Being a Better Writer: Writing for Interactive Stories · 9:37pm Jul 9th, 2018
Welcome back readers! It’s going to be a great week here on the site. More stuff coming, as usual. Follow-ups to prior posts, feedback … Basically, there’s a lot going on at the moment, so expect to see quite a bit of that on display here as the days come along!
Okay, rather than spend a few paragraphs on news or teasers, I’d really rather just jump into today’s topic. This one is, as many of you probably already know, a request topic. And you know that because you were one of the many readers that requested it, and you let out a satisfied “finally” the moment you saw this post’s title.
But yes, we’re talking about writing for interactive stories: Choose-your-own-adventure-style works, tabletop campaigns, or any other sort of story where you give your audience the means to pick their own fate.
Now, this is one of those posts that I’m going to lead with a disclaimer. A stronger one than the normal “everyone’s experience is going to be a little different.” And that disclaimer is: I am not an expert at this. While I’ve been playing tabletop games like Dungeons and Dragons for a few years now, and have been running my own custom campaign now for over six months, I would still acknowledge that I’m a novice of sorts and tend to make a lot of mistakes. Crud, last week I made a pretty lousy one and did something that would have worked for a normal book … but instead flubbed pretty bad because it wasn’t a book, it was an interactive story.
In other words, what I offer today is only going to be scratching the surface. I’m not a master-class writer at doing interactive stories and running tabletop games. I’ve never once written a Choose-your-own-adventure story, though I did read a number of them growing up. What I offer are some of the basic lessons I’ve learned that can hopefully help get you started. From there, I would hope that if you find the topic interesting, you would go to someplace like Youtube or Google and start searching for advice from dedicated Game/Dungeon Masters who have run professional games and have for decades. Yes, such advice does exist, and in fact I watched quite a bit of it before starting my own campaign in January.
Also, a bit of a warning: We’re going to bounce a bit today. Mostly because running a tabletop campaign story is still a bit different from a CYOA-style story. Plus, since I have more experience with the former, the advice I share here today will be more tailored to what I have done for that and would I would do for the other.
Right, disclaimers and notifications out of the way, let’s get this post underway! So … you want to run an interactive story.
Excellent work as always, and as usual I have some comments.
First, on the part about writing choose your own adventure stories, I think you really should have pointed out that the same basic rules apply to other contexts like video games as well. The details are obviously different due to the differences between the mediums, but your advice is general enough to apply to both.
Second, since you have apparently not written a choose your own adventure story yourself, you should probably do one as an exercise some time. This site is probably the best place to do it since you have the ability to hyperlink and have fans ready to jump in and tell you what they think, so it's something you should keep in mind when you are planning future projects. I'd definitely say to avoid your normal epic length monsters since it's mostly practice, but you should be able to come up with something more along the lines of the six character stories you did a while back. If you want a quick idea, you could have Nova "volunteer" to foalsit while Steel does something with the rest of his family and let the readers choose how Nova tries and fails to manage the adorable chaos.