Huntsman's pregnant stories

For me, interactive fiction is a fabulous opportunity. Not only do I get to contribute my stories to the public a chapter at a time, and as well as other writers being able to contribute to the project, I get to write the same story with different options!

Sometimes, when writing a story I will get stuck, torn between one possibility or another. In a standard story format one must be chosen over all others, with the rest discarded. But if the opportunity exists to explore both (or all) directions that could be taken, why not explore them all?

In some cases the separate storylines would be different. If Donna Noble turned left or right at a t-intersection created two very different stories, and did so immediately. If a character had the choice between killing someone who had done a great wrong or forgiving them the outcomes of their decision would be very different.

But what about a minor difference? How different would the branches of the story be? At first (perhaps) not a lot, but gradually the differences would show through. Or maybe the repercussions would soon show even though at first the two versions of the story seemed the same.



I'll cite two examples from a story that I am working on.

In this chapter http://www.writing.com/main/interact/item_id/1723221-Pregnancy-Promoting-Purple-...
the options are given that the protagonist sleeps well (and dreams, but hardly relevant to this discussion) or he has trouble sleeping.
The following morning starts off similar in both cases (he even had much the same dream) but minor differences quickly appear. If he slept well he goes to school and all is fine. If he did not sleep well he is sent home from school, and as a result he makes a discovery that would not have happened had he stayed at school that day. That which he discovered was the same in both versions of the story, but in one he did not find out. This discovery in turn led him to doing something else which dramatically changed the story, but it took me six chapters to reach that point after the option of a good sleep or not.

So the changes caused by a simple difference were significant, but they took time to come into effect - many hours in the story, multiple chapters to fill it, and days to write it - but at first they seemed similar.

Tonight I did it again, but arguably worse.
In http://www.writing.com/main/interact/item_id/1723221-Pregnancy-Promoting-Purple-...
the protagonist has an ultrasound scan and the gender of the baby is revealed in the form of a choice. Is it a boy or girl? Choose.
The resulting chapters are so similar that it could be argued that I just copied and pasted them and changed all references to the baby being a girl to a boy. By an interesting coincidence that is exactly what I did. Was I being lazy? Not in my opinion. Logically, the the only difference between the two chapters is the gender, so therefore the chapters should be identical except for that detail.

If I were to continue writing both versions of the story they would likely remain almost identical until sometime in the child's life when the difference in gender causes variations. I don't intend to do this - I only added the boy chapter to make a point. It is possible that differences or ripples could occur earlier if someone had a gender preference and was disappointed or exceptionally pleased by the outcome, but all the significant characters in this story are loving and/or pragmatic and it makes no difference to them.


The point of this particular post is this - when writing an additional chapter in interactive fiction, how much difference does the choice make? Does it make for a dramatically different story, or would it be similar to the other option even if only for a little while? Obviously the answer varies depending on the options provided, and I believe that we should ask that question every time we look at adding a chapter.

Huntsman
... making bellies bigger.