Peng Shepherd On Writing A Choose-You-Own-Adventure Speculative Mystery

THE AUTHOR Having just survived writing a speculative mystery novel that allows readers choose what happens at certain points in the story, when CrimReads asked me to write an essay about the experience in the same format, I felt: Terror Excitement * TERROR It’s already hard enough to write a book. But to write one in which there are multiple versions of the main character’s story, all of which make sense, and more importantly, all of which feel just as true, was a whole new beast entirely. What if I’ve bitten off more than I can chew? What if readers think it’s too weird? What if I fail? The writing of the manuscript really was like a microcosm for life. And this is the thing, both about writing and about life: one of the best parts is getting to make choices about what’s most important, because that’s how you define yourself as “you”—and one of the hardest parts is having to make choices about what’s most important, because you might get it wrong. And if you do, how do you live with that? Nostalgia No Good Options * NOSTALGIA Many of us are familiar with the children’s Choose Your Own Adventure series of books from our childhood, in which you start as a blank “You” canvas and are immediately launched into an outlandishly fun adventure in outer space or on the open seas or deep in some jungle. Why did we all love that series so much as kids? What was it about those paperbacks that could transport us somewhere else for entire afternoons at a time? My personal theory is that choice is exciting to children because at that age, you almost never get to make them. Most of your life is dictated by your parents or your teachers, and so any opportunity to exercise some autonomy, no matter how trivial, is thrilling. If you put on a blue shirt for bed, will the aliens invade Earth? If you have the granola instead of the chocolate puffs, will a portal open in your basement? But when you’re an […]

Click here to view original page at Peng Shepherd On Writing A Choose-You-Own-Adventure Speculative Mystery

© 2024, wcadmin. All rights reserved, Writers Critique, LLC Unless otherwise noted, all posts remain copyright of their respective authors.