Blackout: A Choose Your Own Adventure Story

Last time, I posted about starting to do our writing group's Holiday Project.  This year we came up with a Bingo Card filled with story elements. We each had to use a row, column, or diagonal's worth of story elements into our story.  Yesterday, after four weeks away, we all reconvened to present our writings.  It's always fun to see how eight people with different sensibilities tackle the same problem. Our group has a pretty strong sci-fi/fantasy bent, and the story prompt "A forgotten god who has gone into hiding" attracted four people to use it, two horizontally and two vertically.  The exercise was kind to people. Everyone submitted something at least solid, and mostly complete.

For my entry, I decided to go a little bit over the top. Here's a little hint how:

The aspect of the Bingo card that most struck me was that it represented different possibilities. We could choose one row or column, but that meant that there were twenty prompts that we weren't using. I pondered whether there was a way that I could use everything? After all, one of the ways to play Bingo was to play for filling all of the squares for a Blackout.

In the last meeting before our break, I came up with the concept.  Write a Choose Your Own Adventure tale which would branch off and use all of the squares.  That way the very disparate story elements (Space Station, Forgotten Gods, Antique Swords, Rotary Phones) could all coexist within the same book. I started with the "Free" square (which group members jokingly insisted meant "gay sex") and gave the traditionally second person main character a gender nonspecific significant other named Casey who are settling into a quiet night of relaxation and possibly sex in their Lower East Side apartment when the lights go out.

From there, I had to create one page scenes that could have decision points at the end of each page.  It became apparent that it was fairly easy to branch out.  You could follow every notion that you had in mind, having them become superheroes here, getting into a detective story in another branch, or veering into the supernatural there. I had fun setting up a few loops and pages that could be read in different ways as the plotlines converged. It was quite a lot of fun, up until you start wanting to wind down before the project got much too large for what it was meant be. I tied off four loose ends into an "I give up" page which I would have to replace if I returned to the piece.

Eventually I had to make a diagram to chart out the decision tree, and to make sure all of the elements were covered and that one column of the Bingo card was used in one contiguous story. Hearing the writing group reading it was a lot of fun, as people on different paths would react to different events with no way of knowing where they were at.

So here is the link to my Choose Your Own Adventure montage.  Have fun on your journey: Blackout