing and managing a mobile app and web platform, I learned more about the indie film community. With Cinevite, I wanted to learn more about film distribution at a practical level. How do people come together to experience cinema and how can technology fit in and make it economically viable for indie filmmakers?

What I learned is that it’s incredibly challenging. The indie film space is super fragmented with a lot of competing interests. The culture of the community overly reveres the past while fighting against the future in front of them. The business prospects are broadly in continual decline as certain segments fail to adapt and reach general audiences.

At the same time there are so many aspiring filmmakers out there trying to tell stories. Year over year, there are more films being made than ever before. I met a lot of talented filmmakers on my journey with Cinevite and that is why I’m confident that storytelling will never die. Even as the Cinevite app and platform go away, I plan to keep a finger on the pulse of indie film because that is where there is still a lot of energy around fictional stories.

I wrote in my previous post that creative technologists are builders and they build tools that can support their own creative expression. With Cinevite, I did a lot of building but I didn’t get to do much creative storytelling. This year, I’ll be building to enable new ways for me to tell stories. On this new journey, I hope to open up new ways for filmmakers and other creatives to tell stories that can make a lasting impact.

Happy new year!