First piece of story writing: A Journey to Nowhere
Designing Branching Narrative
Writing fantasy stories is not as easy as I thought. It is easy to let go your imagination and build the world without limitations, however, it is hard to keep everything within a certain frame and maintain the structure when the story grows longer and longer.
In some way, writing an interactive story is just like coding an interactive experience, you'd better think about multiple branches and consequences before getting started. In terms of this, I think drawing a decision tree / outline map at the beginning could be helpful.
Besides, using variables is another helpful way to keep tracking of the direction and change the story line in a subtle way, other than dividing it by straightforward choices. What matters is to design the whole variable system and make it natural and reasonable by all means.
Story Structure 101: Super Basic Shit
On the one hand, I feel like this basic model of storytelling is a good template for beginners to start creating their first story outlines. It is also a straightforward model with which we can analyze famous stories and movies from the perspective of an author, other than the audience. On the other hand, I don't think a certain template is all good for someone to create a good story. I believe that the soul of a good story comes from its core idea, imagination, and the beauty of language. A good structure only takes a little part of all the features it should have.