Let’s talk in more detail about the differen types of paths that you can use in your book. Since these stories aren’t a straight linear progression, you need to include choices for the reader. This makes it feel like they are in control of the story and its ultimate ending.

Once thing to be aware of is the balance of choices. You don’t want too many or too few in your story. The old Endless Quest Dungeon and Dragons had too few choices. It seemed like you would read for 5 pages before getting a choice and then after 2 or 3 choices you hit an end. Not much fun.

And if you have too many you can end up with a confusing snarled nest of paths that also isn’t fun, but also unmanageable.

The below are the main types of choices to give your readers.

A / B Choice

This is the most common. You read a bit and get to make a choice between 2 ways you want the story to go. Sometimes you might have 3 choices. Just keep in mind that you need to write the story and the paths, so be careful.

Straight

These aren’t as common, but help to get the reader to a certain page. I don’t like it when they are used just to move you to another page, especially if you get several in a row. That’s just a way to hide a whole lot of reading without choices. But if you give them a choice – A or B – where B leads to a certain spot and A lets them do something different. But you don’t want A to be an entire new path, so you they read a bit at A and then go straight to B, as if that was the choice they made originally.

Again, don’t use these too often, but they can help keep the amount of paths down.

Loop

This was used in the computer text adventures and most famously in Zork. In this, the one choice just leads right back to the spot the reader is at. This is easy to disguise in a computer game where the reader doesn’t actually see the choices, but harder to do in a book.

In Zork, you were in the forest. You can go East or West. If you chose East it told you that you are in a forest and you can go East or West. If you chose East, it told you that you are in a forest … get the picture? A cheesy way to extend the perception of different areas.

Dependent

These aren’t so much choices as one thing affects something later. More common in the style of story where you have a character and an inventory. Maybe you need a particular item to get past a certain point. If you don’t have that item in inventory, you can’t make the choice that includes that item (as long as you’re not cheating.)

I talk about these different options in the video below.

Paths

The below picture is from the back of a modern Choose Your Own adventure book. It shows all the different paths and choices in the story as a flow chart. The circles are choices and the squares are ends. An arrow indicates the story continues. The dashed lines reroute the reader from one path to another path – like the straight choice above.

 You can study this picture to see how they put the story together. While reading the story, you can follow along to see all the choices in the story.