Choice of Medium: A Key Decision For Your Story or Adaption

How do you choose your medium?

Every story or great adaptation, whether from a novel, short story, or personal history, has a crucial decision to make in the beginning: choosing the right medium. The soul of your story—its scale, focus, and pacing—must find its perfect home. This choice is primarily driven by your narrative's scope.

Understanding Scope

How narrow or broad is the scope of your story?

Scope refers to the vastness of your narrative. To determine it, ask yourself key questions:

• Focus: Is this the story of a singular character with a clear, driving goal? Or is it an ensemble piece with numerous, interwoven storylines?

• Time: Does the story take place over a weekend, a year, or several generations?

• Space: Is it set in a single room, a city, or across multiple galaxies?

Understanding the unique strengths of each medium will help you match your story's scope to the ideal format.

A Guide to Narrative Media

1. The Feature Film

The feature film excels at telling a focused, contained story. It is best suited for a narrative centered on a single protagonist pursuing a primary objective. The classic structure often involves a character who holds a false belief, is challenged by an inciting incident, learns a difficult truth, and demonstrates this transformation through a climactic action. While a secondary plot (B-story), often a romance or mentorship, can support the main journey, the spotlight rarely strays from the protagonist.

• Best Suited For: Character-driven stories with a clear goal, a defined timeframe, and a tight narrative structure like the "Hero's Journey."

• Classic Example: The Wizard of Oz. Dorothy has one clear, powerful objective: to get home. Every character and event she encounters directly serves or hinders that singular goal.

• Modern Example: Joker. The film is a claustrophobic character study, focusing entirely on Arthur Fleck's singular and terrifying psychological transformation. Our perspective is locked with his.

  
  

2. The Film Series / Franchise

This format uses multiple films to tell a larger, overarching story. While each individual film might focus on a specific objective for the main character, it serves as a chapter in a much larger saga. The world-building is more complex, the cast of characters is larger, and the central conflict is too massive to be resolved in a single installment.

• Best Suited For: Epic sagas, dense fantasy or sci-fi worlds, and stories where the central conflict extends beyond the protagonist's personal journey.

• Classic Example: The Star Wars original trilogy. A New Hope tells a complete story of destroying the Death Star, but it's one part of a galactic civil war and Luke Skywalker's evolution from farm boy to Jedi Knight.

• Modern Example: The Hunger Games series. Each book/film tackles a specific stage of Katniss Everdeen's fight against the Capitol, building toward a full-scale revolution that could not be contained in one movie.

  
  

3. The Episodic Television Series

Television's greatest strength is time. An ongoing series allows for deep exploration of an ensemble cast and a complex world. While it may have a central protagonist, a TV series has the capacity to develop numerous subplots (B, C, D, and even E stories) over multiple seasons. This format is ideal for stories where the characters' relationships and the nuances of their world are as important as any single plotline.

• Best Suited For: Stories with large ensemble casts, long-term character development, intricate social or political worlds, and complex family dynamics.

• Classic Example: The Sopranos. While Tony Soprano is the undisputed center, the series dedicates immense time to the lives, ambitions, and tragedies of his wife, children, and fellow mobsters, creating a rich, interconnected tapestry.

• Modern Example: Succession. The series thrives on the shifting alliances and psychological games of the entire Roy family. It's a true ensemble piece where the "A story" of who will take over the company is constantly fed by dozens of smaller, character-defining subplots.

4. The Limited Series

A hybrid of film and television, the limited series (or miniseries) tells one complete story across a fixed number of episodes, typically in a single season. It offers more room for depth and character complexity than a feature film but provides the satisfaction of a planned narrative arc with a definitive beginning, middle, and end. This format is perfect for adapting a single, substantial novel.

• Best Suited For: Novel adaptations, historical events, and character studies that require more than two hours but don't have the legs for a multi-season run.

• Classic Example: Band of Brothers. The series follows one company of soldiers through their complete World War II journey, from training to the war's end. It's a closed, historical narrative.

• Modern Example: The Queen's Gambit. We follow the complete life story of chess prodigy Beth Harmon, from her childhood in an orphanage to her final showdown. The story has a definitive conclusion, making it perfect for the limited series format.

  
  

5. The Stage Play

Theater is a medium of intimacy and intensity. Constrained by physical space, it often thrives in a single location (or a few suggestive ones) and relies on powerful dialogue, subtext, and character interaction rather than spectacle. The action is driven by what characters say—and what they don't say—to each other. This confinement magnifies conflict, making it a raw and immediate experience for the audience.

• Best Suited For: Intimate character-driven stories, explorations of family dynamics, ideological debates, and stories where the psychological tension is the main event.

• Classic Example: Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller. The play is largely confined to the Lomans' home and minds, creating a claustrophobic portrait of a family collapsing under the weight of the American Dream.

• Modern Example: Hamilton by Lin-Manuel Miranda. While it tells a massive historical story, it uses the constraints of the stage to focus on the intimate personal and political rivalries. The single, versatile set becomes a cabinet room, a battlefield, and a home, with the drama propelled entirely by character and song.

  
  

6. The Audio Drama / Podcast

In audio drama, the writer must create a world using only sound. Every line of dialogue must work double-time, conveying emotion, action, and setting. The soundscape—footsteps, echoing voices, ambient noise—becomes a character in itself, painting a picture in the listener's imagination. This medium can be incredibly intimate, whispering directly into the audience's ear.

• Best Suited For: Suspense and horror (where what you can't see is scariest), intimate character confessions, stories with a strong narrator, and science fiction that can be realized more affordably through sound than visuals.

• Classic Example: Orson Welles' 1938 radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds. It masterfully used the conventions of news reporting to create a sense of terrifying realism and panic.

• Modern Example: Limetown. This fictional podcast uses an investigative journalism format to uncover a mysterious disappearance, using "found" audio clips and interviews to build a deeply unsettling and immersive world.

  
  

7. The Documentary

A documentary seeks to tell a true story. For a life story, it can weave together interviews, archival footage, photographs, and personal anecdotes to present a factual journey. However, great documentaries are not just presentations of information; they find the narrative within the facts. If you wish to dramatize events from your life, these re-enactments can be inserted into the documentary, blending factual storytelling with the emotional impact of a scripted scene.

• Best Suited For: Relaying factual events, biographical stories, social issue investigations, and historical explorations.

• Classic Example: Gimme Shelter. This film documents the final weeks of the Rolling Stones' 1969 US tour, capturing the real-life tragedy of the Altamont Free Concert as it unfolds.

• Modern Example: My Octopus Teacher. The film tells the true story of a filmmaker's relationship with an octopus. It’s a deeply personal, narrative-driven documentary that feels more like a character study than a nature program.

  
  

Conclusion: There is a medium that is right for your story

The journey from story or adaptation to script must include careful consideration of the scope of the piece and the medium best suited to showcase it. Choosing well will pay big dividends. The right medium acts as a powerful amplifier, elevating your narrative's inherent strengths. Be it a character-driven feature film with a singular objective, a sprawling film series with an epic saga, a long-form television series that deep dives into its characters, a "middle ground" limited series for an robust yet limited length of story, an intimate stage play, an audio drama that unlocks the theater of the mind, or a compelling documentary focused on real life, be assured, there is a medium designed to showcase your story at its best. Good luck in your selection and happy writing!

You've got this!

For more tips and useful information check out the above blog posts or for personal assistance with your latest project reach Susanna at scriptsbysusanna@gmail.com.