When I read Choose Your Own Adventure books as a kid, I always flipped to the end to see which route through the story allowed me to escape violent death, and made my choices accordingly. This obviously messed with any sense of narrative coherence or forward progress. It also meant that, my choices never had consequences, not really. So when I came to write interactive fiction, I was glad to do it on a platform that wouldn’t allow massive cheats like me to game the system – and so distance themselves from the story.

Enter Fiction Express For Schools. This publishing start-up is one of those very simple ideas that you can’t believe someone hasn’t done before. The company offers serialized, interactive stories to its subscribers ­– primarily junior schools, mostly in England, but also available to English-speaking schools around the world.

Chapter vote and a winning cover designed as part of the logo designing competition.

The readers interact by voting online for the path they’d like the story to take, as well as via the Fiction Express Blog, and through competitions that also help shape the story.

I started writing for them last year, and it’s not like any writing experience I’ve ever had before. Faster, scarier – because you’re handing over a large degree of narrative control to a bunch of tiny strangers – but also much less wracked with self-doubt. When there’s no time to agonize, there’s no agony.

Here’s how it works. Each week, for five weeks, you write a chapter, giving a few possible paths for the story to go down next. For example, you might ask “Does the heroine go into the dark cave, or explore the mountains above”, though usually it’s a choice with more at stake, morally speaking, than that. The readers then vote online, and whichever path gets the most votes, wins. Basically, it’s Choose Your Own Adventure meets The X-Factor.

The “live” element of it means the reader is forced to wait for the next installment. I can’t help feeling this is part of the pleasure for the readers, allowing anticipation to build. There’s something frustratingly enjoyable about being denied instant gratification when you’re used to it – with books or videogames, say, that you can pick up or put down whenever you like.

The writer’s in the same position as the reader – until the votes come in on a Tuesday, after the chapter going up on the Friday – you have to wait to find out what’s going to happen next out of the options you’ve provided. Sometimes those options are life or death.

One thing that really surprised me was how kind the children were in the choices they made. Perhaps I’m cynical, but I’d expected them to want to put the characters in peril, to make their lives hard, to make them, well, suffer. But actually, they often made the choice that seemed (at least in the short term) to protect the character and get them out of trouble.

This often turned out to be the most interesting narrative choice, as it usually meant taking the quick fix out of trouble that brought even more problems down on the character’s head in the long run.

Of course, while the readers vote for where the story will go next, it’s still within a structured context. Having run a lot of writing workshops with kids, I know that if you give completely free rein their stories can spiral into beautiful but baffling chaos, introducing new characters and changing location with the dizzying pace of a Bollywood set piece. With Fiction Express, the writer is the readers’ puppet,  while retaining enough control to give the story shape and drive it forwards.

Planning a piece of writing like this involves a lot of diagrams, a lot of “If X then Y” plot thinking. Necessarily it means a lot of roads not taken, too; a whole host of ghost paths that you never got to write, and the readers never got to read. There’s also an element of seat-of-the-pants improvisation of course – sometimes, a new idea emerges from the choices the readers have made, which leads the story to a whole new place you never envisaged.

As well as the voting, the readers interact directly with the author, via the Fiction Express blog.  Alongside the stories, I blogged here, as do all the Fiction Express authors. I’d write about what was happening in the story, I’d ask questions, I’d post doodles and “what ifs”. The readers came to the blog to ask questions, discuss the story – saying what they liked, what they just didn’t get, what made them angry – and post their own ideas for stories.

Often, in class, they’d write their own versions of the paths not taken. But they also helped to shape the story in ways other than voting. For example, while I was writing my second Fiction Express story, we ran a competition to design a school emblem for the main character’s school. This was then folded back into the story, as part of the last chapter. Different Fiction Express writers interact in different ways, but I think what the kids really enjoy about it is the opportunity to get one on one attention from the author, and to feel part of the process. To feel like they’re in the inner circle, I suppose.

The business side of things:

For an annual subscription of £199 + VAT, a school gets 12 interactive e-books as well as comprehensive weekly teacher resources to help them guide discussions about the stories and do spin-off classroom work such as creative writing, art and comprehension exercises. Each book is written “live”, so no cheating is possible for the readers. They make a choice, and they’re stuck with it, though pupils often write the paths not taken as stories of their own. Over 350 schools are signed up, which means thousands of pupils reading the same stories at the same time around the country and abroad. This publishing start-up was the brainchild of CEO Paul Humphrey, who previously founded, and still runs, book packager Discovery Books. Laura Durman is the managing editor of the project. The authors are all professional, published authors.

In 2006 Chris Joseph and I were commissioned to create a series of interactive stories for a marketing campaign for a feature film that didn’t exist.  From that inauspicious beginning, Inanimate Alice has gone on to become one of the most popular digital stories for educators around the world, from primary to doctoral level.  How and why did this happen?

The publishing story behind Inanimate Alice is a tale of mistakes, bad ideas, good ideas, dead-ends, lucky accidents, and spectacular success.  Inanimate Alice consists of four episodes that reside online, with a further six episodes planned.  Created by myself and web artist Chris Joseph, Inanimate Alice was commissioned and financed by Bradfield Ltd producer Ian Harper.  The stories are told through text, music, games, images, sound effects, and video and are available for free.

Inanimate Alice tells the story of a girl called Alice, growing up in the near future, surrounded by technology.   Ian Harper had written a screenplay for a feature film and had the idea that he could generate interest in the script by publishing a series of short, interactive, online multimedia stories that provided a backstory to the script itself.  Harper was also involved in a company that had created a gadget, for domestic use, that could detect electronic emissions, the Electrosmog Detector; the sound made by the detector when it picks up electronic emissions is used as background noise in all the episodes.  To date, the screenplay has not been made into a film, and the gadget has not sold in vast quantities; however, Inanimate Alice continues to grow and thrive.

In 2006 there was so little of this kind of storytelling around – accessible, screen-based, digital stories – that Chris and I had no idea of what to call it.  We used the term ‘webvid’, which, thankfully, hasn’t survived. Our budgets were very small; we considered using photos of actors to represent our characters, Alice and her parents, and we considered animating the characters, but we couldn’t afford either option.  This was our first lucky accidents: one important aesthetic feature of Inanimate Alice is that Alice herself is never represented visually on screen.  This practical decision had large creative ramifications:  the fact that Alice remains off-screen throughout renders this hybrid form of storytelling closer to that of reading a book, where it falls upon the reader to imagine the main character’s appearance.  This aspect, combined with the first person narrative voice, draws readers into Alice’s world, allowing readers to identify with Alice, to place themselves in the story.

Lucky accident number two was that Chris Joseph and I did not initially consider the fact that a work about a child might appeal to children, an aspect of the project that seems obvious with hindsight.  Children have been among our most passionate readers.

Lucky accident number three: our character, Alice, wants to be a games designer when she grows up, and it was this aspiration that allowed us to embed games into the stories in a way that made narrative sense. In each episode the games included are representative of what a talented child Alice’s age might be able to create herself.   Accordingly, the level of interaction and gaming skill required by the reader increases with each episode as Alice reaches age 8, 10, 12, and 14.  This gradual increase in interactivity through the episodes has meant that the work functions well as a primer or introduction to digital fiction.

In 2007, I was teaching part-time at De Montfort University, where a PhD student, Jess Laccetti, was researching multi-modal fiction.  Jess was very interested in digital pedagogy, and was in contact with a number of educators at primary, secondary, and HE level. We’d already begun to have interest in the project from teachers, so Ian Harper commissioned Jess to write a set of teacher’s notes, and this was part of what kick-started Inanimate Alice as a tool for digital literacy in schools and universities.  As well as that, Jess is an Italian speaker; she offered to translate the text of the work.  From the web analytics it became apparent early on that Inanimate Alice was drawing readers from many non-English speaking countries and we decided to provide translations of the text in French, German, and Spanish as well. These multilingual aspects of the project fuelled further growth in its readership.

From early on, Inanimate Alice won prizes, including awards in Italy, South Korea, the USA, Ireland, Germany, and Spain. It featured in digital arts exhibitions as well as being promoted by countless teacher-advocates, desperate for engaging digital content suitable for use in the classroom. All of this meant that our audience continued to grow and expand.  Other factors contributed to its success as a title, not the least of which is that all four episodes are available to view for free.  Episodes three and four have two versions:  ‘read-only’ and ‘full version’.  In the full version readers need to complete games before they can move on in the story; in the read-only version the games are by-passed.  Early and anecdotal reader response showed us that our audience is split evenly between those who enjoy the games and those who do not; we took a decision to accommodate both types of readers throughout the remainder of the series.

For me, a pivotal moment came in March 2009, when my Google Alerts first picked up multiple versions of Inanimate Alice: Episode 5;Chris and I had not yet created a fifth episode.  Following the links I discovered that an American high school English teacher, Ms Aronow, had been using Inanimate Alice with a group of ‘hard to reach’ teenagers, encouraging them to create their own versions of episode five using Microsoft Powerpoint, which Ms Aranow published on her class blog.  Discovering these episodes gave new meaning to me for the potential of ‘interactivity’, a term often heralded at the time as the new paradigm for reading and writing.  It was flattering to discover a text I’d written disseminated and reconstructed in this manner, of course, but more importantly, these new episodes are a true indicator of the potential for reader-writer, reader-text interaction, as well as for digital fiction in the classroom.  New episodes have continued to appear online regularly, from around the world; for example, a New Zealand teacher, Mr Woods, encourages his Samoan students to use their own language and culture in their versions of the stories.  Ian Harper has continued to expand the project as a pedagogical tool, making links throughout the large education market; our most recent commission, from Education Services Australia, was a series of twelve photo-stories describing a year Alice and her parents spend living in Australia.  This is where the still developing business model for the project is emerging; the fact that there hasn’t been a new episode since 2009 has not hindered the growth of the project.

It’s been a fascinating process to watch a work like Inanimate Alice, which was not intended, originally, as an educational title, being adopted, adapted, and augmented by educators.  We’ve been able to capitalise on that interest by creating pedagogical tools and spaces for discussion specific to Inanimate Alice and have collaborated with Promethean Planet, Edmodo, and Everloop to create bespoke materials. 2012 saw two big developments:  the American Association of School Librarians named our site as a ‘Best Website for Teaching and Learning’ and the Mozilla Foundation Webmaker project used Inanimate Alice to develop their online remix tool, X-Ray Goggles.

In conclusion, the sizable audience of children for Inanimate Alice has redefined the work as children’s literature, while its popularity with teachers has repositioned it as a classroom resource. Neither of these outcomes were anticipated by us when we set out to create our first ‘webvid’ back in 2006.  

A few examples of new episode fives:

Aronow’s English 10 blog:  http://aronowsenglish10.blogspot.com/

http://6cathie.com/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-itUTAlahrw&feature=related

Alice and Friends – Digital Literacy wiki built around IA, created by two teachers in Australia: http://aliceandfriends.wikispaces.com/

Mr Woodz NZ class lesson plans:  http://inanimatealice-aperspective.wikispaces.com/

Mozilla Webmaker, ‘Make Your Own Episode of Inanimate Alice’: https://webmaker.org/en-US/projects/make-your-own-episode-inanimate-alice/