A fiction story you can customize before reading?

May 15, 2022 4:12 PM

So with Kindle and other modern tech, it seems like you could have a fiction story that you could download and then set sliders like "less description, more action" and "no graphic sex or violence please" or "yes please all the hardcore sex scenes". Has this been done, or how would you do it?

I'm writing a story and I feel like I could tell this story many ways; I could include lots of description and scenery to make it immersive, but it would slow down the action; I kinda want to put some sex scenes but I'd be shy to show them to some people, etc. If I could find a way to make it so you could select what sentences make it into the draft you're reading, seems like that would be a fun thing to do. How would I do that?

posted by The otter lady to Writing & Language (10 answers total)

Just use the “conditional” feature in programs like Adobe FrameMaker?
posted by Melismata at 4:15 PM on May 15, 2022

This could be done with some flavor of SGML. That may be more than you want to chew on, but pretty sure it's flexible/powerful enough. The idea is the user flags the options they want and then it returns the sentences crafted for them and tagged that were marked as such by you.Markdown would be lighter weight and more user friendly, but I'm not certain it's fully up for the complex tasks.

Sounds like a fun idea! Also reminds me a bit of various interactive fiction things. Eg you could do this with Twine and user prompts (eg A: then they kissed… the next day, she- B: then they kissed… then she took of her shirt and they-)
posted by SaltySalticid at 4:24 PM on May 15, 2022

A website with controls would allow the reader to show and hide sections at will. It might be pretty simple to set up.

I wondered if the epub format included conditionally-shown text, but cursory searching isn't telling me. It's clear that a lot of publishing software has the idea, but they're probably thinking of setting up several parallel editions for related markets (eg Windows/Mac, or the two versions of Dictionary of the Khazars), not the 2^n cases you get with several independent user preferences, and not letting the user change it on the fly. EPUB3 might cover this but not be supported by most people's devices (!!).
posted by clew at 4:37 PM on May 15, 2022 [2 favorites]

For the authoring side of things, I suspect that Scrivener can do this pretty well. On the reader side, I don't think this is really possible natively in EPUB/PDF/etc, but a website could definitely do this, and you could have the website spit out a EPUB/PDF/whatever based on how people set the sliders.
posted by wesleyac at 5:01 PM on May 15, 2022 [1 favorite]

I know of one book where you can buy one of two versions - one is smuttier than the other - and this is certainly a thing in fanworks. But I can’t imagine how many variations a reader is actually willing to pay for because all those sliders are many extra words for the author.
posted by Bottlecap at 5:17 PM on May 15, 2022 [1 favorite]

Ted Nelson, the coiner of the word 'hypertext', conceived of a concept like this that he called StretchText. It does seem like there are lots of ways to implement it these days, but it does result in lots more work for the author.
posted by Jasper Fnorde at 5:52 PM on May 15, 2022 [2 favorites]

Leather Goddesses of Phobos and the Spellcasting x01 games had naughty and nice modes. That's the only media I can think of offhand that lets you change how the story is told on the fly.
posted by Spike Glee at 8:21 AM on May 16, 2022

It’s possible but tricky to add interactivity to ebooks (ePub or Kindle). Mostly it’s used for education, like quizzes at the end of chapters that grade themselves. There aren’t many notable fiction examples unless you drop the typical book formats and go for a genuine interactive fiction platform.
posted by Monochrome at 12:34 PM on May 16, 2022 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Here's the simplest version I could think of; it's one page of html with all the code included. If you download it to your computer you can

(A) open the local file in your browser

(B) open it in any text editor, not your browser, scroll down to the line

<h1>Story</h1>

edit from there to change the story. Parts to be turned on and off are marked off like this:

<span class="Violence">Violent Prose Here!</span>

(Violence, Sexy and Discursive are the three classes, I could rename them)

and you can put a span inside a paragraph, or have it be several paragraphs, or even nest one inside the other, but they can't overlap incompletely. Paragraphs start with <p> and end with </p>.

Save the edited html and reload the browser to see your changes.

Even marking up a scrap of Doyle this was an interesting narrative effect, I'd love to see any story you wrote using it!
posted by clew at 12:15 AM on May 23, 2022 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Thank you!! That's pretty much exactly what I was thinking! I'll work on a fiction sample to put into it! (sorry about the delay in reply, I forgot to check this thread!)
posted by The otter lady at 12:38 PM on May 29, 2022 [1 favorite]