Why we built Disclosures

I’ve been working in film and tv for 25+ years. In recent years my career seems to have focussed mainly on crime documentaries, both interview and reconstruction. I’ve worked on these for all the major networks – Netflix, BBC, Discovery, Paramount, Amazon. One thing I’ve started to notice is that the most powerful moments in these docs are rarely the reconstruction, and most often the document. The real life document that was used in a case to prove or disprove someone’s innocence or guilt. The police log. The letter. The DNA file. The medical note. The CCTV logs. These are the backbone and most important linking elements in any crime story. And part of the reason I believe these tell a better story than the story is not because they’re dramatic, but because they are not trying to be! The tension between what these documents record and what the viewer knows has actually happened create more tension than any narration ever could. So the question is, what if the document itself was the fiction – and strip everything else away. The reader does the work of piecing together the parts of the story in-between the documents.

The other thing that I’ve been obsessing over when conceiving what Fictra is - a collaborative experience. I just love the idea of collaborative stories – written together as a community. SCP does this so well, although it’s taken years to get to where it is now.

Epistolary stories (stories told through letters, logs and recorded conversations) are not new. They hark back to Dracula and Frankenstein. But I wanted to tell these disclosure stories in a horizontal, not vertical way. Instead of building one long linear running story, these will have one ‘strand’ that might run to ten documents of 300-500 words each and end, but then have another strand that runs alongside this detailing the plight of another character affected by the same predicament. The stories grow sideways rather than in one line. Imagine ten more of these strands in your world. As creators you can decide when these end. So the idea is to have what we are going to call a ‘floor-runner’; a person in charge of their particular disclosure ‘world’. They may choose to write the first strand, and they can then hire/find creators on Fictra itself to write new strands, opening up the stories sideways. Different characters and storylines set within the same universe. Characters whose storylines may never cross paths with other characters in these worlds. Each going about their lives, affected by some crime or tech conspiracy, without ever needing to meet each other. That seemed interesting to me. A way for a small group of writers to create a living, breathing world on one platform, and a clever and simple way to spread the workload.

As I’ve started writing the very first of these – Verdant (currently live on the platform and growing), I am seeing first-hand how the real challenge in writing these documents is constraint. It’s in writing a document that doesn’t know it’s telling a story. What you leave out is as important as what is included. And constraint itself is the craft.

These worlds can be entirely passive to consume, or can be created with intended detective work needed by the reader. It’s up to the floor-runner. They oversee all documents and all strands. They are the all-seeing eye across their world. And there is the extra potential challenge, if floor-runners are particularly adventurous, of allowing strands to cross-paths. That’s an exciting thought.

Of course this is an experiment. Let’s see where it goes.

Matt