TWINE CONCEPT PROPOSAL

CONCEPT FOR TWINE PROJECT

On Monday, bring with you to class your concept for your Twine end-of-term project. It should essentially be a proposal that is around 1 page, double-spaced and typed. It should have numbered responses to the following questions. The proposal should include the following:

1) What is your story about? What “horrors” will it contain? Be specific. Give us the setting (time and place), main characters, and central dilemma for the story. Make sure not to copy other people's stories. You may reference other horror you have read/watched at certain points in the story, but you will be graded on how imaginative your story is.

2) How do these horrors in your story relate to real life horrors in our world today (not in the past, but today, in 2017)? Be as specific as possible. A particular problem of our world might be a good place to start. For example, the automization of workers is a specific problem. People are and will continue to lose jobs due to robots and machines taking them over. A horror story that deals with a subject like this could be about a possessed self-driving car, for example, or a serial killer Uber driver who had his job taken from him. *Please note that this is the most important aspect of your story and I will be grading you on how well-developed it is.

3) What is the basic plot idea for your story? What will happen?

4) What is the POV of the story? Is it first person? Second person ("You walk into a bar")? Third person? Since this is a Twine story, the second person, where you address the reader directly, might make the most sense.

5) Because Twine is an interactive, narrative game, you need incorporate choice into your story in a specific way. What are some of the potential directions your story might take? What are the different choices your reader might take? How do these choices relate to the horrors in the story? For example, if you made a narrative story like The Witch you could allow your reader to choose to tell their mother why they went into the forest, or to lie or keep it a secret. Both choices have consequences—if the reader “lies” then the mother is more suspicious and more likely to see her child as a witch. If the daughter tells the truth, she may be punished or get her father, who sold the mothers cup to buy traps, into trouble (which could also get her into trouble).

6) Speaking of choice, you will need to consider possible endings to your story. What possible endings might the story have? Now, here is where you should consider the horror at the heart of the story, the horror that relates to the cultural condition that produced the horror. To that end, you may want every path in your story to lead to the same ending, or you may want different endings to be possible. This will entirely depend on the horror you are dealing with. For example, to use the self-driving car example from above—it’s generally been decided that it’s inevitable that self-driving cars are coming and will replace the jobs of truckers, etc. So, in that story, you may want all endings to be the same, because that is an inevitable situation in our world (although you can still come up with another resolution in the story if you want).

Please note that you will likely change many things after your workshop on Monday, and that is totally normal and encouraged. This project is a work in process, and will require thoughtful revision throughout.