Writing a Choose Your Own Adventure Style Story

     For my Goosebumps birthday party, I developed a Give Yourself Goosebumps style story for my interactive Choose Your Own Adventure game.  It had 16 different endings and ended up being about 8,900 words.  While my guests got to explore only one ending during the party, I sent them home with copies of my story so that they could read all the endings.
     Writing a story with multiple endings can be a bit more complicated than writing a story that follows one path.  Here are some things that I have found helpful when writing choose your own adventure style stories.

*Come up with a labeling system to identify your paths.  You're going to need some way to keep track of which choice connects to which story arc.  Numbering your choices 1, 2, 3, etc. may seem like a good idea at first, but it's easy to forget which number you left off on and adds complications if you decide to go back and add another branch.  What I've found useful is the following: Suppose my first choice has three options.  The top option in the list I'll call 0, the next I'll call 1, and the last I'll call 2.  If I start writing the 0 branch and come to a choice, these choices will have a two digit identifier: 00, 01, etc.  The zero at the front tells me that I came from path 0 to get here and the second digit is a way of identifying the choices.  If I start working on the 01 branch and come to a choice, these choices I'll number 010, 011, 012, etc.  Again, the 01 identifies which branch I came from and the final digit is what distinguishes this choice from the others.  This strategy has it's downsides, the main one being that if you have a lot of choices, it's easy to mistype a 0 or 1 somewhere and mess up your coding scheme, but it's what has worked well for me.

*When using my labeling system, I put one label at the end of the choice and the same label at the top of the page on which that branch begins.  For example, this is what a choice might look like:

If you eat the ice cream, turn to page 010100.

This is what the beginning of that branch might look like:

010100

     You eat the ice cream.  Your body starts to tingle . . .

These labels will all be removed in the end and replaced with page numbers, but it helps to keep track of your paths while you're writing the story.

*Keep a story map.  It's easy to get lost in a story with multiple paths, so this gives you a way to keep track of what you've done and where you're going.  You'll want to write out each choice with a brief description (1-2 sentences) of what happens in that choice.  For example,

You wake up in a cool, damp enclosure.

If you turn on your flashlight, turn to page 0.
If you decide it's safer to leave your flashlight off, turn to page 1.

0

You turn on your flashlight and see you're in a cave.  You hear a scraping sound.

If you go toward the sound, turn to page 00.
If you move away from the sound, turn to page 01.

00

You go toward the sound and see a slimy creature.

If you go toward it, turn to page 000.
If you run away from it, turn to page 001 . . .

And so on.  You can use this map to keep track of which paths you've written or to plan out where you want to go.  I tend to use them for both purposes.

*Write branches one at a time.  This way it's more like you're writing a traditional story.  I tend to start by writing all the 0th choice lines, e.g., 0, 00, 000, etc. until I reach the end of that line.  Then I go back to the last choice I made and finish that line.

For example, if 00000 comes to an end, after I finish writing it I would then go back to 00001 and write this branch and all of its choices.  Then I would go back to 0001.  Each time I finish a path, I move back to the last choice I made until I finish the story.

*Limit your choices.  This is one of the hardest things for me when it comes to writing a choose your own adventure style story.  I want to give people lots of options, but the more options I give, the harder it is to finish the story.  Also, the longer your branches are, the more options you'll end up having.  This is one place where your story map could come in handy.  If you start mapping out the options you want to have, you can see whether your plan is too ambitious.  For the most part, you'll want to limit yourself to two options per choice and maybe four or five choices per main story branch.  If there's a particular branch you're really interested in, you can always have a few more choices or options for that one and truncate some of your other branches.

That's all the advice I have for now.  If you do end up writing your own choose your own adventure style story, let me know how it goes.

The Grand prize for my cover design contest was a copy of my story with this holographic cover.

Everyone else got a copy of the story with a non-shiny cover.