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Meaningful Choices

Today's offering on the theme "What It's Like to Write an Interactive Like This and How Much Trouble Do I Get Into While I'm Writing It" is on the topic of endings. More specifically (since very few of the threads in this interactive have actual endings) it's about the kind of choices that are used to end a chapter.

I like to offer choices that are significant, to use a word that is a little vaguer and (paradoxically) for that reason more precise than "meaningful." The best choices are the ones that are significant to the psychology and development of the character. So Andrew has the chance to steal some money that he can use to treat his crush to a fancy meal in an expensive restaurant. Does he take it? Or does he leave it, and content himself with trying to make the bargain burger meal at McDonalds look good? Or, to take a more famous example: Peter Parker has a chance to use his Spidey-powers to stop a fleeing criminal. Does he do the responsible thing, or does he let the guy run past because, meh, he's an entertainer, not a cop. Of course, character is destiny, so character choices will flip the plot in one direction or another. But emotionally we become invested in the character who has made the choices, not the story that results from them.

That's not always possible, though, so failing that kind of significance, I try for plot significance -- choices that send the story careening down one boulevard rather than another. That's usually not very hard to arrange.

But sometimes nothing seems to work. Today's chapter -- "Invalid Item"  (public) / "A Magical Motel Mugging"  -- is a case in point. That's the third set of choices I have tried using to climax it.

When I started writing it, I had one idea for the kind of choice it would climax in. But I reached that point and found that I was nowhere near setting that choice up; and besides, I found myself writing away from that choice so that it wouldn't even make sense as a choice. So I stuck a "Continue" onto it, wrote a Part 2, and wrote my way to a different choice. But when I reread the chapters before publishing them, I just didn't like the pacing or the psychology that was on display. It was all too quick.

So here I am sticking a third choice onto what had been a "Part 1" (and no longer is) with no real sense of what that choice's significance is. If it points toward character development, the choices will take a very long time before the divergence shows up. And I think it will only create a trivial difference to the plotting.

Complicating things is a plot twist that looms on the horizon. Long-time readers who know the signs will understand exactly what is coming. Or what is threatening to come. I'm not sure it will happen, though. It will depend on (a) the choices you guys make and (b) how I write those choices. It's possible that that plot twist might be diverted, subverted, or indefinitely delayed. But the fact that it's out there threatens to render any and all plot or character choices futile. It's like setting a love story at Pearl Harbor in December of 1941.