The door opened quickly and violently, as if someone was breaking in, but Maddie knew otherwise. Brandon stumbled in, hiccupping as he went, closing the door behind him, fiddling with the keys in his hand before sighing angrily and waving at the door, as if the air would lock it for him. Drunkenly, he turned, swaying heavily, his arms swinging around him like vines around a tree. As their eyes met he stopped, in his drunken state assuming she hadn’t seen him. Her glare was fixed and arms folded. She was wearing what she did every night, a long grey nightie, one she had worn since their wedding, ‘easy access’ she had called it. But now her face wasn’t the same as that night, it was stern and furious with flared nostrils and wide eyes.
“Where have you been?” Maddie demanded, quoting almost every wife whose husband had come home inexplicably drunk.
“Out,” Brandon said quickly, trying his best to hide his slurs.
“Where?” she demanded again. He huffed at her.
“Out,” he repeated. This time, she huffed at him, taking a step closer. Now, Brandon could see the fury in her blue eyes and her withdrawn tongue as she held back her shouts.
“You better have a bloody good reason,” she seething, breathing heavily through her teeth. Brendon huffed at her again, pushing aside her anger clearly written across her face.
“Did you miss me?” he teased, still swaying, his arms dangerously close to the framed pictures on the table beside him. Maddie recoiled slightly, her anger slowly fading into sorrow, tears building in her eyes. She bit her lip and sucked in cool air before looking back at him.
“Yes, I did,” she said. Brandon jolted back slightly at the sincere, contained answer, swinging himself steady again. “Because while you were off galivanting around town with your friends, I was here, tucking our daughter into bed. And as I am doing that, my phone rings. I have to stop saying goodnight to her to answer it. It was from my father…” she hesitated, breathing in sharply again but her eyes never left his. “My mother died.” She finished. Even through his drunken vision, Brendon could see Maddie’s eyes well up again, more tears falling down her face. He brought a hand forward to pull her closer but she stepped back, lightly pushing his hand to the side and he let it fall, confusion spreading across his face. She took in another deep breath. “This is how it’s been since the beginning. You go out, get drunk, come home late and I'm already asleep and I find you passed out on the sofa. Thought it was funny and cute to begin with, but then it got boring and annoying. But then, you stopped, cleaned up your act, but, since last week, you’ve been sneaking out to drink, leaving me alone. And not only that, but alone with your infant daughter.” Once she had finished, Brendon had started to cry, the warm tears gently falling down his face, creating a river as they meandered down where the wrinkles of smiles used to form.
“Maddie, I,” he started.
“No,” she interjected, her voice stern again. “I have lost my mother, your daughter has lost her grandmother, a woman she will never remember. I lost someone and the only person I could talk to was our daughter, who was confused about why I was crying in the first place! I don’t want her Christmas ruined with the memory of her grandmother’s death! And you weren’t here for me, or for her. I don’t feel like I can rely on you anymore.” Brendon opened his mouth but she barged past him, heading for the stairs.
“Maddie, please I’m…” he tried, but she didn’t turn. As she reached the stairs she stopped, her back still to him.
“I'm taking Rachel to my brother’s tomorrow,” she said after a moment, her voice warbled with tears, holding back the urge to run to him. “We can talk more after that.” With no further words, and ignoring Brendon’s wails and desperate calls, Maddie walked up the stairs and to their bedroom, where she didn’t sleep.
Day 1
Closed Eyes
Closed Eyes
Deafening
Deafening
Closed Eyes
Day 15
E s t 2 0 2 0
Lesson Taught
A How-To Guide
If you are unable to read the guide, here is a PDF file of it!
Writing this story was a lot harder than I originally thought. As someone who writes short stories and novels, writing a long-form, multi-layered story with multiple endings and choices was a new experience for me, but it was one that I found to be quite interesting and fun to do.
​
This is a guide on how to write your own Choose-Your-Own-Adventure story partnered with my thoughts on each one with my actions as I write Lesson Learned. Bear in mind that I learned as I went and the way I wrote my story may not be how you may write, but each step will be important to the final story so while the order may not suit you, the information might be.
Part I: Decide On Your Genre
Genre is probably going to be what sets the tone of your story from the get-go. If you set it in a dystopian world, then you’ll have to have dystopian elements. So where will yours be set and when? When may not be at the forefront of your mind, and may not even come into your story at all, but it is a necessary element for certain genres like sci-fi and historical. But remember, just because you pick one genre, doesn’t mean you have to stick to only that. All genres blend together and mix, but keep your overall genre in mind when crafting your story. The main thing to know at this point in your story crafting is your genre and your audience, whether it’s a historical retelling for adults or a fantasy for kids.
In Lesson Learned: To get me started, I came up with three stories that I wanted to tell. A sci-fi story about a man waking up in the midst of a war, a romance story where you would follow clues to find your secret admirer, and finally, a crime/thriller story which would become Lesson Learned. I knew that I wanted to write a crime story, so I started looking and thinking about books and TV shows that showcase crime stories to see what elements I could lift. In the end, I decided to use a character I've had on the back burner for many years, DI William Wishwell, and use him and the world I had already started forming as the backdrop to this story.
Part II: Your Story and Characters
Next up, it’s a good idea to work out your characters and plot. Will you have a gruff military commander or a fluffy kitten as your protagonist? Will they have to steal a diamond to sell for their mother’s surgery, or do they just want a belly rub from all of the kids coming out of school? Who they are and what they do is up to you entirely, no one is here to restrict your creative flow.
Here, it’s also a good idea to work out what the central story will focus around. Know that you want your characters to move from one location to another or that you want one person dead by the end of it. But, it’s important to note that coming up with the “real” ending isn’t a must at this point. Only know where you want the story to lead because if you dictate that story as is, you may write yourself into a corner.
In Lesson Learned: I knew I was going to have Wishwell appear in my story but didn’t want him to be my protagonist, so I came up with a new character called Merlin Bell, a new-ish detective under Wishwell’s command. And for my story, I planned out who the victim was, who the real murderer was and their motivations. However, I didn’t plan the actual ending.
Part III: How Many Stories?
Now for the most important part, your endings. This is a multiple-choice story, after all. It’s a good idea to note down how many stories you may want to include, and it’s best to limit yourself. Don’t start making every decision one that changes the entire story. The best way to think of it is as beads on a string. Some choices may branch out but they both lead to the same reaction or event, giving the reader/audience the illusion of choice when in actuality both choices led to the same thing. This is a method often used in the gaming community to keep players engaged while not forcing the developers to code hundreds of outcomes to minute actions. Just keep the options thin and think about how many endings you might want. It doesn’t have to be many, but around 4-6 is a good ballpark for getting started.
In Lesson Learned: When I started, I had zero idea how many endings I would end up with, even after I started writing. But, once I got far enough, I realised that I couldn’t keep expanding on every decision that I gave the reader, so I started simplifying. I made a few decisions that lead to one another and several decisions that led to the same outcome. In the end, I simplified it further by having each suspect be an ending, with one being the true ending, one being the bad ending, and the other two being plain and simple wrong endings.
Part IV: Writing
The hardest part about writing a choose-your-own-adventure story is writing in second person. Second person is when you write “you” instead of “I” in first person or “He/She/They/” and/or the character’s name for third person. Choose-Your-Own-Adventure stories are also mostly written in the present tense since you are trying to engage and draw the reader into the world so that when they make the decisions, they feel like the character they’re playing as. It can take time to learn how to write with those methods but after a while, it gets easier.
But for the content of the story, it’s really up to you. Whoever your protagonist is or whatever the genre and world you're writing in will shape what you write. Keeping your decisions from the previous step clear in your writing is the only thing you have to be careful of. But the other thing to be on the lookout for is the length of each piece of writing before a decision. Don’t make it thousands of words long of world-building and background, simply take what you have and condense it into throwaway lines of dialogue or other means of show, don’t tell. Readers also won't want to wait for pages and pages of scrolling to get to one decision. You don’t know who your reader is, but keep the writing story simple.
In Lesson Learned: I was told early on by my professor that I needed to keep the writing short, which is why I told you. But, I did break that rule a few times and that was because of the scene I was writing. While it’s a good rule of thumb to keep your writing short so readers aren’t bored of waiting, making sure you tell your story is also crucial. But as long as you keep your story moving quickly enough, you should be fine. The second person was also a struggle to learn as well. As someone who writes predominantly in third person, second was a little harder to wrap my head around, especially when I included the present tense.
Part V: Where To Tell?
So far, all I have talked about is the actual story writing and telling but I haven’t covered a key aspect of this journey that is particularly important. Where are you going to release your story? There are many ways to do this. If you want to go a more old-fashioned route, you can submit your story and concept to an agent or publisher and try to get your work published. This, however, would require time and effort, not to mention the research it would take for you to find something willing since Choose-Your-Own-Adventure stories are still a very niche concept. There’s also the self-publishing route which you can go through with a variety of different companies, Amazon Kindle Publishing being one of them (and one I've personally used for my Winter Tales anthology). This approach may be more time-consuming but could be worth it in the long run. You do have to be careful of other companies such as vanity publishers who will ask you to pay for them to publish your work. That, however, is not the point of this guide (although, please do as much research as possible if you look at publishing and make sure you're not being ripped off)
There are also other ways to release your story, like through companies like Tales. These places might charge you to use them or have other steps to take in order to get your work published. And of course, there is also the option to make your own website and release it there. But once again I urge you to look every option available to you and study them to see if they are the right fit for you.
In Lesson Learned: While there were many alternatives for where to release my story, I chose to add it to my already existing site. I chose to do this because of the brand I had already started to build around my IMWrites penname and felt like the two were a good pairing. But this also came with its own problems such as the intricacies of linking every page to one another and a few other. So if you already have a website, it would be something I’d suggest, but it isn’t worth paying a monthly or annual sum for something you're just going to leave up and not touch for years. For me, I come back to this site every so often to release stories or announce my next project.
Part VI: Edits and Reviews
Once you’ve got your story written, or at least mostly written, it’s time to think about its quality. Start reading through it was a critical eye, like you’ve never read it before. Get someone else to go through and correct your mistakes. It’ll be difficult to have someone else criticise your work (and it’ll never be easy) but it will make your work better and may even lead you to create something that you prefer over the original story. But remember, you don’t have to change anything that you don’t want to. You are the original author and you have the final say.
In Lesson Learned: My method of editing is a little different to how I described above. Since I'm on a deadline for my project, I don’t have the luxury of taking my time to edit and review my work. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t. I edit as I go, criticising my story and characters and choices until I've completely finished it, and then I let others have a go and see if anything needs changing or fixing. How you go about editing is up to you. You can write all of it and then edit, or you can edit as you go. As long as you are happy with the final outcome, there’s no pressure to handle it in any particular way.
Part VII: OK, Done. Now What?
So, you’ve done all of it. It’s written, edited and set up wherever your releasing it. Now, what do you do? Well, tease it. Announce it. The easiest thing is to bombard social media with posts about your upcoming project and if you feel up for it and willing, you can also do a few paid sponsored posts as well. Now all you do is sell yourself and your work. Really, there’s nothing else to do. You can carry on editing and tweaking until you release it, but that’s all you need to do.
In Lesson Learned: As I've mentioned, this is part of my community project which means I had to have all of this done by a certain date. When it came to this stage, I was at a critical point because I had to start promoting Lesson Learned before its release date and also have enough time to gather the data I needed in order to get any results. All I did was release a few messages through my IMWrites’ Instagram and TikTok accounts, as well as speak to my lecturer about announcing it to my university course (since it was meant to be a teaching tool, after all).
Those are the steps that I think are the most crucial to when writing a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure story. As I mentioned earlier, these steps do not have to come one after another. Take them in whichever order you want to and there is no pressure to do them all to completion. Which order you do those steps is up to you, or whether you follow it at all and want to try and do it your own way. Whichever way you decide, I hope it goes well.
​
At the top of the page and below the right of step 7 is a link to a PDF file for you to download and use whenever you wish.
Thank you for reading and (if you did) reading through Lesson Learned.
IMWrites