Choose the kind of story
Start with a narrative form or genre. Each page opens onto a story you direct in literary prose.
Start with a form, genre, or classic
Write from a blank possibility, a genre promise, or a literary world already in motion.
Interactive Fiction
There are no numbered doors and no route you are supposed to find. The story can turn on a whispered answer, a decision made too late, or an instruction only the narrator hears.
Romance Story
The strongest love stories live in the distance between what two people want and what they can admit. Hold that distance for a chapter or cross it in one sentence — the timing belongs to you.
Fantasy Story
A map is useful, but a fantasy world becomes real when an old oath changes what happens at supper. Build the lore, then write inside it instead of stopping to explain it.
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen’s world is already in motion. The characters keep their histories and tensions; your decisions create the unwritten version of Pride and Prejudice.
Jane Eyre
Charlotte Brontë’s world is already in motion. The characters keep their histories and tensions; your decisions create the unwritten version of Jane Eyre.
Dracula
Bram Stoker’s world is already in motion. The characters keep their histories and tensions; your decisions create the unwritten version of Dracula.
Persuasion
Jane Austen’s world is already in motion. The characters keep their histories and tensions; your decisions create the unwritten version of Persuasion.
Sherlock Holmes
Arthur Conan Doyle’s world is already in motion. The characters keep their histories and tensions; your decisions create the unwritten version of Sherlock Holmes.
Or start with a trope
A familiar tension can be the first line rather than the whole script.
Mafia Romance
A black car at the curb that wasn't called. A ring slid onto your finger across a notary's desk while his men watch the door. He keeps you safe and he keeps you watched, and you have stopped being able to tell the difference.
Morally Grey Love Interest
He arrived uninvited, with better wine than he could afford and a reputation worse than the wine. Every room he enters becomes less predictable and more dangerous — and he has just decided that the one he wants to ruin, slowly, is yours.
Enemies to Lovers
He looked at you once and pronounced you tolerable — within your hearing, while the room went on dancing. The season is long, Hertfordshire is small, and his friend is bringing him over to be introduced.
Arranged Marriage
A marriage decided in someone else's drawing room. A husband you met at the altar, who sleeps three doors down and looks at you like a debt he didn't agree to. Two strangers, one name, and a long winter to learn what's underneath the contract.
Fated Mates
He looks up across a crowded room and goes still, like something in him has just been named. You feel it answer in your own chest before you've decided to. Neither of you chose this. That's the whole problem.
Slow Burn
A hand that almost touches yours across the kitchen island and pulls back. A look held one second too long, then broken. Slow burn is the romance of everything not yet said — and you decide when it finally is.
Second Chance Romance
You gave him up at nineteen because one wise voice told you to. Eight years later he walks back into the parlour — rich, famous, perfectly polite — and you are holding a sewing basket you have no memory of picking up.
Forbidden Love
His brother's wife. Your father's enemy. The man your family has spent a generation teaching you to hate. You know exactly what this would cost. You reach for the door handle anyway.
Grumpy Sunshine
He answers in single words and keeps the door half-closed. You bring coffee he didn't ask for, talk to his silence like it's a conversation, and one morning he's already poured a second cup before you walk in — and pretends he hasn't.
Possessive Hero
He doesn't raise his voice. He doesn't have to. The room tilts toward him the moment he decides you're the only thing in it worth watching — and you realize, too late, that being watched by him is its own kind of door closing.
Gothic Romance
A house of grey stone with one window lit. A master who asks strange questions by firelight and pays a seamstress's wage for something that is not sewing. Gothic romance is desire under a locked door — and you hold the candle.
Vampire Romance
He cannot come in unless you ask. That is the whole of the courtship: a voice at the glass, older than the abbey on the cliff, making its patient case for an open window — and your hand already on the sash.
Victorian Mystery
A letter in your pocket, in your uncle's unmistakable hand, posted three days after his funeral. The police were kind for a quarter of an hour. Seventeen steps up from a Baker Street door is the only address left to try.