As a storybuilder your main occupation is creating the storyworld's Verbweb, which defines the story's dramatic possibilities. To begin, you decide the Verbweb's topic. For our example, let's suppose you choose the topic of adultery.

The next step is choosing your theme. The theme is the message you wish your storyworld to convey (some theorists call it the story's "dominant"). It's true that in traditional storytelling a good artist rarely starts with deciding on a theme - that just flows naturally out of his or her subconscious as the story is woven. In interactive storytelling, however, the need to communicate your vision to the computer means that you have to be more reflexive than other artists - that, perhaps, is the greatest challenge of this field.

The theme can't be too narrow. For example, the theme "Adultery is a bad thing" is too narrow. To support this theme, all we need is to tell a story of the spouse who rejects temptation and lives happily ever after. Not only would this not be an interesting story, it would also not allow the player any room for volition, because there would be only one right way to play it out. Apart from that, this would also be a manifestly false depiction of adultery, because if it were that simple nobody would ever do it, agonize over it, fantasize about it, or, indeed, tell stories about it.

A good theme, like a good story, and like any interesting facet of the human condition, is about a collision of desires. And when desires collide, there are always negative repercussions, no matter what choice you make. The spouse who rejects temptation will always wonder at the opportunity that was missed. Sexual tension between the partners might well rise as the saintly spouse realizes that the marriage relationship lacks the sexual passion that beckoned in the affair.

Along those lines, a better theme might be: "Adultery represents a collision between marital duty and sexual desire". We can reformulate this in more colliding terms: "Adultery represents a collision between marital duty and sexual growth." Or: "Adultery pits love for spouse against sexual learning". We're looking for the expression that presents each of the colliding desires in its most appealing form, while also accentuating the stress between them. This, of course, depends on your interpretation of the human condition, and as such no storybuilding decision is more intimately yours than your storyworld's theme.

Once you've identified the emotional conflict you want to depict, you're ready to create the Verbweb to play it out with. The best place to start is to imagine all the possible resolutions for said conflict:

Sexual satisfaction, happy marriage retained at price of self-delusion.
Sexual satisfaction, secrecy maintained, slight tinge on marriage.
Sexual satisfaction, but marriage undergoes painful crisis that makes it stronger.
Sexual satisfaction, but marriage slowly disintegrates.
Sexual satisfaction, but marriage suddenly collapses.
Sexual satisfaction, but severe guilt triggers internal crisis.
Sexual satisfaction, but illicit partner demands that adulterer get a divorce.
Sexual satisfaction, but spouse retaliates with counter-affair.

Partial sexual satisfaction plus all of the above possibilities.
Unrewarding sexual experience, plus all of the above possibilities.
Slippery slope to near adultery, plus many of the above possibilities.
Nonadulterous dalliance, plus some of the possibilities above and below.

Strict fidelity, but sexual resentment destroys marriage.
Strict fidelity, but sexual resentment weakens marriage.
Strict fidelity triggers sexual demands that lead either way.
Strict fidelity followed by counter-affair by spouse.
Strict fidelity, rewards from grateful spouse.

This is by no means a complete list of all the imaginable resolutions, but it's enough to make a rich storyworld.

The next step is to list some openings. These will not be as dramatically important as the resolutions, but they provide a useful intermediate step in the outlining process. In this case, all the openings are essentially the same: guy meets gal. The only variations possible are in the context of the meeting. Guy meets gal in bar, at the bowling alley, in the supermarket, at work, etc.

Now we get right down to the main work - defining how the story can get from the openings to each of the endings. However, remember that this isn't an exercise in writing stories when you have defined beginnings and ends - if you think of it that way, each separate story you'll create will have that "sweeping narrative" sensation to it, that is, the inexorable directionality that makes us unable to even imagine alternate routes the story could take. This feeling is vital to create suspension of disbelief in traditional stories, but here we have interactivity to provide for that. And to make the interaction interesting, the player must constantly be making interesting decisions. In other words, he or she must be making difficult, closely balanced decisions. Far from being inexorably drawn towards one course of action, the player should constantly be agonizing over what to do next.    

Towards that end, we try to imagine all the interesting dramatic moments that can exist between a beginning and each of the endings, moments where it's unclear what path to take, and where each decision has negative repercussions in accordance with our theme. There are a lot of possibilities. As for the adulterous affair, we can imagine fantasizing about illicit affairs, serious eye contact, dancing together, private but nonsexual meetings, being together in the presence of a bed, flirtation, dalliance, getting-to-know-you, exploratory behaviors, preliminary behaviors, greater intimacy and actual adultery. There should also be some dramatic situations depicting the sexual frustration that drives the player toward adultery. These cover the player's relationship with his or her spouse, its daily grind and boredom, its lack of passion. These develop even as the potential affair brews.

Of course, we also need some dramatic components like Actors and Stages. After creating the Verbweb, we are better equipped to create these components, because we know what behaviors will be available and how we want each component to behave.  

To summarize, here is an outline of the crucial steps in storybuilding:

1. Establishing a topic.
2. Determining a theme, expressed in terms of the internal conflict that the player is meant to experience.
3. Listing many possible outcomes of such a conflict.
4. Listing many possible openings for such a conflict.
5. Listing many possible intermediate dramatic situations where the internal conflict comes to a head. In each of these, the player must choose from among several courses of action, each of which has serious repercussions.
6. For each such situation, adding the Verbs that make it up, linking them to each other and creating the other necessary dramatic principles.
7. Creating the dramatic components necessary for this Verbweb.