A ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ Collaboration
Authors, come join us!
Did you ever read ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ stories as a kid?
I did!
They were so much fun. There’s a real pulp-thriller feel to each short instalment/chapter, with each one ending in a set of choices for what the character should do next (or, of course, with ‘The End’).
If you’re not familiar with this kind of book, here are some titles to give you a flavor of a genre that has some real Jules Verne vibes:
- The Cave of Time
- By Balloon Across the Sahara
- Space and Beyond
- Journey Under the Sea
- Prisoner of the Ant People

I’ve found a couple of attempts at creating collaborative fiction here on Medium, but the writers involved seem to have become inactive some months or years back.
Who would be up for giving it another shot?
Guidelines
I suggest the following guidelines to help keep things running as smoothly as possible:
- A publication to keep the stories all in one place.
- Aim to keep instalments fairly short, so that the story/stories keep moving along. No point in working on a chapter for weeks, right? If you write something longer, consider splitting it into two or more parts, with a ‘Continue’ link at the end.
- Otherwise, each instalment must end with at least 2 choices, or with ‘The End’.
- Once follow-up stories are written (by you or someone else), authors are strongly encouraged to go back and edit their own stories so that endings link directly to these. It’s also fine to loop forward to some of the starter stories! (We editors can also add links).
- If two people write follow-ups to the same story, that’s ok. We can add them both in as options. Roll the dice!
- Authors are encouraged to add to other people’s stories, but they can also add to their own.
- Everyone is encouraged to read and comment as well as write. Remember, reads means royalties!
Are you in? There’s nothing to lose!
UPDATE:
We created a publication and shared hundreds of CYOA chapters. This is very much still going, if you want in!
At first, these lived in a separate publication, but for ease of editing and organisation, we switched to become part of a general fiction publication, The Fiction Writer’s Den.
Therefore, if you want to write CYOA stories, just head over to The Den, check the submission guide, and get yourself added as an author.
See you there, adventurers!
Thanks for reading! And whether or not you take part in the collaborative storytelling, you can find some writing inspiration in the prompts below.