Mobile interactive fiction (mifiction) harks back to the old style gamebooks of the 1980s but in a more literate manner and without the dice-rolling and statistics crunching that they required. By using the capabilities of mobile phones and PDAs the reader can read the stories anywhere and without having to carry an ebook reader, or even an ordinary book itself.
Mobile interactive fiction is a style of writing that has its own particular set of do's and don'ts. We provide these here as suggestions to assist you in writing mobile interactive fiction and enter our competition.
Do's and Don'ts:
Aim for each section to be on average 150 words long. This is ideal for reading on a small screen without too much scrolling. The maximum should be no more than 300 words.
A mifiction complete story should be around 25,000 words in total. This is split into around 10 chapters with 10 to 15 sections within each chapter. Each chapter is therefore about 2,500 words long and is about manageable for the average person to read in a typical session on a mobile phone.
Story branching is critical to putting the "interactive" in mobile interactive fiction. However, be careful not to branch away too much and try to bring branches back to the main flow of the story. If you don't, you'll find that the amount of words you have to write will become enormous.
To assist you in creating your story branches and keeping track of them, we recommend using flow charts. These let you visualise your story and the different paths the reader can take through it. You might just use section numbers in your flow chart:
Or you might include the entire text for your sections:
With such a limited amount of text available in a mifiction story you don't have any words to waste. Try to make each section interesting, exciting, or funny to keep the reader's attention. Err on the side of more action rather than less.
Each choice presented to the reader must be logical and allow him or her to make an informed decision.
Don't arbitrarily kill the character off and therefore end the story prematurely - non optimum choices should keep the story going, just on a different thread, rather than ending in "sudden death".
If you're unsure of how mifiction chapter can be structured, take a look at our example. It's the first chapter of a mifiction called "Three Tears".
Most importantly, do have fun when you write. mifiction stories should be fun to read and with all the options open to you as a writer (can't decide on which ending to use? then use both!) they certainly should be fun to write...