End of chapter questions and chapter names

Hvast

Hvast

Really Really Experienced
Which style of those do you prefer? I think it is a very important part of an interactive story and it isn't given enough attention by many chyoa writers.

How spoilery should those be? How important it is to warn readers about fetishes\themes they may not like? Are questions that require a choice of protagonist's decision the best approach? What are your personal do and don't do?
 
I abuse them for all sorts of things, jokes, additional information, sometimes even links

I only ever use questions when there is an actual choice to be made. I personally don't like the "every chapter needs to end with a choice" approach, it feels very clunky and artificial


It ultimately depends on what type of story you are writing. If you go for a heavy amount of sex, I believe it best to give the reader as much information as possible. The reader is here to wank after all, spoilers are not a concern. Many reader also open the storymap and choose solely based on title, so that should factor in.

If it's a more plot heavy story, tags should suffice in giving a general idea of what to expect
 
I also find it a stylistic choice. The best choice depends on the tone and structure of the story. Private stories don't benefit from open-ended chapter endings in the same way as public stories. Moderated stories might have specific philosophies about how contributors should divide up their writing into chapters, which affects how they should end. Complex game mode stories will need to make strange chapter breaks in order for variables to work properly, so they will often have meaningless or empty chapter questions. In the same vein, game mode stories don't need explicit chapter titles, since the content will probably break if opened from the story map anyway, where on other stories readers may want to jump to certain scenes. It should be a conscious and deliberate choice, but it is ultimately a choice.
 
I think my biggest problem is where to put the question. I write offline and then copy and paste but I will write and write and write and not find a point I feel that would make a good branching point so I kind of get stuck throwing a question in there to make a breaking point so I am not putting to much into one chapter that goes on forever.
 
I tend to use chapter titles like book chapter titles so I try to give them thematically appropriate, references, or jokey names. Therefore I tend to ignore the question unless there's a branch.

One method I have seen is to just show the action as the title "She tries the door" vs. "She tries the window" which preserves the CHYOA feel but makes it really annoying to search the story map.
 
I've kind of gone with multiple answers to this question depending on the story. Dustbin uses simple answer titles and simple question endings.

IE: What should Emily Do Next? (Is the end)

She goes home (Is the next chapter's title)

The exception being Bad Ends where the End thing is used to title each Bad End... usually being extremely dark humour joke titles.

Meanwhile my Monster Isekai branch goes a bit more thematic with titles and end things.

With titles like "Knowledge is Power" and end things like "Things seem to be going well..."

The hunters meanwhile is much more simple in almost every way. With very simple titles that just describe the choice made and the end things are usually just what happens next...

The Tower of Voices is a bit special, the titles tend to be thematic like Monster Isekai, but the end things are often direct messages to the readers from Yulia or just commentary from her.
 
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