An idea for story customization

[darkcc]

Hey all! I'm sorry if this idea has been mentioned before, but I was just wondering if something like this has ever been discussed or thought about.

Basically the idea is to have more interactive/personalized stories for the reader. Beforehand the reader would fill in a bunch of blanks, sort of like mad-libs, such as character names, location, clothes the girl is wearing, hair color, breast size, etc. Then afterward the story text is parsed and all of the stuff is changed accordingly. The idea itself is pretty simple, and each customizable part would be determined by the author and taken into account while writing the story to make anything fit.

I'm not an author myself, I just like reading the stories here. Of course custom stories like this would have to be written specifically for this. I think it could lead to a lot of interesting opportunities for one story to reach out to a lot of different types of people, with different types of fetishes and whatnot. Given the nature of the site's design it might take a little bit of work to implement, but shouldn't be too hard with basic html/jscript. Anyway, let me know if you think this idea is cool (or dumb), or if something like this already exists.

 

[Sean Renaud]

Technically that's against the rules of Lit but you could probably side step it easily enough. What you're talking about is a template story which is why it's against the rules. However even a relatively poor author would end up doing a lot of writing to fix things once clothing and slight personality changes happened.

 

[Totzman]

Why are template stories against the rules?

 

[Carnevil9]

This could easily be automated. There used to be a series of children's books where you submit your child's name and sex, his/her best friend's name, pet's name, home town, etc., and the "customized" book is generated and sent to the parents. No sex, of course, but just fun kid stuff.

You could easily make an adult version with just a little bit of programming.

 

[Sean Renaud]

Why are template stories against the rules?

Ultimately because Laurel and Manu say so. I imagine the reason is probably that there are enough cookie cutter stories out there that are virtually identical to each other without making stories that are quite literally cookie cuttered versions of each other with only a few changes.

 

[GorgeousGeekGirl]

Cookie cutter stories: like the 19 year old bisexual blond cheerleader in a sorority who is into older men and gang bangs with lots of anal?

If you look up authors who have published a lot on lit, you will see they do mostly cookie cutter stories. One guy has at least 50 with a bisexual black man. One guy has all anal stories, usually involving a 19 year old blond. The vamp tramps can make even the most diehard Twilight fan say "seriously? Again?!" And my favorite audio story author is always very dominant male.

We don't need any official cookie cutter stories because we are already glutted with them. If you want a particular story type, just do a tag search will all the specifics you're looking for

 

[Sean Renaud]

Exactly. Though the beauty of a custom story is being able to insert what exactly you want. Maybe this guy doesn't like blondes and isntead likes Asians, but same concept.

 

[Carnevil9]

Isn't it easy to copy a story to a word processor, then do a universal find/replace to make it about you and your SO? Seems like it would be pretty simple.

 

[Hypoxia]

Isn't it easy to copy a story to a word processor, then do a universal find/replace to make it about you and your SO? Seems like it would be pretty simple.

Welcome to the modern world. I've been doing that for decades, since I first learned WordStar. But I know better than to let anyone see the plagiarized results.

 

[Sean Renaud]

Isn't it easy to copy a story to a word processor, then do a universal find/replace to make it about you and your SO? Seems like it would be pretty simple.

Well first if you want to READ the story that won't work because you've already read it at that point, it takes the fun out of it. More to the point that will work with a book written on a children's book level anything higher than that and you're going to hit all sorts of snags. I can't tell you how often I'll trade black/raven/ebon or blond/golden/flaxen or bronzed/caramel/cinnamon/tanned so you'd be ait for a while with your universal find and replace on one of my stories.

 

[RicoLouis]

For some reason I am picturing an erotic mad lib with the Editable parts in bold or underlined such as.

I walked up to the door of my RELATIONSHIP GIRLSNAME. After I knocked GIRLSNAME openned the door and smiled at me. "Hey YOURNAME."

 

[Sean Renaud]

That's correct, that's what Laurel doesn't want on her site. I'm suddenly curious why there isn't a website that does that. It doesn't sound that complicated program wise.

 

[RicoLouis]

There is one website that I found that does this a little, letting you put in names and stuff before you begin and choose stuff like girl breast size. But there arn't that many stories on the website.