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If you are like me, determined to write a good storygame but are just unable to, I just found a method which helps me plenty.

The gist of it is to start with the structure itself rather than the story or the game, basically linking all the pages together as you see fit. Incorporating variables and items won't come as much of a challenge either.

For example, in my variable heavy game I am making, I start by naming the pages FIRST, CHOICE 1A, CHOICE 1B,  and so on. Then I can easily find and add my variables and results to RESULT 1A, RESULT 1B, and so on.

When one finishes the structure, then they can flesh out the pages to add story to their game and replace their placeholder page titles for real ones.

If you have any feedback or methods you use in creating your storygames, feel free to add to the discussion.

 

I've never attempted that before but I've considered it, even possibly as the basis for a contest. Give out a template for a story's choice structure and then the challenge for entrants would be creating a plot to fit it.

There's this persistent idea I see in writing communities that a writer isn't in control of the plot they put on the page, like it's just this magic thing that happens or doesn't happen and they have no control of it, and I think something like this would encourage people to have to break their ideas down and start looking at story elements as parts of a whole.

Sure. Is it alright if I temporally publish the template, even if it is not a full on game?

Just leave it in sneak peek and put the link here in the thread if you want people to look at it.

You don't want to temporarily publish anything, everyone will delight in rating it down and you'll also mark it with that publication date so that even if you do eventually finish it it probably won't show up among the new stories.

http://chooseyourstory.com/my/adveditor/chapters.aspx?57596

Here's what I have so far.

Sounds like people who tend to be more like gardeners with writing.  They tend to the story, feed it, see how it grows.  Architects tend to be more structured, usually having a firm grasp of how things will go before they even start writing.

The approach that I'm trying to take at this point is to get firm on the structure of the plot, but letting the characters sort of fall into place with everything and write them as their scenarios unfold.  I think that approach will be what works for me, but since I'm still new at writing, we'll see.

I think that getting more organized would help a lot of people, though.  I also think that contest sounds really interesting.

I know a few people that do it this way.

I tried it once and it did not work for me. I write my stories on scrivener and then copy paste each page into the editor after I finish it. So I was constantly coming up with one format for pages and choices in scrivener, then having to change it because it wasn't the same as what I had already put in the editor. But if it works for you, then that's all that matters.

Personally, I prefer to create a detailed outline of the major paths, branches, etc in my stories. Then I write out the scenes and slowly connect them, this also allows me to jump around and write something else if I'm having writer's block somewhere else in the story.

That sounds really nice, and when it comes to regular stories and such, the outline method is by far my favorite.

However, when I attempted that here, I guess the different paths and such just became too much to keep track of. Although, I never knew you could use Scrivener to create a CYOA.

Scrivener is perfect for it. You can physically see all the branches of your story and keep it organized. I'll try to take a screenshot of one of mine when I get home from work as an example. It's much easier than writing directly in the editor, though.

Yeah I use Scrivener too. I hate trying to keep track of a billion little boxes linking to other boxes but only in certain conditions with the site editor, with Scrivener I just write each major path out one at a time and create sub folders for smaller branches as I go.

Standard license can be bought 25% off if you put in the promo code "WINTERFEST2018", so that's pretty nice.  I might pick this up, now.

I never knew about Scrivener before this.

Was planning on buying it for a while now; writing with Word is difficult for me. Thanks for the promo code btw, I doubt I would've caught it myself.

I saw a similar code for previous years, so I plugged in 2018 and it worked. 

The lack of security for something like that is almost concerning... Well, it's great for us!

I think they just use a variant of that for a Christmas sale every year. There's no security reason to hide a coupon code from customers anyway.

I haven't checked in quite a while since I don't need to update Scrivener for my use, but I assume the Linux version is still free.

If I hadn't used Scrivener, I'd probably still be beating my head against a wall trying to write something for the site that was spiralling out of control. It makes it much, much easier to keep track of everything and you can set it to display only the relevant pages in the path leading up to/working toward the part you're working on so it lessens the chance of plot holes, etc. It is great!

I have written CYOAs here using many different methods. But writing CYOAs is certainly different and I find it hard sometimes to take a story that appears in my head and find ways to split it into an effective CYOA. This is an idea I'm thinking about, almost to the extreme. What if I write up all the boxes from a layout and then try and figure out what story fits into those boxes?