17. Setting Up the Pre-Story, Central Story, and Post-Story
All stories are imagined in three parts, though only one of those parts ends up on the page or screen. Take, for instance, Infocom’s game Moonmist. You play the detective friend of Tamara Lynd, who has asked you to come to her estate in England to investigate a ghost that is haunting the castle.
The story begins in medias res, which is just a fancy literary term for noting that the story opens in the middle of the action. In medias res translates to “into the middle things,” and that is the perfect way of understanding a tripartite story structure. The reader or player wants to get to the meat of the story, which is the action. But on either side of that middle section on the screen ...
Get Writing Interactive Fiction with Twine now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
