The latest chapter of Loyalty Fallen Book 2: The Desert Crossing is now live. For new readers, Loyalty Fallen is a four-book fantasy series covering the story of a princess who is accused of her husband’s murder on her wedding night. Head over to read the latest chapter, or start at the beginning and get caught up.

For today’s blog post, I’ve decided to give a tutorial on one of my favorite topics, which is creating interactive fiction. While there are many types of software available for this purpose, I’ll primarily focus on three free options that I’ve taken a look at. If you’re not familiar with interactive fiction, read on to learn if it’s something you might be interested in pursuing.

What is interactive fiction?

Interactive fiction is simply stories that put you in the driver’s seat. You get to decide what happens next.

Some of us remember the days of “Choose Your Own Adventure” books. In those books, you acted as a character that followed a certain script up to the point you were allowed to make a choice. That choice could kill you instantly, or it could turn the story in a completely unexpected direction. You’d flip to a completely different part of the book and keep reading from there, and you would spend a lot of time exploring different paths and trying not to die. These books are what is known as interactive fiction: stories where you get to choose the direction.

Having a physical book in the form of this kind of interactive fiction is very challenging. It’s hard to keep track of choices, pages, and story routes. Fortunately, there are online tools designed specifically to make it easy to create digital interactive fiction. You may have played visual novels, which often allow for a degree of interactivity but are limited by the fact that each outcome requires its own artwork and often, extensive coding.

In contrast, standard interactive fiction is often completely text-based. There may be a couple images, but the focus is on the story, and there may be dozens of different routes. Interactive fiction may require some coding, but increasingly many websites offer free tools to both create and share stories with zero coding required. These are the sites we’ll look at later.

Is your story right for interactive fiction?

You may wonder, how do you know if your idea is best suited to interactive fiction or to a standard novel or short story format? There are a couple factors to keep in mind.

1. How long is your story? Writing interactive fiction takes a lot longer than writing a standard novel. If you’re working with a long, complex story, you’ll have to consider whether you have the time to actually complete it.
2. Do you want to have multiple points-of-view? Having multiple POVs will again make your story much more complex. Interactive fiction is usually best suited to one or two POVs.
3. Are there multiple ways your story could go? I don’t know about you, but for me, I often have a very clear idea of exactly how my story will go, and it wouldn’t make sense for it to go any other way. But there are other stories that I think, “This could end in tragedy if my character makes a mistake here, or it could end completely differently if they earn this person’s trust,” for example. Those are the stories that have potential for interactivity.
4. Are you willing to take the time and effort to finish? Few people are willing to play through an incomplete story. While there are serialized novels that manage to do this just fine, plus you can release your story in parts, I think it’s always worthwhile to consider if you may have a big life change coming that could prevent you from finishing. If you’re about to start college soon, for example, it might not be the best time to start writing interactive fiction.

All in all, writing interactive fiction isn’t for everyone. It’s time-consuming and requires a ton of effort, but if you’re willing to go to the trouble, you can make something truly awesome.

Where can you write interactive fiction?

I didn’t dive that deep into most sites for writing interactive fiction, usually because I didn’t want to do a lot of coding or I became frustrated by a difficult interface. Still, there are three primary sites that I looked at. Note that all three are available completely for free.

1. Choose Your Story

Chooseyourstory.com was the first site that I discovered after a friend told me she was using it to create interactive fiction. My initial impression of the site was that it looks outdated and rather simplistic. On the plus side, however, there’s a pretty strong community on the site, so you’re more likely to get your story noticed here than on some others. The interface was rather challenging to use for me and not intuitive at all, but it may be very different for others. Several people seem to be using it quite successfully.

2. Twine

Twine is apparently a very well-known resource for creating interactive fiction. I found the interface here somewhat more challenging than others, and it ultimately didn’t fit what I was looking for. It requires bit higher level of technical capabilities, though I would say it’s not terribly difficult once you get used to the interface.

Like the other options mentioned here, it’s completely free, and there’s a wide user base. There’s a forum on the site you can join, or you can head over to the subreddit r/twinegames to connect with other writers and chat about your story. The subreddit has over 11,000 members, so it shouldn’t be too difficult to get advice and help as needed.

3. Inkle

This is my personal top choice. Although it doesn’t seem to have the same level of community as Choose Your Story, Inkle has a simple, easy-to-use interface that doesn’t require any coding knowledge. It also allows you to easily add images and to create conditional statements. In other words, you can effectively say “if the user chose X three choices ago, then go in this direction.” The tutorial is also very easy to understand, and in general I just find it remarkably simple to get started with.

Note that the Inkle subreddit has only about 500 members, so it’s currently not as well-known as the other options on this list. If you really want a community to work alongside, this may not be the choice for you. However, you can share your story with anyone with just a link, so they don’t even have to log into the site to interact with it. This means the barrier for entry for sharing your story with others is very low, and you can share through a subreddit like r/interactive fiction or on a personal website.

If you want to see what a story in progress looks like, take a look at Crystalline Fracture.

Final thoughts

If you’re interested in exploring interactive fiction, Inkle would probably be the easiest place to start. Comment below if you’ve used any of these options before and tell me about your story. I’d love to read it.

In the meantime, enjoy Loyalty Fallen! While book two is nearing its end with just four chapters to go, and I will soon be taking a hiatus to prepare new chapters, I will continue to publish blog posts whenever possible, so subscribe to get notified when I upload. I hope to see you then!