Jon Ray's Blog: The Writer's Tower - Posts Tagged "cyoa"

When I was a kid there was the Scholastic Book Fair that came to my school's library once each school year. For me it was once of my happiest childhood memories. It also happened to be where per chance I discovered my first Choose Your Own Adventure book. I was amazed the first time I read one, as it felt like I was playing a computer game in my mind. There was a narrative, but I got to make choices that decided the outcome of that narrative. I finished the book, re-read it a few time for different outcomes and couldn't wait to find my next CYOA book. Eventually, I came across the "Wizard, Warrior, & You" series and being a huge fan of fantasy, I took to the series like a fish to water. These books were a bit more evolved into what are called gamebooks, but the center concept of CYOA was still there.

Recently, with the publishing of my first fantasy novel "[Gorp: Goblin Janitor]" the writing bug bit me again. Harking back to my days of youth, the urge to create my own CYOA series is just too great and I feel now is the time to embark on this endeavour. As of this week I have started work on the series which I have titled, "Agrobathe Adventures". Agrobathe is a fantasy world I created years ago and spent some great length in developing. Unfortunately, after a few server and hosting moves, I lost all of the personal Wiki data I used to create and flesh out the world. I do however still have all the maps and a few drawings of the creatures of the world. I also have some of the remnants within my head and like the phoenix, am rebuilding the world of Agrobathe from memory to set as a rich backdrop to my CYOA books.

The first thing I've done is research everything I can get my hands on for writing and designing a CYOA adventure books, surprisingly this is still a somewhat popular genre, but not too many good resource our at there to guide you. Most are geared towards computer game programming or selling a finished product already on the market. However, I did happen to come across a fellow GoodReads author who had some of the best information on writing your own CYOA I've found yet. If you're like me and this is something you'd like to do as well, I highly recommend Karen Woodward's How To Write A Create Your Own Adventure Story. In the coming days, I'll be blogging more about my process in how I came to create this wonder knows as the Choose Your Own Adventure book.

In continuation of my new Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) book series, this week I've tackled the job of world-building and map-making. Agrobathe, is a fantasy world I've been working on for a few years now. Unfortunately, my database backup was corrupted and I lost all the details of my world, but I still have the images, so that is where I'm starting all over again. As, the CYOA books will all take place within the world of Agrobathe, I am building a world foundation before I ever write the first book, however, I have designed the first book and typed out the first few pages, but nothing story wise.

To create the map above, I'm using a CAD program called Campaign Cartographer 3 by ProFantasy. Being a CAD program and having a multimedia background I thought it would easy, but I'm slowly learned that CAD systems are quite different than Photoshop. Other than the slight learning curve, this has been a great program and has some very nifty map-making features.

Work wise, I've traced all the landmass and islands from an older image and added in mountains, forests, lakes, and rivers. With that complete, I'm now in the process of adding towns, castles, roads, and map labels on the map. My writing style may lend itself to having a background in Dungeons & Dragons, where maps were essential to the one running the game. For my CYOA book, I need a world map to root my foundation in the story world. Once I have the world map completed, I'll know of all the major cities, cultures, and landscapes. For my first book I then plan to create another town map for the starting area where the reader starts off. Having a map gives me a better mental picture of the character as they move through time and space within the world. It gives me a strong anchor and also helps with continuity throughout all the books. For me, maps are like storyboards are to a director as they prepare to shoot a film. Once I have the basics of a place to start, I'll flesh out the area more along with my writing. At that point it will be mostly giving all the locations and buildings names and the character who inhabit them. I'm stoked about this series and really can not wait until the map making process is over.

It's been awhile since my last blog, but I've been working on my new fantasy based Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) series. I've added more to my over world map and detailed the continent mostly populated by humans as that is where most of my beginning stories will start. As for the book itself, the writing has been very slow, but there is a ton of prep work when creating a new series. I've started a Series Bible, which is a very big and long Word Doc with chapters about my world as well as rules and guidelines I will follow for each of the books for continuity purposes.

One of the most frustrating topics that has alluded me thus far on my quest is how to actually construct a CYOA story. Yes, you write like any novel, you come to a point where the narrative is interactive through reader choice, but what then? No where online have I really found a set of instructions on how to write the stories out. So I'm forced to re-invent the wheel so to say and create my own method. My plan at the moment is write the story out until I come to a reader choice. From there I will create Node numbers for each of the choices (1A, 1B, 1C, 1D...2A, 2B..etc.) Each fork in the story will have a unique number and each choice within that fork will have a letter. I'll then skip down in the document to those choices with a page break between them and continue writing. Each new fork in the story will mean a new number regardless where in the tree it branches. In writing this, it does seem messy, but I will be writing all of this in a separate document and when it comes time to format the actual manuscript for the book, it will be a copy & paste job into all 400 blank entries I have already listed. Once I have a system in place, the next book should run a lot more smoothly and I'm going to need it with for the original 9 books I have planned for this series.