Nicholas Packwood

Nicholas Packwood BA Hons, MA, PhD (ABD)

Narratology is the theory and practice of storytelling, of creating coherent, relatable worlds, the characters who inhabit them and the obstacles they face. This can take the form of "scripts" for successful innovation and change in complex inter-organizational networks, imagining the life worlds of vanished civilizations or creating new virtual worlds for audiences to experience for themselves.

The stories we choose to tell about the lives people lead - whether fictional or non-fictional - hang together in internally consistent ways. Their basic narrative elements have a syntax that can be analysed and extrapolated. Methods from the science of stuctural anthropology and structural linguistics can be turned to the aims of art and story design.

Creativity begins with a mastery of the tools of your art, a mastery that begins by addressing fundamental questions:

• Why do some stories intuitively make sense?

• Why do some story elements feel out of place?

• How does character and conflict create drama?

• What makes a story a commercial and aesthetic success?

• Why is video game writing different than writing for film?

• How is strategy and planning a storytelling medium?

Nicholas Packwood draws on structural analysis to reveal the underlying grammar of stories in the language of theme, character and setting. He helps storytellers to find and better represent the narrative core of their work in the virtual worlds of film, television and video game and in the off line world of policy design.

Nicholas teaches Storytelling and Character Development in the post-graduate Game Design program at the School of Design, George Brown College.

Television, film and video game:As a partner with Toronto based Trophy Wife Productions, Nicholas wrote and optioned film projects for Ellis Entertainment and the CBC. As a partner with Anomaly Interactive, he wrote and optioned video game and television projects with Corus Entertainment, Epic Games / Unreal Technology and Microsoft Games. He developed the catalogue and accession system for Moses Znaimer`s MZTV Museum of Television and was Toronto demonstration team leader for White Wolf Games.

Writing and research consultancy: Nicholas has published articles and features for the National Post, the Montreal Gazette, the Manchester Evening News, the Canadian Literary Review, Exclaim! and Canada's original cultural studies magazine Border/Lines. His writing has been anthologized alongside Margaret Atwood and dub poet Lillian Allen. He has made frequent radio and television appearances as a guest commentator for CBC Radio, WTV's Modern Manners, BookTV, Talk!TV and the Michael Coren Show. He was accredited as a foreign correspondent by the British Fashion Council.

Nicholas has twenty years of professional writing and research consulting experience. His MA thesis (with high honours) in Cultural Anthropology was a narrative analysis of myths of healing grounded in 18 months field research facilitated by Health Canada. He was awarded a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada doctoral fellowship in Social Anthropology for field research which took him to London and Paris.

As a member of full time research faculty with the Design, Space and Society Research Unit of the School of Communication and Culture, Lancaster University, he worked as a research consultant for projects with organizations including Jaguar Cars Ltd., BAE Systems Submarine Solutions, Tarmac, Taylor Woodrow, the Tavistock Institute and the UK Department of the Environment.   

Higher education: Nicholas has lectured in cultural studies, anthropology, communication studies, organization studies, history and archaeology at the University of Toronto, Humber College and Wilfrid Laurier University. His specializations include Nonverbal Communication, Digital Media, Cultural Ecology, Pre-Columbian Archaeology and the Collapse of Civilizations.

Nicholas is a member of the Language Creation Society. He is completing a certificate in Recording Arts at Centennial College in Toronto.

Scholarly publications include:

Dialectical Narratives in Myths of Healing. Santé Culture/Culture Health. (1992-1993). Montréal: Girame.

Symmetry Analysis and the Lament Configuration. Chaos International. (1997). London: BM Sorcery.

Engineering the Future: Building Coherent Speculative Technologies.The Parliament of Dreams: Conferring on Babylon 5. (1998). University of Reading: SF Foundation.

Space, Place and Representation.Reviews in Anthropology. (2001). Newark: Harwood Academic Publishers.

Geography of the Blogosphere. Into the Blogosphere: Rhetoric, Community and Culture of Weblogs. (2004). University of Minnesota.

The Work of Fashion in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Gendered Intersections. (2005). Winnipeg: Fernwood.

Editor - "At the Wall of Darkness", a commemorative issue on the life and work of Pierre Bourdieu for the peer reviewed scholarly journal Space and Culture. (2003). London: SAGE.

Reviewer - Media Anthropology. (2005). London: SAGE.

New media publication: Nicholas is writer and publisher of Ghost of a flea, one of Canada's top arts and culture blogs by links and traffic. Publishing since 2002, "The Flea"  is a BlogsCanada TopBlog winning 1rst Place for Best Culture Blog in 2005 in the Canadian Blog Awards. Ghost of a flea has received positive reviews from traditional media organizations including CBC Arts and USA Today, new media giant Glenn Reynolds ("the Instapundit") and praise from prominent Canadian journalists and columnists including Antonia Zerbisias and Andrew Coyne.

Expertise

Script analysis

Narrative analysis

Character development

Plot development

World building

Writing from film to video game

Pitch writing

Log line & synopsis writing

Script doctoring

Project development