Writers: How do you determine if a story should be a novel or IF?

Authoring General Design Discussions
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I do realize that some of you may be exclusively game writers or IF writers, but I was wondering if anyone else ever finds themselves in this predicament?

My first and only submission to this competition (as of right now) was expanded from a short story. The reason I thought it would make a potentially great IF is because I thought it would do really well as a choice-based narrative with multiple endings. I had a really hard time coming up with an ending that wasn’t too ambiguous when it was a short story, and I thought I’d expand it to see where I could take it. The game might not be perfect, but ultimately, I really like it as a game vs. a short story.

Now, here’s my question — do you have projects that just make sense as IF vs a novel or a short story or another narrative format? I have a few ideas for novels that I’m tossing around right now, and one I’ve actually started, but then I wonder if it would make better IF.

I suppose a lot of this comes down to preference. Personally, I have stories that I want to tell in full, and there are other stories I want to hand over to readers and let them make choices.

I also realize there may be goals regarding publication. Do you want to see your story as a book, being sold in stores? Do you dream of self-publication? Or do you want to see it on Steam or another platform? Does the end goal also factor into your decision?

What about everyone else? Are there ideas that call to you as IF? As novels? Are there ideas that you’re unsure about? Do you dream up separate ideas for IF and separate ideas for novels or short fiction? Or something else? I’m interested to hear about how everyone approaches their story formats!

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Mostly my ideas for static fiction and IF are separate; I conceive of things as one or the other from the start. A lot of my IF ideas start as a concept relating to the interaction mechanics and then I think about what kind of story I could use that kind of mechanic to tell, rather than me coming up with an idea for a narrative and then deciding if it should be interactive or not.

That said, I do have two IF works that started out as (never-finished) short stories: Wedding Day and Die Another Day. They were both made for an event with a very tight time limit on development, and I think in both cases a lot of the motivation for repurposing an abandoned short story idea was that it was something I’d rotated in my mind a lot already and that would help to write it more quickly. (Although, to be clear, I wrote the IF versions without using any text from the original versions and in fact without even rereading the partial drafts, which were in both cases at least a couple years old when I did the IF version.) I don’t know if I had any sense of why I thought they’d work better as IF; it was just sort of an instinct.

To be honest, though, in recent years I’ve been really neglecting working on any static fiction ideas, because the immediate feedback I get from this community when releasing IF is so gratifying (even though it’s not always that positive!). I don’t write the kind of static fiction that would get a following on Wattpad or Royal Road or whatever (for starters, that leans towards extremely long serialized fiction with a regular update schedule and that is not so much my style), so I’m never going to get that kind of immediate response to it.

I would love to be published someday, but the way that publishers expect you to be your own social media marketing team and have been building your brand for years before you try to publish anything makes me think that it is wildly unlikely to ever happen, which also makes me feel less motivated to work on anything that might be theoretically publishable.

I feel sort of vaguely guilty about all this, but I guess if the odds of my work being published were vanishingly small to begin with, there’s nothing wrong with focusing on stuff that I can be pretty sure people other than me will eventually read.

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I appreciate this thread topic! :heart:

As someone who arrived (recently) to IF from the perspective of being a fiction writer, I think mostly I’ve just found the IF medium helpful for getting unstuck. I hadn’t written anything for years, but the options opened up by Twine have been giving me a sense of vitality and interest in making things that linear manuscripts hadn’t been lately.

Based on what I write, I don’t expect to ever earn money from IF (or, at this point honestly, static fiction, I’ve pretty much given up on getting anywhere career-wise).

So setting that concern aside, since I write IF projects that are not very game-like (it’s not a big deal really, but I kind of object to IFComp automatically labeling all its submissions as “games”), my main factors are story-focused. Here’s some ideas off the top of my head.

(1) Structure: While it’s true that there are a lot of cool things that you can do with a linear manuscript, the structural options IF offers in terms of branching, randomization, and so on really lend themselves well to stories that feel like they are in tension with a linear manuscript. Stories with cyclical elements (like time loops) can really work well in IF.

(2) Themes: Deciding when to restrict or allow agency to the reader can be really thematically rich, if you want it to be. So stories with themes centering around authority, resistance, or having meta/fourth-wall-bendy elements might find comfort as IF projects. There are other thematic reasons to write (or not write) IF, of course, so I guess I would just ask whether interactivity could enhance or detract from the meaning of what you want to write. Sometimes, branching and having many different endings can dilute the impact of what you wrote, rather than intensifying it.

(3) Presentation: While this is also true in self-publishing, I guess, usurping 100% editorial control not only of the text content but also the visual design in IF is really interesting to me. In Harlowe (the Twine format I use), it provides basically nothing in its default presentation, so I had to decide what everything looked like. This caused me to approach projects way differently, because I could introduce and play with visual art aspects that I never really felt like I had access to before. Maybe this is a bit abstract, but if you feel like your story would benefit from looking a certain way, IF seems very amenable to that. You can also have kinetic/timed elements in your presentation, which opens up some interesting options.

Oh, one other thing: this isn’t something I’ve ever done or been interested in (so far), but IF also allows for character customization (like Choice-of-Games-style projects), if you want to explore different possibilities for who the central character of a narrative could be and how that would affect the story’s outcomes, that would be a good fit for the medium I think.

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Several of my IF works have been adaptations of my published static fiction; I liked the idea of exploring alternate possibilities with those characters/storylines, and really enjoyed the process of doing so through adapting them to IF. Another one was an adaptation of a short screenplay I wrote—I had shelved it because, while I was happy with it, there was no hope of it ever being produced or published in any way, but it ended up working out great as an IF piece!

Besides those examples, my other IF has typically come about because I was specifically brainstorming ideas for IF works. E.g., I wanted to write something spooky for Ectocomp (which runs every October), so I thought about potential spooky IF stories.

This has been my experience too—I haven’t touched most of my static fiction projects since I got involved with the IF scene 2.5 years ago. :sweat_smile: These days, when I have new fiction ideas, they pretty must just tend to be IF ones.

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Back in my school days, I used to joke that writing poetry was an incredible hassle and that if there were a better way to say what I wished, I would have chosen that other, better way.

My specialization was poetry.

When I dropped out of graduate school, I decided to write a YA novel about a young man struggling with mental health and a fish-out-of-water demon woman who needed to save the world from a dangerous occult organization/health insurance company.

I was about, oh, three hundred typed pages in when my mother died. We had unfinished business, which I guess is true for a lot of people in families.

I set it aside for a while. It just kind of felt silly and lightweight. There’s nothing wrong with that. In fact, I prefer that sort of fare, but I couldn’t write that story anymore.

A year later, when I had begun to learn Inform, I came back to it, and I made a game about making games and parents and mental illness. And magic. I say it’s a “game” with my whole chest. Whether its tale is told in full is up to the player. There are a least two full stories there, but I don’t try to make players read them. It’s their call. I think telling stories in games requires a lot of trust. What will readers do with their freedom?

So the serious version was the game, not the novel.

When I make games, I think specifically about the interaction. I have it there because it’s integral to the experience I’m trying to create. This is really just a way of thinking about audience. Reading a static text is another, equally worthwhile way to experience text. But what am I trying to create? When I undertake a project, I’m thinking about the way I want to connect with readers, and the way I would like them to connect with me.

I wrote a poetry collection in Inform not too long ago. From the ground up, it was written to be an interactive experience. It is poetry, of that I’m sure, but it is also heavily gamified with a whole lot of state tracking. My take from that is that poetry is a fine sort of game, so long as readers are willing to accept that. I could have chopped it up into standalone poems, and that would have worked fine. It might have even found a more enthusiastic audience! But I envisioned it as an interactive widget that was, at least in part, about choosing.

I do have another novel idea I’d like to go back to someday. Something that would not work as a game. I have that interest, but it’s something I see as fitted to a specific story. I’ll do it when it feels right.

This is a bit of a ramble; no game that I have made would make a good novel. No story that I’ve written would make a good game. I am not speaking for anyone else; we all have our own ways of making things! But the audience is always on my mind. I see myself as making an experience for someone, and I try to imagine that experience at the very beginning of things.

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Maybe since I came back to IF big time (2010), I’ve had periods where I’m thinking about the next story experience I might do, and trying to decide the best venue for it out of a novel, parser game and choice-based game.

I guess I discovered I most wanted to do a big parser game. My ‘actress game’ idea wouldn’t have worked that way, it was one of the other two, so the result was I set it aside.

My sci-fi WIP is satisfying my desire to create a big parser game while being sufficiently novel-like that it satisfies that dimension, too.

It does seem a lot of people who get heavily involved in IF stay here. Factors include wanting to build on what you’ve done in IF previously, and the fact you’ve got full control of the work.

If you think of the world of traditional publishing, and all the time spent there pitching, agent-seeking, market-vetting, lucking into the right timing, etc., for a novel you might write, IF is certainly an appealing alternative. There’s greater certainty, it is possible to turn things around quickly (my game, started in 2019 but not worked on solidly ‘til I Kickstarted in 2022, may be evidence against that, but a truly high-cost parser game is high-cost in time) and you retain creative control.

So there may be lower eyeballs on the result… but they’re also probably more guaranteed eyeballs. Obviously there’s no comparison to if you wrote a novel that was a commercial success, but most will not be, and they have to even make it to the ring first.

You may be someone who most assuredly wants to write a novel, in which case you’ll pursue that and the nature of the battle will be irrelevant. The same can be said about making certain kinds of IF. I’d say it about making what I’m making. It requires a massive amount of time. Nobody I’m related to or real life friends really understand me spending years on this one thing. But it’s precisely what I want to do.

-Wade

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I’m not really a kinetic fiction guy - as in, reading them is great but 9 times out of 10 I feel like they would work just as well as short stories. But, you know, there’s always that one that makes incredible use of the format, and I just think “This couldn’t have been done any other way.” And that’s the difference. With other styles of IF it’s easier to clearly separate the game ones from the novel ones.

Ultimately, for me, it’s interactivity. House of Leaves could be an IF game, but a lot of its power is how it clings to the page using essay style writing and its weird formats to make a story compelling, not how interactive or branching it is; and I think that the fact that it was made as a static text with an essay as it main idea is what makes it so cool.

I’m currently editing a book written by someone I know, and it’s clear to me it’s not really a game. But I’m fine with that, it just kinda … works better that way. (It could be turned into a musical but that’s another thing I’m working on, lol.)

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I sometimes get asked why I even bother with doing IF if it’s all linear anyway and honestly, I can see the point in that question. Why do I bother with learning new programs and new ways to code when I could just chuck it all into a google doc or publish somewhere and just be done with it?

Main reasons why I tarnish the good name of interactive fiction with my wildly uninteractive stuff:

  1. Control. Have you ever read a book and your gaze wandered to the paragraph below? This doesn’t happen in IF because I can show you just a paragraph or two at the time. You can’t accidentally spoil the story for yourself by getting a little careless with where you look. It’s also pretty good for people who can’t focus on long pieces of text for one reason or another.
  2. Even optionless “choices” can serve a purpose. I use them as just another piece of dialogue in some of my works and sometimes, it’s more about what you click instead of where it leads you (or doesn’t lead you; the loop ending of the train will always pass you by, anyone?)
  3. I can’t take the same shortcuts with a novel. This will probably sound bad but… I’m aphantasiac, my mind’s eye is legally blind, I don’t see things that I’m describing in my head, and I genuinely think that IF is a more lenient medium when it comes to not describing things in detail. In case of my Decker and Ren’py works, I can help myself with visuals and nobody will get hurt.
  4. Most of my works aren’t even novelettes, let alone novels. Some ideas are best as short explorations. I think writing 50k words of continuous text with things like the Primary Lights trilogy or take me to the lakes where all the poets went to die would be torture.
  5. Most importantly: IF is just more fun to make for me. More possibilities to play with. More avenues to take.
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I really like the moment-to-moment part of writing (descriptions, vignettes), but I’m not so great at or interested in the big, structural “storytelling” aspects of writing (plot, characters, etc.), so in some ways writing for games is ideal specifically when it lets me write little scenery descriptions and snippets, while the game mechanics & progression provide the overall narrative structure. If I have a “game idea” that I realize doesn’t really have a clear mechanical structure to it, I frequently end up thinking “why is this a game and not a short story?” and then usually end up abandoning it.

I used to write more poetry and short stories, but haven’t been doing that so much lately, and I think that is heavily based on the communities & opportunities for feedback that I have access to. I used to participate in a forum with a lot of active writers, and wrote a lot during that time. Now I participate in game dev communities instead, and have followers on Itch and so on.

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In my case I’m writing a novel that is also IF! I realised a while ago that I tend to start stories by figuring out the structure. So it will be IF if I come up with a mechanic that lends itself to that. My ShuffleComp pieces The End of the Line and The Line in the Sand could have been short story collections (indeed, the former was once going to be), but making them into software is just a more natural fit. Plus, while originality isn’t a be-all-end-all, it feels much easier to explore new ways of interacting with text in IF than it is to find anything that hasn’t been done with a novel.

I used to write a lot of short stories and flash fiction. My IF piece Sleepless in the Sapphire City was based on one of these. I basically had an atmosphere, and it only really came together once I made it a nonlinear verse piece and realised the main character should be a vampire. I also put together a database fiction piece called CAUSE&EFFECT which compiled a tonne of these flash fiction pieces into an engine with several different ways to explore them, which turned them from a bunch of unfinished scraps sitting on my hard drive into a complete (maybe) interesting project. In both cases these stories would likely not have gone anywhere if they remained in linear life, and I’m getting ideas for more adaptations in the future as I come up with suitable mechanics.

I agree with what others have said about publishing and presentation being important reasons when choosing IF. The cycle of unjuried IF jams where you can get inspired from a theme/other submissions and submit whatever you like and likely get a few eyes on your work is much more compelling for creative work than the prospect of getting back into writing linear prose short stories and dealing with the ordeal of crafting something to submit to magazines and hoping to get paid and getting rejected etc. And having total control over the presentation and stucture is also important, even in the most linear IF. Sleepless would read very differently in plain black-on-white print on paper, I feel. I was thinking recently whether IF is actually more similar in form to comic books than prose novels because of this frame-by-frame control. There’s also the aspect of mystery and secrets, as the audience doesn’t always know the full extent of the story as they would with a block of text. All of these can be used effectively or not, of course.

Thinking about it more, it’s also the community aspect. Linear prose as it is now seems a very lonely and isolating process. You interact with gatekeeping publishers or with strangers on social media you’re trying to sell or with other authors you’re inclined to see as competitors… Here we often play all three roles in various ways, so we’re all in a mess together talking about it all, and it’s just much more conducive to making interesting work and not getting fed up with the world. These are things we desperately need in this day and age!

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I tend to write more gameplay-focused IF, and many of my ideas for that start with the concept for a puzzle or a mechanic, so it’s generally pretty obvious which is which. The main exception was my first game, which started as an idea for static fiction (though it never got beyond the “rotating it in my mind” stage). In that case turning it into IF made sense—it was a premise that involved exploring a specific space, and involving the reader directly in that exploration strengthened the story.

I think for me ideas for static fiction are more, well, static. If I have a clear image of what’s going to happen in what order and how the characters are going to feel about it, then it’s not a good fit for IF. To me IF is more about creating a space that someone else can explore. Even if there’s only one way forward, the option to look around, try different things, and figure out what to do is important to the story. So it’s really a question of which story works for that.

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Personally, I think that KN has potentiality beyond mere static fiction; admittely I spectacularly failed in delivering back then (First Contact), but allowing player the choice of “reading the footnotes” or “looking at details” can give both a more immersive narrative, esp. in science-fiction or fantasy stories
(e.g. clicking on the name of the tech (SF) or magical (fantasy) gizmo gives what is, what it does and why is here; I’m sure that many people rereading a SF/fantasy novel skips the paragraph where the engineer (SF) or magician(fantasy) explain to the MC the gizmo for the benefit of the reader…)

In practical words, I think that tools like Harlowe’s link-reveal or chapbook’s (which is designed for KN…) reveal link has huge potential for delivering powerful and/or immersive narrative.

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

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Thanks for sharing your short-stories-turned-IF! I resonate so hard with some of your points here about publication and about the IF community. I was simply an IF lurker last year, and now that I’ve finished one game, I can already feel the warm embrace of the community. And yes, this includes the criticisms I’ve already been getting for my first submission to the competition, lol, but for a first game, I have to welcome it.

I also get feeling guilty – I have multiple projects/ideas/dreams happening in rotation at all times. So right now, I have a novel idea, I have a new game idea for IF (that will be a huge undertaking and learning curve), and an ambitious dream to learn a little bit more of the development side – and it’s hard to figure out where to put my attention, but the IF is really calling to me right now!

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I appreciate all the thoughtful responses! :slightly_smiling_face: But I’m with you there, my IF so far is much more story-oriented than “game” oriented, although I suppose you could argue that anything playable is a “game.”

I’m looking at some of my older stories right now and looking at stories that I’ve had a really difficult time ending for one reason or another, and I’m asking myself, “what if I let the reader pick the end, instead? How would that change the story?”

I actually wrote a paper for grad school about ambiguity in short stories and how often stories with ambiguity hand a large amount of control to the reader to interpret the ambiguity however they see fit. They might read a symbol one way, someone else might read it another way, and you might have two or three or four different ending interpretations based on who wrote it. Some people don’t like that at all–they want a linear narrative that tells them how it ends. I’m often interested in just the opposite. When I wrote this paper, I had no idea just how much this idea would apply to my own writing, lol!

I’m also very interested in the editorial control that IF offers. It’s also been so cool to be a part of a community that willingly shares coding resources, template resources, assetts, etc. For self-publishing a book, sometimes it can be a massive investment, but with the freedom and literal free access to so many IF tools, it’s pretty exciting to have such strong creative control over a project. I have seen some games that use character customization and I’m also very interested in trying that out in another game.

I’m also really into the idea of options for character customization, because so many of the stories I write don’t rely on a specific-looking narrator, so I very often like to give readers control of how they imagine certain characters in my fiction. In my submission to the competition, a purposefully left any description of the narrator (who you control) so that people could imagine whatever gender, hair color, clothes, etc they wanted. I’m definitely going to look more into how to incorporate this into IF! Another reason I’m really enjoying this modality: the challenge of learning and incorporating new things to an engine like Twine. It’s fun!

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My first IF game, Quotient, The Game, was an attempt to create a tongue-in-cheek representation of the “world” of my novels, The Quantum Contingent and Quantum Time. The novels are more techno-thriller, mission impossible-esque novels, and what started as just a simple experiment with IF grew into a larger and larger game with Zork-like treasures, puzzles, silly humor, and magic. At one point, I considered trying to convert one of my novels to an IF game, but it seemed like to do it right, I’d really need to write a new novel that was interactive by design since I prefer puzzle-laden parser-based games.

I’m also not sure many people would be willing to tackle a full length puzzle-laden parser novel since it would end up being a very long play time. (just reading a typical linear novel is a 5-6 hour event) So, if I bite that task off, I need to be ok with the journey being the reward.

Hence, the “complementary” approach… IF as a way to introduce some of the locations, some of the key characters, and have some good old fashion Zork-esque fun at the same time.

Short-stories and other IF approaches may lend themselves better to adaptation.

Greg

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First of all, thank you for sharing that. Second, I resonate with the tempting possibility for interaction in IF. I’ve treated ambiguity in some of my short stories as a sort of game, and I think before figuring out that his medium even existed, I was itching to have this possibility tied to any of my writing.

I started writing a novel a few months ago, and I have the idea mostly planned out, but I just kept getting stuck, even though I pretty much knew what I wanted. The story was already non-linear and moving between POV, and I just kept thinking that it felt like there was more room for interaction. This is really the inspiration behind making this entire post. I keep leaning into this idea of stretching this story out and giving it the potential to be interactive. And then just last week, I was inspired to write a completely different novel, one that feels like it should be linear and told only one way. It all got me thinking, and well, it took me here. How do we approach our storytelling?

On another note, an interactive poetry collection sounds really cool! Please do share if it’s public :slight_smile:

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I’m guessing that’s referring to Portrait with Wolf? Which is very cool.

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Generally speaking, if I have an idea for an IF game, it’s because there’s a game mechanic behind it that won’t readily translate into static fiction. I don’t think many of my games would work terribly well as short stories or novels.

There is one story however, an as-yet-finished choice-based game that I’ve thought about turning into a novel, for two reasons. One is that the player character is so single-minded that I struggle to come up with choices for her - I know exactly what she would do in every situation. The second reason is that for the story to work properly the viewpoint character needs to change from time to time.

One game that manages both these things very capably is Stephen Bond’s The Best Man. My game is completely different in character, it’s a very silly comedy, but it struck me that I could learn a lot from that game and somehow manage to make a game of it yet, albeit a very linear one. It would be nice if I could, because I think it’s the best of my works in progress. But it might also be nice to publish a novella!

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I think this is the crux of the issue for me. Lots of people like the idea of a game, but don’t understand that the choice of the medium itself is just as important as the content. I’ve seen lengthy wordy rpg’s with bland gameplay that really should have been a novel. In other words, the project being a game added nothing to the experience and in my opinion, detracted from it.

The beauty of games is that the player is responsible for their actions. There is a markedly different experience between reading that a character pushed someone onto train tracks and having the player type “push character onto tracks”. Even in a linear story, the player must still be responsible for keeping the story moving.

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Thank you so much for this wonderful conversation topic! Taking into consideration my general love for writing I found it very engaging and you inspired me to actually think through about the distinctions between IF and novel stories, as well as about what actually is a storyline and how it can be constructed. Although, I was aware of the existence of the IF community, I got the chance to be actually involved with IF after a university course, and I am so grateful that this aforementioned course enriched my knowledge and motivated me to take part in this community.

More specifically, I have not yet posted any of my stories (either IF or novels) online, but I have created a structure for some as well as written quite a few. Whenever I begin writing a piece of work, I usually have a prearranged plan for it and I already know what I want it to “become”. There are separate paths I follow in order to create something, with different guidelines and methods that are usually required for a writer to utilize so as to proceed with their texts. However, writing constitutes more of a feeling rather than a presupposed set of rules and boxes that need to be ticked. There are instances when you might begin with a specific plan for IF, but eventually you realize how well this storyline would fit as a novel, or the other way round.

Therefore, while in most cases the primary process to be followed is different for IF and novels, it is not a rule, and writers should feel liberated to express their ideas in any form they desire. The secret behind a successful contribution to any kind of literary world is the love people possess that leads them towards an actual expression of their own unique ideas. To be completely honest with you, after reading other people’s comments on this thread, I would personally love to try and turn a novel story of mine, or even better a poem, into IF, giving the opportunity to more people to actively engage with it and open up more choices for the characters I have created and their stories.

I wish you all a creative and inspirational day!

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