What aspect of your Choose Your Own Adventure book did your map—or did the mapping process crystallize?
For me, the mapping process made me exercise patience. I was mapping the first branch of the book and completed it without any major issues. Then, I began to map the second branch, due a connection between the first and second branch, I noted “oh nice, it maps out to the other branch,” thinking I would be done soon. After two hours went by, I counted the number of endings and I had forty-two instead of the book’s advertised thirty-eight. This was a problem. Instead of starting from the beginning of the second branch, I decided to go backwards from the endings that I had missed initially. So when asked, what did the mapping process crystallize for me? It crystallized the mapping process should be done from beginning to end. Three to four hours later, I had worked backwards from several endings back to the beginning; it was not an easy task. Not all pages refer to exact page numbers, some are a page or two behind and it was rather difficult to map it this way. However, having mapped the book forward and backwards I have a better sense of how CYOA adventure books work in terms of construction. The map itself did not reveal any specific moral or ethical values; it did however reveal that there are three thematic endings, which were: a successful life, somewhere in the middle and death. At least in my book, out of the 38 endings, 21% were happy, 31% were somewhere in between and 44% resulted in death.