Your first step is to select some story that you are particularly fond of. Sorry, basic principles of taste forbid anything with dragons, wizards, magic, space battles, or young men out to prove themselves. If that’s all you’ve got, you’re not ready for any kind of storytelling.
Your goal here is not to replicate some great story, but to be inspired by such a story. You want to select a story for its fundamental underlying principle. For example, you could pick Huckleberry Finn as a piece on human iniquity, or A Farewell to Arms for its tragedy of war and love. Yes, you could pick something from the Arthurian legends for almost any theme — these legends have been the source for basic hack-and-slash (Le Morte D’Arthur), social satire (Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court), kiddie cartoon (The Sword in the Stone), Broadway romance (Camelot), feminism (Mists of Avalon), romantic tragedy (Excalibur) and many others. Just don’t you dare put any light sabres or TIE fighters in there!
The Iliad makes good source material for “pride comes before the fall”. The end of The Odyssey is a sharp piece on loyalty and revenge. Shakespeare’s stories are some of the best in the world, but they can become terribly complicated. Hamlet is to storytelling as Java is to programming languages. Macbeth, on the other hand, is a good start for unbounded ambition.
Forget Dickens; I hate him. Jane Austen’s stuff is brilliant but might be too deep for a beginner.
You would do best to take your inspiration from one of the many excellent movies out there. That form keeps the storytelling tight, and there are so many great classics: City Lights, Citizen Kane, The Godfather, and yes, even 2001: A Space Odyssey. Blade Runner, Bridge on the River Kwai, Pan’s Labyrinth, and Seven Samurai, for example. But there are quite a few lesser movies that would make great material for an interactive treatment: Stage Beauty, Brave, Maleficent, District 9, the Age of Adaline.
And if anybody ever figures out how to make an interactive Koyaanisqatsi, they deserve to be canonized.
Once you’ve got your inspiration, your next step is to decide upon the meaning you wish to convey. For the last forty years, movies have been evolving into mere spectacles. Look past the CGI to see the true content of the story. What do you have to say to the world? If you’re just looking to make a cool story, then you’re not ready. Give yourself a few decades to mature before trying again.
Having settled upon your message, you must then identify a set of endings that communicate the message in both the positive and the negative sense. Remember: the shadow defines the light. You want endings that show how a player who grasps your meaning reaches a satisfying conclusion, and a player who just doesn’t get it reaches an unhappy conclusion. But don’t define the quality of the outcome in terms of the classic comedy (story with a happy ending). A heroic and noble death can be a better conclusion than a mediocre life ending in obscurity.
An aside: there are plenty of great movies that have powerful messages but do not lend themselves to interactive treatment. All Quiet on The Western Front is such a movie. What’s he going to do other than die? Go home, fall in love, get married, and have a bunch of children? Titanic is another one; there are only four possible endings: nobody dies, he dies, she dies, or they both die. Where’s the meaning in that? You need a dramatic situation that could end in multiple ways.
At this point you’ve got the basic structure of your storyworld nailed down. Now it’s time to define your global variables. These are crucial; at the end of the story, you’ll have a calculation like this:
Outcome = some function of (global #1, global #2, global #3)
followed by something like this:
If (Outcome > 10) then Triumphal Ending
If ((Outcome > 0) AND (Outcome < 10) then Mediocre Ending
If (Outcome < 0) then Fall Into Sewage Pit
In writing the individual encounters, recognize that you’ll have three broad types of encounters:
Context-setting encounters
These do not challenge the player with any choices. Their purpose is to present the player with information about the dramatic situation. This, for example, would not be a good encounter to launch the story with:
The clock ticks down: ten, nine, eight… Roland pulls at his hair and screams “Push the button! Push the button!” You hesitate, thinking of all those lives.
I push the button
I don’t push the button
You’ll need a lot of context-setting encounters in the early portions of the storyworld.
Choice-making encounters
These are the meat of the storyworld, in which the player makes decisions that determine the outcome. Remember, we have more than one bit of data to play with here, so use some arithmetic, not boolean variables. Let the player slowly define exactly who they are through a great many decisions that affect the global variables. It’s especially useful to set up situations in which the player must weigh two variables against each other. In Le Morte D’Arthur, I wrote a great many encounters in which Arthur had to choose between being a nice guy (taking the choice that would increase people’s affection for him) and being a respectable leader (taking the choice that would increase their respect for him).
Tree encounters
These are encounters that lead to branching out. These have definite value, but you’ll probably overdo it with the tree encounters. You are NOT seeking to expose the player to many different experiences; your goal is to put the player in dramatic situations that pose different conundrums.
A good storyworld will have a bare minimum of a hundred encounters. Le Morte D’Arthur has 360 encounters, and many people complain that it’s too long. My guess is that these complaints stem from expectations created by videogames, and that once interactive storytelling has established itself as a medium, we’ll see storyworlds with more encounters. For now, aim for something between a hundred and two hundred encounters.
How will you come up with so many encounters? At the outset the task daunts. With conventional storytelling, you have a clear conception of the basic structure:
Once upon a time, something happened.
And then something else happened.
Which caused something else to happen.
Then something new happened.
etc.
But you don’t even have this conceptualization with interactive storytelling. Here’s where you fall back on the story that inspired this storyworld. You can follow something vaguely similar to the original story, but you must deviate from the original in order to provide the dramatic uncertainty that will force hard choices on the player. A good storyteller creates a linear sequence in which each step in the story seems almost inevitable. “Well, OF COURSE Luke Skywalker went along with Obi-Wan Kenobi to Mos Eisely spaceport — the imperial stormtroopers had killed his uncle and aunt. What else was he to do? And OF COURSE he jumped into the trash masher on the Death Star — he was trapped in the prison area. What else was he to do?”
You want to follow the basic storyline, but embellish it with tantalizing twists. Yes, the Imperial stormtroopers did kill Uncle Owen, but Aunt Beru managed to hide from them and survived. You could set up a small tree in which Luke abandons her, or decides to stay with her, but she sends him off with Obi-Wan anyway.
Don’t be too disciplined in writing encounters. Let them sprout naturally in your mind. You’ll go some days without writing any encounters, because your creative well ran dry. But then you’ll get a new idea. Sometimes new ideas will come from your daily experiences. Some of the encounters in Le Morte D’Arthur were directly inspired by mundane personal experiences. The kid crying in the ice cream shop because he spilled his ice cream might not seem interesting, but with a few changes, it can be the inspiration for a good encounter.