Writing Formats - Interactive Fiction

The easiest part of writing, is having the idea. What idea? THE idea! That great twist, that moving image, that wonderful character. Anyone with a bit a fantasy, anyone a bit insane, can come up with some idea which would make a great story.

Yet this initial idea is worth less than nothing, unless you add to that idea some other ingredients. Skill, perseverance, luck, marketing. But also something I've been thinking about a lot lately: Format. How to spice things up, how to decide what method to use to tell the story I want to tell?

Format?

The form of the final story is not obvious from the beginning. You might think it is obvious, for instance you want to write a 50-word short story, or a flash short story (somewhere between 500-1000 words) or perhaps you've got it into to your head to write a saga with eleven books and some accompanying stories. Sure, you can start out with a dream, an initial desire. And often your particular skills will make you try to put your idea into a format that fits with what you have to offer.

But actually, it should not be you deciding on the format. The form the story takes is mostly dependent on the story itself. With its aim, its own desire. This is not to say that if a short story is taking its sweet time and eventually making you write a novel, that you should always allow the story to make you do that. As author you are in control. And it's an interesting battle between your own needs and the needs of the story. Which might turn out to be a poem. Or a play.

Or maybe, it is something completely different... It's up to you to make it work, to find the best way to get it across.

Interactive Fiction

Some time ago a friend of mine told me about interactive fiction. Something I didn't know a lot about, but fortunately there are a lot of websites explaining IF (Interactive Fiction).

Interactive Fiction is basically a text-based game, where the reader (player) gets to choose and interact with the story and in this way determines the narrative. The author of the story has provided narratives for all possible combinations, and there is not per se the right way, although in some interactive stories there may be. Think about adventure games, you trying to solve a puzzle, exploring a world, fighting magical creatures, all based on text. This was something fashionable in the 80s, with games like Zork and Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, a hype which lasted until PCs started to have good enough video options.

But even today, Interactive Fiction has many fans. Here is a good database with a lot of games, some of which are free to play online. Also this site textadventures.co.uk provides some good links to games to try out.

New ways of interacting with narrative

Personally, I don't like videogames very much. I don't like adventure games either. But I do like good narrative, and being involved in the story, truly being a part of it. And nowadays there are great and easy programs available for non-programming people like myself, which allow anyone who can write to create an online story-game with several endings and loops and whatever complexity you wish to build into it.

So, this is something I'll be going to explore further, as it has really piqued my interest. As it might fit philosophically oriented stories very well, letting people make choices and to let them face the consequences. And with choices, I don't mean that you have to pick up a puzzle piece that you can later solve something. But ethical choices, choices that tell something about your own attitude, or the attitude of your player-character in the story.

An example of a very short, non-adventure, but very interesting 'interactive fiction' is for instance this one, available online for free, written by Andrew Patterson: 'Choose Your Own Test'

Thanks for reading, and I'll keep you updated on my journey into Interactive Fiction.

^{Here an overview of more fiction/short stories and poetry by @nobyeni.}