NEWS FROM THE CLASSROOM

What is a Nonlinear Story?

News from the Middle School classroom

January 15, 2022

By Pete Johnson- Middle School Language Arts and Social Studies Teacher

PNA Middle School students recently finished a nonlinear story project, which is a unique story form that has many possible endings. In class, we have been referring to these stories as Choose Your Own Adventure Stories (CYOAS), which is also the name of a nonlinear book series that was particularly popular in the 80’s. These stories can be read many times with different results, because the direction the story takes depends on the choices the reader makes throughout the story. Nonlinear stories are a unique form of storytelling, not only because of the different story strands, but also because these stories are written in the second person. The main character of these stories is the reader. As a result of the direct participation of the reader, these stories can feel more like playing a game than passively reading a story. 

Students created these nonlinear stories using a program called Twine, which is available at twinery.org. Twine allows students to organize and visualize the different story strands they create. In addition to learning to manage a nonlinear writing format, students learned to enhance and manipulate the formatting of the stories using HTML and CSS code. Through this project, students learned basic HTML and CSS code that they could implement in their projects. They were also encouraged to explore the possibilties of CSS and HTML on their own.  

Most of these stories have already been added to the class website at: https://sites.google.com/view/pnams/cyoas-stories

Below is a sample page from the story Neolithic by Kenny. Don’t you want to find out what happens next?

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