Resources

Twine Brainstorming Template: We created this template to help with the highest level of brainstorming for a Twine. It is used to visualize and plan the primary decision point of your Twine, helping you consider the basic actions and their consequences that should be taken to get to your end goal. This example in use shows the planning of the main decision point of our text-based Twine.

Getting Started Tip Sheet: This tip sheet has some basic considerations to make when planning and writing a Twine. You can think of this tip sheet as a condensed version of the tips presented in the Meta-Twines.

Screencraft.org: ScreenCraft, an organization dedicated to providing emerging talent with inspiration and resources to grow as screenwriters, gives readers tips, tricks, and narrative building blocks that can help simplify the process of constructing your Twine narratives. Their resources on character archetypes in particular can make story writing much more streamlined and straightforward.

One Stop for Writers: One Stop for Writers offers a wealth of story writing tools, including a story components thesaurus, a character builder, story and scene maps, worldbuilding surveys, idea and random storyline generators, and other templates. Although this is a paid resource, One Stop for Writers does have a free 14 day trial that you can use to explore everything they have to offer.

RL Stine's Writing Program for Teachers & Librarians: This free writing program was created with educators in mind and aims to help beginning writers generate and develop story ideas, get started writing, and stay on task. It’s aimed at a slightly younger audience, but the activities and advice in this accessible guide are useful to anyone looking to easily create simple stories.

Trope Talk: Trope Talk is a YouTube series that explains common story tropes and walks viewers through effective and ineffective examples of those tropes. Some of the tropes may pertain to stories much larger in scope than you’re likely to write with Twine, but Trope Talk has plenty to say about the more basic components of stories as well.

The Secret Language of Books: A Guide to Story Elements: The Secret Language of Books breaks narratives down into digestible story components, which include pace, storyline, tone, character, writing style, genre, and themes. The extensive vocabulary and clear, easy definitions in this guide can help you figure out what kind of story you want to tell and how to begin describing and presenting it.

The Author Learning Center: Fiction: The Author Learning Center is a library of fiction writing tips broken down into collections dedicated to topics like common mistakes, creating conflict, plot planning, and more. Each collection contains videos, articles, and podcasts to help writers grow their story building skills. You might find this article on story structure and the fundamentals of narrative to be particularly useful when creating your Twine.

Storyboarding Guidance: Storyboarding is important for both text- and image-based Twines. These 18 templates and examples of different storyboards offered by the Articulate community can help you plan all aspects of your Twine, making the process more smooth and requiring fewer revisions later. Articulate also has some downloadable templates available for different types of projects and media.

Twinery.org: This is the site where you can access and download Twine, as well as find links to Twines others have built and Twine creation resource.

Twine Discord Channel: Discord is a chat app that is used primarily in the gaming community, but that doesn't mean it isn't a treasure trove of information. With almost 6,000 members, it's a great place to network, find experienced Twine collaborators, and get help troubleshooting technical issues.

Twine Wiki: The Twine wiki is the definitive reference site for building Twines, containing important "how-to" documentation. Most individuals who get into Twine now will use the Twine 2 version of the reference guide, but a Twine 1 reference version is available for veterans. It also provides guidance on choosing and using the different built-in story formats of Twine (Harlowe, Snowman, and SugarCube).

Twine Cookbook: The Twine Cookbook provides those with the experience and interest using some coding (HTML, CSS, Javascript) examples of code that they can download and try out to help them build more complex and enhanced Twines.

A Total Beginner's Guide to Twine 2.1: This set of intro-level videos can help you get accustomed to building basic Twines created by an English professor at the University of Toronto. It also links to videos for a basic introduction to HTML and CSS, which can help you add more customization to your Twines.

Illume: Illume for Twine 2 is an enhanced proofing tool for Twine. This tool is by far one of the most important add-ons, especially for those working collaboratively or who do not want to write out their whole Twine draft narrative in Microsoft Word first. It adds two important missing features of Twine, an interface for tracking edits as they are made and the ability to allow others the opportunity to suggest edits and changes (although not in real-time).

Tweego: For those who write very long Twines or aren't fond of the Twine interface of using passage blocks, Tweego may be a possible solution. Tweego lets you use a text editor (think NotePad) to write an entire Twine without using the Twine interface. To do so, you must use Twee notation, which can feel much more like coding, so novice Twine users may not want to start with Tweego until they've become comfortable with how Twine works unless they have a stronger background in coding languages.

Digital Inspiration: This site takes a share link for an image in Google Photos and turns it into a direct image link. The direct image link can serve as your source when you use HTML to insert an image in a Twine that will be embedded in an LMS or website.