Clickable Hyperlinks for Interactive Fiction on Medium!
Advice for CYOA authors
T o all the fans out there of interactive fiction (Fighting Fantasy, Lone Wolf, Choose Your Own Adventure, etc).
Unfortunately, Medium is designed specifically for linear story-telling, but I know a hack so you can create your own interactive fiction with clickable hyperlinks.
Here’s a typical gamebook example where the reader is presented with a choice of where to go next:
You come to a crossroads. Do you go East or West.
Wouldn’t it be cool if you could click one of the choices and be taken to that part of the story?
Well, here are the instructions for doing exactly that.
- Right-click your browser window and select ‘inspect’.
- Click the ‘pick element’ button highlighted in red below (your inspect window may look different to this):
3. Highlight the heading you want to link to:
4. The highlighted line above (in blue) has a four-character code after “id=” — in this case d6e7. (Yours will be different.) NOTE: it could also come after “name=”. Whichever it is, use the code that follows the equals sign.
5. Take note of the code (and any other codes) you want to link to.
6. Exit the inspect window (click the x on the top right).
7. Holding down your left mouse button, highlight the part of your text where you want to link from; for example, highlight East below:
8. Left-click it. A bar will pop up.
9. Select the link (chain) button. A box will pop up asking for the link.
10. Type #5e21 (or whatever the code was that you copied earlier) into the box. NOTE: remember to include the #
11. Publish your story.
That’s it! The link(s) should now work. Repeating the process can produce a complete interactive story.
Here’s the same example from earlier with clickable hyperlinks:
You come to a crossroads. Do you go East or West.
East of the crossroads
Lone wolf walks along the eastern pathway. A bandit jumps in front of him …
West of the crossroads
Travelling west leads to a desert plain. After about an hour, the blistering heat …
