WriteHive Online Conference 2025: Interactive Fiction Q&A
Image by Rama Krishna Karumanchi from Pixabay
During the WriteHive Online Conference this a couple of weekends ago, I was the host for an interactive fiction Q&A with Livia J. Elliot, an author who co-created the app Unearthed Stories (Android and iPhone/iPad) with her partner. We had a great session in which Livia talked about some of the dos and don’ts of writing interactive fiction, answering both my questions on the topic and those from the audience.
Some of the many topics Livia explained were about how to create meaningful choices for your reader in an interactive fiction piece, whether in a story or game, in order to help the reader or player feel like what they’re deciding has real consequences and to greater immerse them in the story and world. At the same time, she talked about how playing with phrasing and emphasis in the choices can help emphasize a point–for example, having all of the options be “run” but at different levels of capitalization and punctuation might look like a non-choice, but if the next scene is different based on how emphatically a reader chooses to run can make it more meaningful. She also talked about taking choices away in a story about depression, wherein the character that the reader embodies reaches a point where there is really only one way forward due to their depression.
Another aspect of interaction fiction that Livia talked about was creating believable outcomes to the choices the reader makes and ensuring that the narrative flows from those choices in a logical manner. As an example of this, she talked about Mass Effect and the “paragon” and “renegade” options that game presents. Based on a player’s choice to follow one path over the other, it causes other characters to react to the main character. She also explained ludo-narrative harmony, which is when the mechanics match the mood of the story, with the opposite being ludo-narrative dissonance, when the mechanics don’t match the mood.
Some of the most interesting parts of the Q&A for me were some of Livia’s examples of unusual stories she’s told using interactive fiction, like creating a dungeon crawl in a story or having a story using the paragon/renegade model reach a point where the two paths diverged so much that she could no longer write them in parallel. She also shared some great tips on structure and ways to create a narrative where the choices matter but ultimately bring the reader back to the same narrative after only a brief unique piece based on the choices made.
As someone who loved Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books as a kid, it was fascinating to hear about the many ways in which this core idea has been continued and vastly expanded through technological advances like Twine and Unearthed Stories. The recording of this Q&A will be available on the WriteHive YouTube channel in a month or less, so be sure to favorite that channel so you’ll get notified when it’s uploaded!
Update 9/1/2025: the Q&A recording is now on YouTube!
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