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You want a hero that your reader can relate to and enjoy learning about, but without personality quirks that might distance the reader. Your hero should be interesting enough (along with the story itself) to make the reader want to make his or her own decisions when appropriate.

Forks in the Road

The fun part of writing a choose-your-own-adventure story is deciding when the reader gets to make a decision and what kind of choices to provide. Your story should begin normally, with enough background, setting, action, and peripheral characters to allow your reader to both enjoy and understand the early stages of the plot. Then, as you develop various scenarios, ask yourself: Is this a good stopping point? (You hero probably won't want to stop in the middle of a chase/fight/love scene.) What choices will advance the plot? (Making your hero decide on a milkshake flavor or how much kibble to give the cat usually doesn't matter. Try not to let your story stagnate.) How do I make it fun for the reader? (Use lots of variables.) There are always exceptions, but they're infrequent.

That last question deserves a little dissection. When you create your choices, you'll want to vary three things: the importance of the decision, the number of choices, and the addition of optional clues.

Importance: Some decisions will be quite mundane, while others may be life altering for your hero. Make sure you provide a good mix so that the reader doesn't get bored. The earlier "goblin" example is quite different than standing at a corridor intersection or reading a menu at the local pub. As the author, you can make your reader's choices as bland or exciting as you wish, but just remember that it is also your responsibility to keep your reader entertained. He or she is going to lose interest if every stopping point is the same (i.e. life or death, left or right).

Number: Naturally, not every real-life decision is limited to two choices, and so it should be in your story. In the previous example, my hero has three choices: arm, rescue, or steal. Standing in a corridor might only allow heading left or right. Reading a pub menu opens up any number of culinary options. Remember that when rationing out choices, you'll have to write for each of the resulting scenarios, so be careful or you'll have a 900-page novel on your hands!

Clues: You should also provide clues now and then, allowing your reader to guess what's coming, but certainly not every time - that would be unrealistic. After all, real people

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