Choose Your Own Misadventure
Last year, I published, having spent months working alongside a programmer, a choose-your-own-adventure app for Android, called Scoundrel’s Cross. It had taken some time, I had done the press for it, we had a review in PocketGamer (a five out of ten, and I’ll explain that soon), and I’d even blogged about writing it for the renown Terribleminds blog, owned and operated by one Chuck Wendig.
The app came out.
And it sucked.
Now, let’s analyse this, because if there’s anything I think people would benefit from - specifically people who want to write a choose-your-own-adventure novel - it’s learning why we screwed it up so badly.
This isn’t a denial of accountability, but I’d be crazy to say that it was my fault. At first, the idea was we’d have choices on every page. Why? Because this is what you do. But it soon became apparent that in the many pages of the novel we’d written together so far, there were only around five or six choices. Sounds terrible, right?
It gets worse.
We decided (well, he said what he wanted to do, and it was his IP, so I went along with it) to release it in five parts, rather than release it all at once as an entirely self-contained app. Updates or new apps, who knows - we never got past part one because the delays got so long that we both called time on the project. I was enthusiastic and raring to go, but I think he had a lot going on behind the scenes, and although I’m disappointed it didn’t happen, I’m not going to hold that against him. He worked hard, and I sure as hell can’t program an app.
The problem with these mistakes is they go against so many of the fundamental rules, or my rules, at least, of what goes into a great choose-your-own-adventure book. Here they are, for you to agree or disagree with as you see fit.
A choice on every page. No, really, don’t even bother writing a choose-your-own-adventure novel if you’re not going to offer someone some way to change the course of their journey through the book every time they turn the page. The reason for this is because turning the page, for the reader, is an act they will relate to making a choice.
But introduce them to a page-turning event that doesn’t allow them to make a choice, and you’ve taken that familiar if you choose choice A, turn to page X choice away from them. Interactive content needs to stay interactive throughout, or at least damn interesting or you risk losing the reader as they begin to feel frustrated and powerless.
One long story. Do not release it in chunks. The reason the app we worked on went south was because he was low on spare time, and because I was really unhappy with the decision he’d made to split up what was a relatively short book already into chunks so small that you’d be in and out of the app we released, beginning to end, in about five minutes.
Ideally, you want something that provides someone with about, hmm, 150 pages of content. Which means a lot of content for you. Try not to think about it too much, because I assure you it will depress you. Most readers are not going to re-read your CYOA book, but if they do, the advantage of having so many pages is that it can genuinely be a totally different experience at least twice. You don’t need thousands of branches, but many different routes through to several different endings can not only keep the reader feeling in control of the outcome, but also encourages discussion, i.e. “what did you do in the cave? I took route A, but should I check out route B next time?”
It’s a novel, stupid. It might be a CYOA title, don’t don’t opt for prose that’s a little too basic - this isn’t a blow-by-blow of a videogame, it’s an actual novel. Ensure your description is lush with detail, and don’t skimp on the characterisation - your protagonist may be a shell, its existence defined soley by the second-person viewpoint you’re using, but a barren story does not a book make. If you want to make a game, make a game - CYOA novels are interactive fiction. There’s a difference, there, and if you’re not sure what that difference is, it’s that the reader can’t see anything until you tell them what they’re looking at. Imagine playing a videogame blind. See? There you go.
If you experiment, make it good. People are used to the second-person, and if you futz around with this particular genre staple, then you better be able to back it up with some pretty goddamn amazing characterisation. If you want fifty choices per page, you’ll need thousands of pages to back that up, lest your reader’s CYOA experience with your book be two goddamn pages long.
Make sure you know what age group you’re writing for. This one occurred to me as I was finishing up here, and my god is it important. CYOA books are traditionally for kids, right? That means that your stuff needs to fit that market. But it doesn’t mean that you can’t write, say, a gore-fest thriller for adults that uses CYOA mechanics. In fact, a mature series of CYOA novels might be an interesting experiment - will they read it, or will the CYOA thing put them off considering it as a book for adults? Only one way to find out, I guess, but personally, I’m aiming for something more in the middle - teens and adults, enjoyable because it’s simple and has a strong storyline. But that’s just me. You’re your own people.
Now, the one thing I don’t know how to do is price it. Do you go with novel pricing? Do you make it cheaper as, to the reader, it’s a shorter novel? Or do you make it more expensive, because there’s a game element to it? It’s a tough choice, and personally I might opt to make it cheaper, as ultimately it’ll read like 50,000 words to them, even if it’s 150,000 to you.
Now go forth, and write awesome CYOA books.
Laters.