Writing Experiments (Choose Your Own Adventure)?

Jurixe

Being in my new job (which is finance-related) made me realise that finance/investment is really not what I want to do for the rest of my life. This job is so much more tightly regulated and highly, obsessively structured that it depresses me being completely unable to do anything creative for the majority of my day. It occurred to me that I needed to motivate myself to continue writing in what little spare time I now have or my writing skills would rust worse than they are now, and so here we are.

I have a number of projects I've always sort of vaguely thought about doing, but never quite found the time to do, so here they are:

1) I've always really wanted to try writing a Choose Your Own Adventure story. I've never really tried to do a story with multiple possible endings before and the concept, while sounding difficult and time-consuming to make believable, also sounds incredibly interesting. I discovered inklewriter while researching possible tools to help me with this, and on the surface it looks like a really cool program, though I've yet to try it myself. A story written this way would require all possible endings of the story to be written before it can be published for people to read.

2) An 'audience input' story, which is basically a Choose Your Own Adventure story but the readers read each chapter as it gets published and basically determine, as a group, the direction the story will go in based on their choices. Readers would get to vote on their preferred narrative choice either by clicking on the forum reactions, or by sending me a message.

3) A collaborative story where the beginning and end is determined, and a number of writers collaborate to write the story out. Different writers would probably be responsible for different sections of the story, which could go either really horribly or really interesting depending on the skill level of the writers and their individual styles, but essentially the thread would be continued. Kind of like the history of the Seleucarian Empire, which had so many different writing techniques but in the end, to my knowledge, was only ever written by one person.

Now, I will only have time (if even that) to try and dedicate myself to one of the above projects in the near future. As these are all going to be Achaean stories, as it's what I love writing about most, I figured I would get opinions and see what people would be most interested in reading (since the audience would obviously be yourselves) and maybe that will help provide extra motivation. Primarily the idea is to try and get some sort of a routine going so I get to balance out honing creative skills and incredibly dry non-creative skills.

A few notes:

1. Out of options 1 and 2, option 1 will take far longer than option 2, but will probably be more cohesive overall since I'll have time to polish and refine before publishing. However, it means the reading experience is more or less solitary and you don't get to influence the creation of the story (which may or may not be a good thing. Bear in mind that I've never written a story in this style before and I'm not sure how good I'll be at this).

2. Option 2 would probably be an update once a week or once a fortnight, depending on how hardworking I am/how much time I have, and then you'd send me a message or vote for the option some other way. The option that receives the greatest number of votes (probably within three days) will be the one I will use. Of course, if I write the type of story that has dead ends, it means the story could end really early and you'll never figure out what might have been because I won't have written the rest of it out. I'll probably try to give each option at least a decent continuity, though.

3. If you'd be interested in being one of the collaborators for option 3, do send me a message and we can see if there are enough to try and work something out. Bear in mind that option 3 may have rather short deadlines - a week to two weeks, maybe, since you'd just be responsible for one chapter. I don't like things with too-long timelines because they stagnate and I lose interest very quickly after that.

I didn't make this a poll because the poll description box was too small and I couldn't see any of my text, which was majorly annoying. Anyway, to make things simple, you can either post below with your comments/vote or you can send me a message. I'm in favour of using the agree etc system to make it visually easier, but I guess that's open to abuse so maybe messages would be best. 

I have a few story ideas but which one I actually write will depend on what gets chosen, so you'll find out then. Regardless of whatever does get selected, try to be patient as it will most likely take some time to do! Links will likely be posted in a new topic when they are written. 

I'll take votes and suggestions for three days, ending Serenade on Wednesday, which means 00 on the 9th of April 2014. After that I'll count them and see which one got the most votes, and work from there!

I'm very tired now so goodnight.