What Jay Bushman Taught Me About Storytelling Across Worlds
I'm on a mission to find the secret formula for writing a bestselling story.
Most writers think about format too early.
They ask whether their story should become a novel, a game, a transmedia experience, a social media project, or something interactive. But after talking with Jay Bushman, I was reminded that the more important question comes first: what kind of experience are you actually trying to create in the mind of the audience?
Jay Bushman is a writer, narrative designer, experience designer, and transmedia producer whose work has consistently explored storytelling beyond conventional formats. One of his best known projects is The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, the Emmy-winning modern adaptation of Pride and Prejudice told across YouTube and social media. The series made characters feel as if they were living in real time online, not as marketing extensions, but as fully coherent story beings. That distinction matters.
What struck me most in our conversation was Jay’s clarity on something many people still get wrong: a story world only works when every expression of it feels like it belongs to the same living whole.
Getting in touch with Jay Bushman
Story Extensions Only Matter If They Are Really Story
When Jay talked about The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, one point stood out immediately. The social media content worked because it was not treated as promotional add-on material. It was developed as part of the writing process itself. The writing staff thought through the episodes and the social content together, so the characters on YouTube and the characters on Twitter or Tumblr felt like the same people.
That may sound obvious, but it is not how many cross-platform projects are approached.
Too often, the “extra” channels are treated as secondary. They are filled with content that vaguely matches the tone of the main story, but they are not carrying the same narrative intent. Jay’s view is more demanding and much more useful: if an extension is not genuinely part of the story, it weakens the illusion instead of deepening it.
That also explains his skepticism toward simplistic uses of AI in character-driven storytelling. AI may be able to imitate surface plausibility, but for Jay, the real work lies in deciding who a character is, why they say what they say, and what role every piece of communication plays inside the whole experience. That is authored work. That is storytelling.
You Cannot Engineer a Bestseller
I also asked Jay the selfish question behind this whole Road to Rank 1 journey: what is the shortcut to writing a bestseller?
His answer was useful precisely because it refused the fantasy.
You cannot engineer a great story by reverse-engineering market taste. That way lies formula, imitation, and eventually slop. What you can do is create something that clearly reflects your own intention, perspective, and craft. You may not get a bestseller out of it, but you might create something that is actually yours. And that matters more than people admit.
This connects to a deeper principle in Jay’s thinking: tools do not remove responsibility. If you use AI, or any other tool, to produce something flat, predictable, or emotionally thin, that is still your decision. Your audience experiences the result, not your excuse. In Jay’s framing, every creative choice should be judged by the experience it creates in the audience’s mind.
I think that is the right standard.
The Medium Changes. The Experience Is the Constant.
Another reason I found this conversation valuable is that Jay does not romanticize one format. He has worked across platforms, digital environments, social systems, and now even toward more tactile and analog experiences again. His new project is a reimagining of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow through physical letters in the mail. That idea feels almost rebellious right now. (If you want to join the rebellion, the project is funding on Kickstarter right now.)
But it also reveals something essential: storytelling is not about chasing whatever platform is currently loudest. It is about choosing the form that creates the strongest emotional and imaginative experience for the audience.
That may happen through video, social media, audio, paper, or something else entirely.
The format is not the soul of the story. The experience is.
And for anyone working in interactive fiction, transmedia, or narrative design, that may be one of the most useful reminders of all.
About Road to Rank 1
Road to Rank 1 is my public learning series about becoming a better writer of interactive fiction and audio stories by talking to experts from games, books, audio, and narrative design.
