This spring Mrs. Cindy Cook’s creative writing class has been working on a very unique story genre together. We are collaboratively writing a short story in which you, the reader, get to participate. Members of the class are senior Kristan Dell, juniors Isabella Baldwin and Kinzey Naisbitt, sophomores Lance Kaligian and Koga Reed, and freshman August Calvin-Gidley. This small but creative group has gone all out to construct a choose-your-own-adventure story in which the ending is really up to you!
In the beginning stages, classmates put forth possible ideas for this project, and Koga’s “prison break” idea was selected for discussion and further development. Kristan suggested getting into one group to hash out ideas. We started with the premise of a crime already committed. Would the reader be responsible? With a story like this, we quickly realized that readers couldn’t dictate the outcomes; they could only choose actions and see where each action led. Kinzey wondered if there would be any “winning” endings, and August wanted to include the opportunity to be sent back into a repeated situation to make a different choice. Students came up with many possibilities in the end, with Isabella suggesting a riot and Lance proposing a choice to do time instead of escaping. (We’ll let you find out what happens when those choices are made.)
Students did a great job with metacognition as well. As they paused early on to analyze what made the project difficult so far, August cited writers’ “conflicting ideas” and “inexperience with prison life” (thank goodness!). Kinzey wrote, “It’s hard to think of all the different ways it could go.” When they switched to thinking about what could make the project fun, however, having opposing thoughts turned out to be high on the list. Kristan wrote, “What is fun is it could go so many ways, giving multiple outcomes.” Isabella agreed and added, “You get to make a creative story, hearing everyone get creative with it,” was the best part.
Organizing all the storyline choices was a daunting task; thanks, August and Koga, for putting that together. Lance thought quite a bit about formatting the choice buttons and came up with bold text and color choices. We even linked each ending back to the beginning for another chance to play through the story. After all the slides were typed, edited, formatted, and linked together, we ended up with a 75-page “book” that you, the reader, can read multiple times for a chance at 20 different endings! Read our tale, “The Prison.” Then please complete a short response form to let us know how we did; responses will be turned off after two weeks. We hope you enjoy our adventure.
