In choose your own adventure stories readers?

Answer 1

It is not too hard nor to easy to write a CYOA type book. If you don't map out your stories you may end up inadvertently sending a reader to a page that is already another choice somewhere in the book. What I mean is, if you are writing the story, you are obviously not going to write it like page 1,2,3 etc. You are going to write each path one at a time. If you have a choice to save the damsel in distress go to page 6, or run and leave the damsel to die turn to page 12. If these are your first choices in the story to make you will obviously choose to continue writing the path that "speaks" to you.

In that say you want to write the character saving the damsel, so you write page 6. No problem you may think. But if no mapping is done, later down the line after a few paths of story or so, you have another choice to make. It could go like this "Become a blacksmith turn to page 14 or choose to train to be a knight turn to page 12". Because you haven't written the path on the original choice to go to page 12 you inadvertently made a different story path that would take the reader to page 12 again, clashing with the other path you have yet to write.

I don't know if I am being vague here or not. But mapping is KEY to writing a choose your own adventure book. It should be simple and on a notebook page or two. The maps can be like family tree graphs or something similar. Page one of course is the starting point. Have arrows to the subsequent pages and choices.

For example have page one in the left middle corner of the paper. Have an arrow pointing to your page two (pages can be squares with numbers in them and have very breif descriptions under them) and if page two is the first set of choices have arrows pointing to say page 6 and 12 squares with what the choices are on the bottom of those squares.

I am not a good writer myself so this answer may not be the best but it is how I write them (I am also an unpublished writer so you will never see any of my CYOA books unless I actually solicite them). a little bit at least.