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Writing tips: How to write a choose-your-own-adventure story

as skills and job classes, which would further develop the story into a more wholesome (and more complicated) development.

Next comes the main component of the story, the content. Write as though you were writing an action thriller, keeping mindless drivel to a minimum and going along at an exciting pace. Skip minor details, and avoid abstract descriptions to avoid confusion to the reader. Writing should also be done in a second or third-person perspective, with an absence of minor actions that the reader would feel trivial. The usage of the present tense should also be observed, to retain that feeling of immediacy when involved in an adventure. Remember, you are there to narrate to a reader his or her own adventure, not to dictate a grinding recount of another's actions.

Now the main distinction of the choose-your-own-adventure story is the constant page flipping that a selection of a choice. You would want to keep your chapters short and readable, with a wealth of sensory detail to aid the reader in visualizing his or her own presence in the story. Keep a page index to aid yourself in the referencing of chapters to another, as organization is ever the more important in choose-your-own-adventure stories. When writing chapters that follows a choice, try to avoid references to past actions or elements. "Stepping over the corpse of the goblin" and "Opening the now unlocked door" would not be very cohesive if you had merely scared the goblin away or had used a magic spell to walk through the door in the first place! Story linkage is thus an important, yet difficult component of a choose-your-own-adventure story writing. When allowing the reader to make choices, you should also allow some clues to precede. This can be done via sensory detail, "You feel a breeze coming from the left leg of the tunnel." Or via information recalled from previous events, such as a conversation in a tarvern that clues to the weakness of an enemy. However, it should also reflect real life decision making, and thus the reader should be allowed to make some uninformed decisions once in a while. For after all we can never really tell what lies ahead of us in the future. It is also a common feature in many adventure stories to request the reader to find a page that corresponds to the answer to some riddle, or a password of sorts that is obtained somewhere earlier in the story. This interactive form of choice making would allow great flexibility in the reading of the story, but note must be


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