[NSP] The Big Idea

Most everyone is familiar with the Choose Your Own Adventure story format. It’s an interesting type of interactive narrative, and one that’s introduced to children fairly early on in their reading careers as a way to make reading seem more playful to those kids who are choked by the rigidity of an immobile plot. CYOA books do not have a much greater audience, though, because they’re typically frowned upon after a reader hits a certain age. Whether this is due to writing quality or subject matter is beyond me.

Maybe there’s some hidden detractor in this type of writing that I’m missing. Does one lose a sense of attachment to the story if they know it could have gone a different way? Perhaps. And this is actually one reason why I’m going to eschew the typical CYOA format – short scenes with a limited number of choices – and crowdsource all of the narrative choices.

Here’s how we’ll do it:
We may create more than one story in the long run, but for now we will focus on one opening scene. An event, a thought, a character, a sound…there are many compelling ways to start a story, and that’s what I want you to do. Give me a list of elements, and I will craft the beginning to our tale. From then on, it’s up to you to lob possibilities my way. Then I will return to you with the next scene, hopefully giving credit to the comments that inspired my direction.

I will be trying to update this blog on a bit of a strange schedule: Saturday nights at midnight, Monday nights at nine or so, and Wednesday nights, also at nine (or so). This will give me a break at the beginning of the weekend and allow your ideas to develop and accumulate for a bit before the story picks up again. You can post ideas any time you’d like until the actual update is posted, but I probably won’t give as much weight to ideas that crop up once I’m three-quarters of the way through writing that post. Keep in mind that updates are subject to delays, and I may post updates early so that I might focus my energy on other matters in my life. A delay, though? That’s so depressing. Let’s focus on the fun…

Be creative! I have plenty of ideas as a storyteller, lots of which will be tested with this little project of ours, but combined, you all have FAR more ideas than I could ever come up with. I welcome the silly, the short, the lengthy, the arrogant, the unintelligible, and the corrosive, just as long as YOU think there is some merit to what you are suggesting.

So…[drumroll] without further ado…[more drumroll] please take a look at the next post!

Thanks,
M. Charles