Planning Tips for Choose-Your-Own Narratives
From the time I was a wee nerdlet, I loved text-based adventure games, choose-your-own-adventure books—anything that let the audience, not just participate in the story, but influence how it played out.
As much fun as these stories are to read, writing a choose-your-own story can be a beast of an undertaking. I attempted several that I never finished before finally completing my first one—and even though I made it through, it took a couple of false starts. On the plus side, I made a few valuable learning mistakes along the way. I’m currently in the planning stages of a new choose-your-own story and, while it’s still a bit of a daunting task, I feel much more confident about how to tackle it than I was last time.
I’ve been seeing more interest in these kinds of narratives of late. In part I think because online publishing makes it much easier to share this kind of story with readers, but I’ve also seen a few writers playing with the form in print books (a chapter in Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House comes to mind). So I figured I’d share some of my tips for writing a choose-your-own story without losing your mind.
#1: Diagram first.
I’m normally a seat-of-the-pantser. I might have a rough idea of where I want a story to go but, for the most part, I just start writing. That was my first mistake when I tried to write my first choose-your-own story.
The thing you need to remember is that, each time the reader gets a choice, that adds a new story thread you need to write out—and each of those threads is going to lead to further splits, creating an exponentially growing narrative tangle.
Plotting the big-picture movement first can help you to wrangle the word count and the number of scenes you’re going to write into a reasonable space from the start. It also lets you look for places that you could save yourself some work by having two threads lead to the same path, or putting in “dead ends” to prune some of the story branches. This also can help you get an idea for exactly how long your story is going to be once it’s finished, and roughly how many words you’ll have to play with in each segment to stay within your target length range.
#2: Establish a numbering or categorization system for scenes.
One of the challenges of writing this kind of story is how to manage your manuscript in progress. Keeping track of how the segments flow from one to the next can be difficult, especially once you’ve written out multiple plot threads.
I used a letter+number system last time, and it seemed to work pretty well so I’ll probably do that again. The way I approach it:
- Scene 1 leads to 2A and 2B
- Scene 2A leads to 3A and 3C; scene 2B leads to 3B and 3D
- Scene 3A leads to 4A and 4E…
…and so on. I wrote all the scenes together in one Word document, using the letter-number label as a heading for each scene. Some people might find it easier to save each scene as its own document, all saved in the same folder. Whatever works for your brain, establish that as your system and stick to it throughout the drafting.
#3: Use index cards, Post-It notes, or other visual aids.
If you think the writing stage of a choose-your-own project is challenging, just wait until you get to editing. You have to make sure the story is telling a cohesive narrative no matter what decisions the reader makes. You also have to expect that the reader is going to try multiple paths, so you need to make sure all of the paths feel both cohesive and like they’re interesting either alone or read together.
I found an index card system absolutely key to getting through this process. I made an index card for each scene that had a brief plot summary, along with which scenes it leads to. Having these let me lay out the paths I was currently editing to look at them from start to finish.
Post-Its would do this job just as well, and there are probably software programs that would let you do a similar thing. I personally find it helpful being able to physically see how the scenes connect, but I could definitely see advantages to a digital version—it’s more portable, visually cleaner, and probably more efficient.
Either way, though, you’ll want some kind of tool for quickly identifying how the scenes branch and connect once you get into the editing stage.
The downside to having completed a choose-your-own story already is that I know exactly how much work I have ahead of me to finish the next one—and it’s a lot, even if you’re well-organized from the start. But it’s also a very fun way to approach storytelling, as a writer or a reader, and I’m excited to give it another go.
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