The first time I watched Midnight in Paris, I was mesmerized by the idea of a modern Paris by day and an ex-patriot Paris by night. Drinking with Hemingway, dancing with Zelda, visiting Stein – all of these things and more were events that I had always dreamed about, but knew would never actually occur.

But that’s the power of a great film – it makes the unimaginable come to life before you.

As I prepare to travel to the City of Light myself, it can be argued that I’m kinda, sorta, okay REALLY excited to see what adventures await me. But that trip is still a few months away, and in the interim, I still have several projects to finish and finals to prepare for.

But all work and no play has never been my strong suit. Which is why, when assigned an interactive fiction project in my Writing for Digital Media class, I knew that I needed to get the Paris of my dreams out of my head and put it into my project. Relying on the idea of an ex-patriot invasion from Midnight in Paris, I began to plan how the story would play out.

It’s a well-known fact that the writers, and, well, almost everyone, in the 1920’s were huge drinkers, dancers, and lovers of all things that were emblematic of the Jazz Age. With this in mind, I did a quick Google search of what were some of the favorite drinks of famous ex-pat authors, because I knew that I wanted to start this project off with the participant in a bar and ordering a specific drink, which would make one of the two men nearby to comment on the choice.

Creating the dialogue was my favorite part of this entire project, for I truly felt like I was there in that bar, sitting next to Fitzgerald, trying to have a conversation with him while Zelda went off dancing and drinking. I think that in interactive fiction as a whole, the story has to be engaging, descriptive, and overall, feeling real, like it could actually happen. The same feelings I had when watching Midnight in Paris were the ones I tried to recreate with words and actions, which wasn’t always the easiest thing to do.

I mapped out the different narratives I had created and actually had it completed on a Google Doc before planting it into Twine, an online, open-source tool to creating interactive fiction pieces. While Twine was completely new to me, I was very glad that I had already written my story, since I knew what my different options were and how I wanted the story to connect. As a whole, however, Twine is extremely user-friendly, and if you know how to code, your options for customizing your story are nearly limitless.

For me, though, publishing my story to a site that could host the .html file was tricky, considering that I’ve never done anything remotely close to the field of computer science, but with some assistance of my professor, my story was up and running in no time.

All in all, this project daunted me ever since knowing about it. It was something that I had never done before and was something that I simply assumed would be challenging every step of the way. But when I figured out that I wanted to create a Paris dream world featuring my favorite authors, doing the “work” became something that I looked forward to. And I think that is so important to realize in the bigger scope of life: if you truly love what you’re working towards, it won’t feel like work at all.

To play my interactive fiction game, “Lost in Paris,” click here.

To find out more about some stories behind Hemingway and Fitzgerald, check out this article about their first time meeting each other.