by Elton Gahr

Created on: May 23, 2009

Writing a choose your own adventure story can be a great deal of fun and an interesting experience for a writer, but there are a few issues that can come up from this type of novel that you won't face in your more typical books. Understanding them can give you the opportunities to write things that aren't typically available to the writer.

The first thing you will notice as you begin to write a choose your own adventure is that you need to change the point of view from the typical style to the second person narrative form. This isn't all that difficult but it changes some things. The most basic is that you typically don't have a strong main protagonist. This forces the other characters and the plot to take over the bulk of the work that the main protagonist would normally be doing. This becomes doubly difficult with a choose your own adventure novel when you don't have a single plot path but several. This is why the premise of a choose your own adventure is so important.

Another thing to keep in mind is that people will be reading your story numerous times in order to find different paths. This leads to two general issues you will want to focus on. One, the first couple pages should be quick and interesting, but it is also useful to add foreshadowing. Typical choose your own adventure novels are for kids but besides keeping it appropriate it isn't useful to think of them as such. Drop in hints of what is happening and inside jokes that they won't get the first time through, this will add something to the later reads.

It is also useful to consider if you want to keep the story consistent on different paths. The typical answer is yes. That means if a character has a choice between going left or right the same character shouldn't be in both directions because the second time they read through it's going to upset them.

Another valuable point to consider when avoiding frustrating the reader is that in a chose your own adventure they want to make the major decisions. All too often writers will make major choices for the character in the middle of a choose your own adventure story because it makes it easier to write. Don't do this.

It is also worth remembering that what you are really writing is 10 or 12 short stories with the same subject and the same beginning. So short story rules of description and characters tend to apply more than novels rules. This means less characters and less description than a novel. It also means that you will get the chance to write at least a few tragedies. This is excellent practice as writers rarely get to do so. Enjoy it, but also try to make it interesting. You die isn't fun, but a good death scene can be interesting.

Last, you will need to be organized. There are several ways to do this but the easiest is to take a page from the computer programmers handbook and write a flowchart. This way you will know that every choice is fully written without needing to reread the book in every possible variation. It will also help you see if you have long sections of story without choices while others have too many.

With some practice a choose your own adventure can be a great deal of fun as well as an excellent way to stretch your writing style. All it takes is a little bit of effort to understand what is different about this type of book and taking advantage of that.

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