When Jay Leibold started writing Choose Your Own Adventure books in the 1980s, no one told him exactly how to create a branching story with a passel of different endings.
“It was a seat-of-the-pants, use-your-intuition kind of thing,” he says.As the story developed, dividing along different branches, Leibold would map its shape on 8 1/2 by 11 inch pages. One page, two pages, then a branching choice. “There was lots of erasing, crossing out, trying again,” he says. As the story grew and the first half became more settled, though, a standard, letter-sized piece of paper wasn’t large enough to hold the whole map of the story. Eventually, he had to tape two large pieces of paper board together in order to hold it.
After reading Atlas Obscura’s story about maps that reveal the hidden structure of Choose Your Own Adventure stories created by the publisher ChooseCo, Leibold sent us images of the original, hand-drawn maps he used to create some of his CYOA books. Here’s the final map of Sabotage, the first book Leibold contributed to the series:
had 30 possible endings. “It was so challenging, and it really did feel pretty great to have it finished and take it in all at once, on one chart,” he says.
Leibold would eventually write 15 Choose Your Own Adventure books,…
The post These Hand-Drawn Maps Helped Create ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ Books appeared first on FeedBox.