Some people loved where “Moments” went. Some people hated it, and believed something different should have happened. But I can’t satisfy everyone.

Or can I? I’m thinking about rewriting it as… drum roll...

…a choose-your-own-adventure clopfic.

Wait! Ow! Put down those pitchforks! I can explain.

I wanted to stuff a lot of different things into this story, and only some of them got in. And it is an adventure story, which lends itself to the choose-your-own format.

As for the clop… well, that was one (or two) of the paths I didn’t take in the original story.

This raises some questions:

1. CYOA books often have different branches that are incompatible with each other, because they reveal inconsistent facts. Interactive fictions like Infocom made were always consistent with each other—there was a single realized story world, and you explored it by taking different paths through it. CYOA-style explores possible worlds; Infocom-style explores possibilities within a single world. What are the pros & cons of each?

2. Similarly, different branches could diverge into different styles. Does a CYOA get more stylistic/atmospheric leeway, to change between branches? As a linear fiction, I can take Moments through a chapter or two of black comedy, but I can’t end there. As a branching fiction, I think I can have some branches that end in black comedy, as long as others don’t. Not every story leaf (an ending to a branching structure) has to have that final consistent closure, because it doesn’t have the final word. How far can I stretch those endings? Can one branch end in cloppy comedy?

3. While graphing out the tree structure, I found I couldn’t go straight from chapter 3 to 4, or 4 to 5, or 5 to 6 in a CYOA format as they’re written now. The CYOA format needs to end a chapter with a question, such as, “Go to chapter 8 if you think Twilight should tell the townsfolk that they’re going to die.”

In order to do this, you have to have presented some new info in the scene, and then had your protagonist reflect on this information after the scene, so that that action doesn’t come out of nowhere. This is exactly the “scene and sequel” structure advised by Dwight V. Swain and Jack Bickham. Whereas “Moments” currently leaves out the “sequel” portion in chapters 3, 4, and 5, so that you have to start reading the next chapter and infer what Twilight was thinking. And those chapters in particular seem to have lost readers--they kept reading the story, but they disengaged emotionally and started wondering about plausibility (see this comment by Titanium Dragon).

So maybe a good test for story continuity is to take your completed story and imagine rewriting it as a CYOA. If there’s a chapter break that you couldn’t end with a “Should the protagonist do X or Y?”, and follow it immediately with the next chapter, there’s a problem.

4. AFAIK, nobody has ever written a “serious” CYOA. All the ones I’ve seen are pure adventure fic, without any theme. Why? Can CYOA not support “literature”?