Making Strange Things with Twine

Instructor: Jeremy Andriano

According to its website twinery.org, Twine is “an open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories.” However, as Twine’s creator Chris Klimas says, “you can also make things that nobody can quite pin down.” He admonishes potential Twine writers, “please make strange things with Twine.” Inspired by Klimas’ request, this workshop explores Twine as an eccentric tool for more personal kinds of writing, such as journaling, scrapbooking, note-taking, or letter writing.

In this session, we will first introduce Twine for new users, providing basic instructions for getting started. We will then work through a series of prompted writing exercises designed to highlight the ways that Twine can be used as a hypertext notebook for ‘scribbling,’ for jotting down your thoughts, recording a diary entry, or for sending a note to somebody you care about.

Jeremy Andriano (he/him) recently completed a Master of Arts in the joint graduate program in Communication and Culture at Toronto Metropolitan University and York University. His thesis research explored ways that digital tools such as Twine and Ink/Inky can be used to introduce hypertext writing in traditional creative writing workshop settings. He has an undergraduate degree in English, Honours (TMU 2023), is a frequent contributor to the Unarchived Podcast, and has taught multiple workshops on Ink/Inky for the Electronic Literature Organization. He is the author of Creating Playable Stories with Ink and Inky (2023).