But think very hard every time someone voices a complaint and you don't take steps to make that aspect of it better. You have to decide for yourself which advice is worth keeping, and which you can safely ignore. It's probably good.Īt the end of the day, no one can tell you what to do with your story. Then suck it up and listen to their advice. Send it to all your friends and beg them to tell you the worst things they can think of about it. I've tried plotting out every single paragraph section before beginning the writing process, and it can be kind of boring to plod through writing all the sections, when you've already decided what happens in each and every single one of them. But a warning: Make sure to leave enough ambiguous that you still have room for some creativity in the final writing. You'll do another mini-flowchart for each scene, either formally or just in your head, and then just sit down and write it out.Īt this point, you've done the hard work. At this point, you should basically know what needs to happen in each scene, and you have a rough idea of about how many sections you have to allot to each scene. If the flow-chart is storyboarding, then writing is penning and inking. Once you complete this step, there's no reason why you shouldn't be able to finish your gamebook. It's hard, but if you tackle it as it's own problem, you may find it easier than you think. This step is the essence of writing the gamebook. "If find the jade statuette, go to reward sequence, if lose the statuette, go to the docks scene for fight with villain." Draw the lines connecting all the options. "Explore dungeon #2," and the possible outcomes of those chunks, ie. You don't need to work out every detail at this point you can write in chunks, ie. In this stage you want to get a big white board, or a sheet of graph paper, or some appropriate computer program (I don't have one, but I assume they exist) and draw out the path of your story, including major branches and decision points. Before that, I would run into a problem I hadn't anticipated, not know what to do next, get frustrated, and the story would go to the back-shelf graveyard. I didn't learn to write long-form until I learned to outline. You usually don't want to just jump in, because you might write yourself into a corner and find that you don't have a way out of it. This is a critical step, like storyboarding for a comic, or outlining for a novel. Different stories will have different requirements for notes, with some areas being well-detailed, and others left more vague. Technical information about the world (how magic works, what spaceships are available, and what the differences are between them, how the system of mystic seals that grant shapechanging ability really works, etc.) In step two, we did some heavy brainstorming and started putting it all together and answering the big questions. Where do you want to begin? Beginnings should introduce the most important characters, and set the tone for the rest of the gamebook. What will the ending be? This is often a chance to pop the "Big Question" of your gamebook, or to throw a Boss Battle at the player, or both. Make sure big branches in the story are based on important decisions. Take your own limits seriously it's easy to say, "I'll do it all!" but gamebooks will bloat rapidly if you let them, and every human, even you, has a limit. How many major diverging branches to your story do you want to tackle? Strike a balance between replayability and how much you're willing to ask of yourself. Sometimes, especially in science fiction, the choices a character must make are only possible given the inherent laws of a certain setting. What kind of setting will provide the best backdrop for the story? Ideally it should be both colorful and thematically appropriate. What important choices will the characters face, that you can torture the reader with? Why does the reader care? What challenges do these character face? You want to answer the following questions: Other times I'll scribble all over whatever piece of paper is handiest. Sometimes I'll do free-writes on the computer. It usually starts small, but it can grow from there.įor me, this step involves a lot of creative planning and random brainstorming. For me, this is usually a setting, or a character, or a certain decision I'd like to throw at the player, or some combination of the above. Here's, my 8 step process to writing a gamebook:įirst, come up with your idea. I know this topic has been covered before, by other capable bloggers, but I'll go ahead and throw in my two pence, for what it's worth.
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