Art & Creativity Quote by Margaret Weis

Choose-your-own-adventure fiction sounds like a liberation from authorial control; Weis frames it as a logistical trap. Her description of Endless Quest books strips the format of its magic trick and shows the wiring: you "start the plot", then immediately fracture it into parallel tracks, each demanding its own momentum, stakes, and payoff. The casual repetition of "choice" does the work here. It mirrors the reader's branching options while quietly emphasizing the writer's multiplying obligations. One decision becomes two scenes, becomes four, becomes a bookkeeping nightmare with narrative consequences.

The kicker is that dry, almost resigned line: "The author might get one or two choices out". It's not a complaint about readers. It's a revelation about limits. Interactive fiction sells the fantasy of infinite possibility, but the subtext is that possibility is expensive. Every branch has to feel real, not like a penalty box before the "main" story resumes. Weis is pointing at the hidden bargain between author and audience: you can have agency, but the writer has to manufacture the illusion of an open world inside a finite page count, deadline, and budget.

Context matters. Endless Quest emerged alongside 1980s tabletop role-playing culture and Dragonlance-era tie-in storytelling, when fantasy was learning to scale across formats and franchises. Weis, a builder of big, coherent worlds, is implicitly defending the virtues of a single, well-engineered arc. Not because choice is bad, but because too much branching can dilute the one thing fantasy depends on: consequences that actually land.