Nanoreno 2018: Staying on track with story choices

How do I plan on writing a visual novel story without getting side track with adding different story/character choices?

I want the choices to be there simply to make it more interactive for the readers while also adding meaningful details to the story.

Visual novels are a unique medium because they combine the visual parts of a story to help cut back on narration (instead of describing the setting which I struggle with I can just use a background so they see the setting right away.)

So my main focus will more so be on the art to handle the description narration and then all I need to do is add the dialogue.

With the choices these can also be used to handle narrations that might feel a bit out of place if you try to incorporate them in the story. Choices sometimes have good endings and bad endings and these can be used to incorporate the perks of omniscient third person point of view while still sticking to the first person point of view. The readers get a sneak peek at the possible dangers ahead while the main character and story POV and story plot remains intact.

I’m not sure if I described that well enough but that’s my goal when I try to make the choices interactive and meaningful for the readers. Now that we (the reader) know this choice leads to a dead end we can pick the other choice to lead the character to the right/safe path.

Now a way that us authors can have fun with that a little more is were we can show the readers the bad ending if they go that route and the readers lead the character to another path to avoid that but then us authors add in a rode block that adds tension forcing the characters to have to go to that bad ending path.

My  goal in doing that is to get the readers to feel that heart pounding tension because they know what lies ahead and tried to avoid it but are now forced to watch and see the outcome which of course everything turns out fine and the story continues because it’s know fun to have both choices lead to the bad ending cause then the story isn’t fun but just frustrating cause it didn’t go anywhere and all that stress was pointless. It’s kind of like a roller coaster ride but with stories. (I’m one of the authors that enjoys tormenting my characters and readers….that sounds a lot worse then what I intended but it’s so much fun! I can’t give a logical reason why ^^;)

Today marks the first day of Nanoreno and my current goal is to get my story outline done and then get started one the script. I hope to be able to do weekly documentations of this 30 day challenge. I also hope that I can finish this challenge because I’m a stay at home mom but I also homeschool my 3 children and we have state assessments coming up. Most of my free time will be taken up but the free time that I’m able to find for myself I can use to work on this story.

Good luck to all of you doing the challenge! Let’s have fun and learn new things!