How do I make the premise of an epsodic series understandable through a one-shot?

@darthmongoose Kate Holden
Tue, 27 Jun 2023 08:08:54 +0000

@darthmongoose wrote:

One option is that the character is narrating her life somehow. Either she narrates what she does to the audience directly, or you can use a framing device like she's writing it in a diary, recording it as a sort of log, either for work record or evidence purposes or in case they die, or she could be talking to somebody they met on the road.

In the excellent story podcast "Alice Isn't Dead", the framing device is that the main character is recording an audio diary of her strange supernatural encounters while driving a truck around the US, and she's speaking as if she's addressing her former lover, Alice, allowing the story to be told in an audio format to the audience with a believable framing device that's also world building.

A lot of older novels were written with the framing device of it being a letter sent to friends or family, or you have Gravity Falls where the narration at the start of the first episode is Dipper's diary.