Very (very!) early in my career I wrote a couple “Choose Your Own Destiny”-style books for a small digital publishing house. The idea was that writers would earn royalties on people who purchased the app and then specifically downloaded the stories you wrote.
I wrote a kids story about a couple cats looking for treats, and I wrote a big sci-fi epic space opera thing. I’m proud of both, although I secretly kinda hope that nobody ever finds them again. They were early in my career. I had so much to learn! I mean, I still do, but I make fewer mistakes these days… and the publisher wouldn’t pay for editing, so that was also an issue. But whatever, they never earned me a cent… I don’t think the publisher screwed me or anything, I’m just pretty sure the app never sold at all. Who knows, maybe he made a billion dollars off my books and retired to a palace in Mexico. Beside the point.
But I’ve been thinking a lot about branching narratives recently, due to a bunch of games I’ve been playing that use open-ended, branching narratives. Writing for games (board and video) is an art unto itself, of course, but the idea of how to write open-ended enough that you don’t have to have the story being linear, but tightly enough that each section flows well into the next (and, ideally, makes a coherent story at the end!) is a heckuva puzzle. I’m sure there are people that thinking in four dimensions for their writing plots ain’t no big thing, but even the two I wrote (which were less ambitious with the branching narrative stuff) were challenging enough!
Maybe something I’ll tackle someday. For now I’m trying to focus on this novel, and writing just one ending would be wonderful!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!