We have seen a generation of authors writing some interesting stories with their experience of fiction and nonfiction. The stories have been published and audio converted for the masses. Now is the time for stories to reach masses by web series and OTT releases.
So what does it take to transform yourself from an author to a web series writer?
Here are the tips from Mahendra Sharma, CEO of well known publishing and OTT platform Matrubharti.
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The change of mindset, this requires shifting the gears from a long episodic novel to a fabulous story that opens the doors for episodic web series. This change is not easy and many writers won’t achieve this. But it is as simple as changing the room and changing the clothes for different occasions. You have to think of the audience first, this audience will have less patience, no prior experience of your subject matter and almost no prior introduction of yours.
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Context before content, this will require you to think at the speed of a bullet train or a rocket. Before you start writing the content, think about the context of it, where will it start, where will it roam around and where will it end. If you cannot think this long, you are wasting your time to write an OTT preferred story for a web series.
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Character is the king, yes you heard it right, it is the character who would drive the show for you, not just the content or story. Developing the character for your story would take you very long in the world of OTT content. If you go back to memories and remind yourself about the web series you have seen last, you would recall that there were characters driving the story and you remember few of them forever. If your story can develop few of such characters, your story would live long on OTT.
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Gripping is the name of the game, gone are the days when the story kept on showing the incidents where background was being developed for characters and context, here every episode you write has to create curiosity in the mind of the audience. If your episode ends without leaving curiosity for the other episode, the audience interest will be lost quickly. I repeat here the audience has low patience or no patience to wait for your story to develop in incidences.
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Younger is longer, the most number of people watching OTT are younger than 30 years, so your context has to run around this age group which is 18-30 years. These are the people having highest fantasies in their life and a hunt for thrill always in their eyes. Most powerful economy is the consumer and this age is the highest consuming content on OTT. Your characters should focus on this age in the majority of the story events.
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Write like you witnessed it, this style of writing would take you way longer and higher than you imagine, if you are writing incidents like you witnessed, that would create a powerful story, your characters will act real and your context will be easily understood.
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Devil is in detail, you have to put every single detail of the incident or event you are writing with expressions of people around the incident. The background, the location, the objects, the people and climate of the event. These all things will make the job easier for the production house to create a beautiful web series out of your story.
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Start should be the end, many of the films or web series have picked up this success formula where their beginning actually starts from the end scene of the story. If you can start your story from the end point, it starts with a bang, it starts with a curiosity that how come this end is reached, what could have happened here, who has made this? That can act as a success formula for your web series story.
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Written short and detailed, many novels have never been adopted for web series due to one single reason: they are very long and not written for OTT content. Web series stories are not very long or not giving the decades of life span of characters, in fact many of such stories are based on one or two incidents only but elaborated episodic. So here at the end of this article I would recommend that you write episodes like they are to be taken tomorrow for OTT. If so, your story should finish in 5-7-9 episodes. It might open a gate for new series on the same plot but finish one with above guidelines.
This is a very brief understanding of story to OTT shift for writers, I hope this helps you write some beautiful stories for web series that reach a billion audience in future, good luck.
Article by
Mahendra Sharma , CEO of Matrubharti, leading publishing and OTT platform.
