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   I am not an experienced writer. However, i think i could be decent at it. <eye roll> another noob who thinks he can write. I am considering entering the current contest. I will submit my first draft at an intro. Tear it apart. Full criticism is welcome. Im looking for helpful ideas about format and style. I have a couple of pages up to the first game decision. My hope is to never have random decisions, but choices that have been fleshed out in the story leading to them. No one has to review this, but thank you for your time to anyone who does.

http://chooseyourstory.com/story/viewer/default.aspx?StoryId=56701

I'm on my phone right now so I only skimmed it but it looks decent so far. 'Wake up and get out of bed' intros tend to be a little overused and not the most exciting way to start a story but in this situation things get more interesting pretty quickly.

One thing though, don't ever use 'lol' in any form of narration, that's an unspeakable crime. It felt a little unnecessary for the character to start rambling about vampires too, it was pretty easy to guess what was going on with the 'spider bites' already without immediately confirming it. Remember a lot of what keeps people's attention is raising questions they want to keep reading to eventually see answered. You don't want to deflate a mystery the moment after introducing it.

Although I'm really intrigued to see how that cat stacking game is going to turn out.

Thanks mizal for taking a look! ok, too much writing in social media snuck that "lol" in there. Good point to get rid of it. As for the story self referencing vampires, i like vampire stories that don't take themselves so seriously. I think the reader here knows we are going down a vampire path, not a whole lot of mystery there. and i guess it is an overused trope to have characters that joke about vampires being real, until the moment they realize this is real. But I do like to have a light tone, until events make the tone very dark. I'll think about different ways to set that tone at the beginning 

  given that I wrote that intro in a hour, i do see i used a bunch of tropes. Like daddy approval, and a dead older brother... But for the assignment, im not going to delve too deeply into character development. Tropes convey the message quickly. :)  I dont plan on just using that stuff as background fluff however, my goal here is to get the reader to like and identify with the main character, then join him on his struggle to save his own humanity. Questions of whether the struggle is worth it will come up. I am not a fan of these thing that have a decision fork, and then oops, u picked wrong, you are dead. I am more into telling a story no matter which path you take, with outcomes of varying success or failure. I want to limit this one in scope to just a fight of becoming a vampire or saving his humanity. 

And not to be too critical and make enemies, I read "blooded". I read about 20 linear pages, then got to my first choice, and died. lol. The story was really unique and interesting. It added something new to the vampire lore, which isn't easy to do. But i think the author focused more on telling a story, than making an interactive experience. I hope to find a good balance in there with my stuff.

 

Blooded has some interesting things in it but it's really only featured because horror is a weak category here and hadn't had a decent new story in awhile. It's pretty rushed though since it was for a contest and definitely has flaws. (And a different author wrote each path. There are some pretty dramatic diferences.)

You really should've rated and commented while you were at it, especially if you're trying to get points together for the contest. Really writing detailed reviews is the quickest way to gain respectability and shed your noob status around here anyway.

Which path was it you went down?

It sounded like Malk's.

Hey Steve. I went down the path of least resistance? I did not grab the shotgun as a boy, and became a vampire hunter. I had constant nightmares about that moment my entire life. What if i did grab that shotgun? What if I could kill that vampire. That is why, 20 years and 20 pages later, I wanted to make up for my mistake as a child. I wanted to grab my gun, and kill that vampire. And oops, I died. The End.  :)  

I agree, Steve is a bad writer.

So Steve wrote the vampire hunter path? It was pretty well-written btw...  

I did not. I wrote the bit where you grab the shotgun, and you spend your life working for a vampire rather than hunting them.

If you grabbed the gun, you can't kill the vampire. He's impressed with your courage, though, and you can join him as a servant, and then you work for him. That's my path. I'd recommend reading it to actually read my own vampire work rather than my mate's.

cool, I will check it out. Becoming a vampire sounds fun 

 

Pretty much what Mizal has already pointed out (the sudden "lol" was unintentionally funny) but I also noticed that you sometimes tend to misjudge sentence length, i.e. cutting them too short.

For example: "Plus your short story assignment is due today. Even though you haven't met the min requirements for word length." I would keep this as a single sentence because the two parts are deeply connected by "even though". There are also other instances in which you used "and" right after a period, but I tend to do that too and it doesn't really sound wrong to me. You probably used short sentences to give rhythm & style to your narrative and that's nice, just be careful not to overdose. And I have issues with sentence length too.

There are also some typos but those happen to everybody, and this is just the first draft anyway.

Looking at the plot, this could be a not-bad story (I'm refraining from saying "good" because there are only 3 pages so far), so stop worrying about minimum site standards. Of course reading other storygames, even if not vampire-related, should help you get a better assessment of the general quality. Just keep writing, I'm sure more or less positive that you can finish this story and make it even better than most other first tries at storygames.

 

  Thanks for the good input Undr!  Yeah, sentence length can be a problem, ill review the sentences that should be combined. But you are right about the rhythm. I wanted a light rhythm. The main character is a young kid in college, likes to have a good time. There is more to him, but i wanted to open with a light tone. I have seen other examples of writing that tries to create an epic poem with each sentence, even if that sentence has little impact on the plot. The character taking a dump can become a sonnet. So, i was shooting for a light tone, but not an empty one. I tried injecting significant backstory during mundane prose. Cuz really, all that happened was a hung over kid got up and showered. I haven't written anything in a long time, but i think trying to make a main character likable is such a tough task. I'll do my best with this one. Any tips on developing a likable character? lol   

Disclaimer: I'm just a reader, I don't write, so I'm not the best at giving writing tips.

However, I think you should stop thinking about the protagonist per se and focus on telling the story. If it was your profile in a roleplay sure, you could worry about whether your character is likable or not; these are storygames though, so you don't have to invent just the protagonist on its own, you have to write a comprehensive story. Focus on the events and dye them with your character's perspective, but don't let his personality become more important than the whole tale. This is especially true for CYOAs because the reader has to identify with the protagonist and make the choices.

Anyway, you probably just wanted to know how to not turn your protagonist into an annoying asshole*, but the only advice I have for that is to not exaggerate his personality too much. Don't turn him into an unfunny caricature and you're golden.

*You could always write a villain protagonist, but I don't think that's what you're aiming for and it isn't an easy type of character anyway.