How to Turn a Short Story Into Interactive Fiction

Every finished short story is a record of decisions that could have gone otherwise. The narrator opened the letter; she might have burned it. The brothers took the mountain road. Somewhere in your drawer is a story whose unlived alternatives you still think about — which makes it, structurally speaking, an interactive story that has been printed flat.

Splinter is StorySplice’s tool for un-flattening it. You paste the linear story; the AI reads it and proposes four to seven branch points — each one a "What if...?" question pinned to a specific moment, with a sentence of reasoning. You keep the proposals that name real forks and discard the ones that don’t. Then Splinter splits your prose into scenes at its natural breaks and scaffolds the diverging paths, and the writing — the part that matters — comes back to you.

The whole workflow runs on the free plan; the analysis and the build are one AI call each against the daily 10.

1. Pick a story with decisions on the page. Splinter works best on stories where characters act under pressure — refusals, gambles, confessions, departures. Mood pieces and pure interiority give it little to fork. If the story’s tension lives in what someone almost did, it is ideal material.
2. Paste it into Splinter. In the editor, open story planning and choose Splinter from Text, then paste the full linear narrative. You are not committing to anything yet — the next step is a proposal, not a conversion.
3. Read the proposed branch points as an editor, not a customer. The AI returns 4–7 candidate forks, each a "What if...?" question tied to a location in the text with a one-line rationale. Expect a spread: usually a couple that see the story clearly, a couple that are technically valid but dull, and one that misreads the subtext entirely. The misreads are diagnostic — if the AI thinks a moment is a fork and you are certain it is not, you now know that moment’s inevitability is doing quiet work.
4. Keep only the forks you would defend. Select the branch points worth building — two or three good ones beat all seven. A good fork changes what the story is about, not just what happens next; "what if she missed the train" matters only if the train was ever really the subject.
5. Let Splinter build, then inspect the map. Splinter splits your prose into scenes at natural breaks and generates the diverging structure: at each kept fork, one choice continues your original text and the others open new paths with drafted starting prose. Zoom out on the map and check the shape before touching sentences — this is the moment to decide where new branches should rejoin the spine. See structuring branching plots for how.
6. Rewrite the counterfactual paths in your voice. The generated branch prose is scaffolding and will read like it. Rewrite every new scene the way you would rewrite a first draft — yours or anyone’s. The rewrite and continue tools can push a branch forward, always as accept-or-reject suggestions; Expand with AI can lengthen a branch that ends too abruptly. Your original prose, meanwhile, came through untouched.
7. Reconcile tone, validate, publish. Read every full path start to finish — branch prose drifts flat compared to the original, and the seams show at merges. Run validation for orphans and broken links, play-test as a stranger, then publish to the library or unlisted by link. The story’s first readers already know the linear version; watching them meet the fork you almost wrote is the payoff.

Frequently asked questions

Does Splinter rewrite my original prose?

No. Your text is split into scenes at natural breaks, but the words in those scenes are yours. Generated prose appears only on the new alternate branches, where it is a first draft for you to rewrite.

What if the proposed branch points are wrong?

Discard them — you choose which proposals become structure, and you can add forks by hand that the AI never saw. The proposal step costs one AI call and commits you to nothing.

How long a story can I paste?

Short stories are the sweet spot — a few hundred to a few thousand words. For novella-length work, Splinter one chapter or sequence at a time and stitch the results on the map.

How many AI calls does the workflow use?

Two for the core loop — one to analyze and propose branch points, one to build the structure — plus one per optional rewrite, continue, or expand afterward. The free plan’s 10 daily calls cover a full conversion comfortably.

Do I need the rights to the story I convert?

Yes — convert your own work or public-domain material. Publishing someone else’s story as interactive fiction is the same infringement it would be on paper.