User talk:Fish/CYOE: Difference between revisions

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== Discussion for Dreams, Inc. ==
My objectives here with this choose-your-own-ending story are several.  First, I need to get writing again, even if it's in small chunks.  Second, I have a lot of disconnected story ideas that I felt could all be mashed together in an all-encompassing story such as this.


I'm not positive what I want from this project yet.  I've got a chart in hand for all 10 characters, and which 3 options (Romance, Adventure, Thriller) each of those characters will have to start.  After that, I don't really have any notion of where they're going.  Mostly I'm writing this because I want to write something, but I haven't been able to write a single novel-length work lately — I get distracted or diverted or discouraged, and stop.  This is something I can write in small, manageable pieces.
I have seen a number of CYOE stories on the Internet.  Some of them start out well, and some start out poorly, but most of them go downhill in quality after a time, no matter how well-intentioned the starting author.  This is because there are several pitfalls with unrestricted anything-goes editing, and there are a number of traps in CYOE design that I am determined to avoid.  So here are my goals:


Is this going to be a collaborative story effort, where anybody can edit in a new page? I doubt it — or at least it won't be freely editable by anybody anywhere.  I'm considering letting people make submissions for it, but I am pretty picky about quality, so I haven't decided yet whether that'll happen.
# All the characters will have a personality.  The lead character will ''not'' be a cipher, a blank slate, a victim with no purpose other than to move from fetish to fetish.
 
# The characters will each have an emotional hook, upon which to hang their story branches. For instance, one character's hook will be about confronting his fears; each story branch will therefore boil down to Fear and Courage.  Needless to say, the Fear branches will ''mostly'' be dead ends, or lead quickly to dead ends within a few segments.  The character should progress toward branches that are courageous, for that way, he'll make an ''interesting'' character journey.
Also, I've got a short list of Things That Bug Me about other online branching-fiction, which I want to avoid in my treatment. These pet peeves include:
# High quality will be maintained.  This will happen because the WikiMedia software can (so I'm told) be constrained to permit editing only to registered Authors.
 
# Story segments will be long, not short.  The segments will contain real action, not two sentences of fluff followed by another ridiculous choice.
#Low-quality porn.  I want my pornography to be high-quality, damn it.
# Branches will be a small number of meaningful alternatives, not a long wall of nearly identical choices.
#A multitude of near-identical choices, as in, "He turns into a dog, he turns into a big dog, he turns into a little dog, he turns into a medium-sized black dog, he turns into a slightly-smaller-but-still-medium-sized white dog, he turns into a dog with a bow on his collar, etc." where all of the options have virtually the same story direction.
--[[User:Fish|Fish]] 05:12, 15 November 2007 (EST)
#Story branches that aren't controlled by the protagonist, like "suddenly the phone rang," or "suddenly a meteor struck," or "suddenly, he found a mysterious magic lamp on the ground next to him and he used it and he turned into a almost-medium-sized-but-slightly-larger-than-medium-but-not-so-large-as-large white and black dog."
 
Right now this is just an outlet for me to write.  Heaven knows where it's going.
 
--[[User:Fish|Fish]] 20:24, 5 November 2007 (EST)

Latest revision as of 05:12, 15 November 2007

My objectives here with this choose-your-own-ending story are several. First, I need to get writing again, even if it's in small chunks. Second, I have a lot of disconnected story ideas that I felt could all be mashed together in an all-encompassing story such as this.

I have seen a number of CYOE stories on the Internet. Some of them start out well, and some start out poorly, but most of them go downhill in quality after a time, no matter how well-intentioned the starting author. This is because there are several pitfalls with unrestricted anything-goes editing, and there are a number of traps in CYOE design that I am determined to avoid. So here are my goals:

  1. All the characters will have a personality. The lead character will not be a cipher, a blank slate, a victim with no purpose other than to move from fetish to fetish.
  2. The characters will each have an emotional hook, upon which to hang their story branches. For instance, one character's hook will be about confronting his fears; each story branch will therefore boil down to Fear and Courage. Needless to say, the Fear branches will mostly be dead ends, or lead quickly to dead ends within a few segments. The character should progress toward branches that are courageous, for that way, he'll make an interesting character journey.
  3. High quality will be maintained. This will happen because the WikiMedia software can (so I'm told) be constrained to permit editing only to registered Authors.
  4. Story segments will be long, not short. The segments will contain real action, not two sentences of fluff followed by another ridiculous choice.
  5. Branches will be a small number of meaningful alternatives, not a long wall of nearly identical choices.

--Fish 05:12, 15 November 2007 (EST)

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