Good storytelling makes the audience fill in the blanks

Both oral and writing storytelling have a quality that has really worked for them: part of the story always happen/is produced in the imagination of the audience. You can make a very detailed description of a dress or the view from a window, but each one pictures something different in their mind. The person who is reading or listening usually adds not only sensory aspects to the narration, but also personal memories to the narration. So she or he is never passive, always interacts in any way with the story itself.

For visual representational media things can be different, as some times the storytelling tries to give all the information to the audience. I'm thinking about video content, which usually drives the audience through all the details of the story, making the spectator passive. But a photo, drawing or painting can also tell a whole story by itself. Those cases usually ask for a talented storyteller and an audience ready to fill in the blanks.

What about web storytelling?
The Internet makes it possible to combine different formats in the same piece. This comes to be not only an advantage, but also a danger, as we can confuse the viewers with format changes or fall into aesthetic temptations.

A good web narrative should do two things: provide space for the reader to 'fill' some information and engage the user asking for his or her interaction at some points.

The web storyteller need to be sure that each part of the story is told using the format that makes more sense from the own story point of view.

For me a perfect marriage for web storytelling could come from the mix of video and flash infographics, where the infography in itself is the container and video provides framed stories inside the whole story.

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