Title says it all.
Anyway, never done this before (I’ve written a book, but it was pretty easy). If anyone here has any suggestions, that would be great.
The best thing would be a plot-generator (coining a phrase) that gives me an outline that I could then fill in with my own writing. I don’t have a problem with the writing, per se, but the structure of this. I’m currently using Excel, but… ugh… again, I’m new to this and not even sure if I’m doing Excel correctly.
Thanks in advance, everyone.
I’ve seen other people discuss these and I think what you really want to get the structure is something more like a process mapping tool. E..g Microsoft Visio but I’m sure there are loads.
The structure is essentially a branching diagram - in each location you will offer two or at most three choices so you want to be able to map these as they branch out. The trick of course is that they don’t branch infinitely. There should be perhaps two main routes through the story, with other branches either looping back to rejoin or coming to, as it were, dead ends.
Note taht you can do this structure without any content at all - it should work just as well for the tale of the daring kitten rescue as for the adventure of the vampire’s tomb. But it will give you an idea of how much you have to write, how many significant choices you are asking your readers to make etc.
You might want to start by thinking about what your “completed story” ends are going to be (e.g. kill the villain, redeem the villain, go into partnership with the villain etc.) and then work backward from there and forward from your start to get an idea of the general “map” of your story. There may well be key locations and characters that crop up in different branches, but which present differently based on how people got there.
As Stanislaus says, you really are looking for a decision tree map on which to draft your story. Here is an interesting article on the eponymous Choose Your Own Adventure stories and their structures
I’m enjoying a classic series by Joe Dever where you roleplay a hero called Lone Wolf.
Once you read through one of these, you get the idea.
It isn’t as if Choose Your Own Adventure
and other branching fiction books had particularly elaborate plots. For the most part, any particular storyline only had a dozen or so decisions before it came to some conclusion with some occasional loops (requiring that you maintain some narrative consistency). I used to write my own as an adolescent and would even program them in BASIC to make a very simple, mostly linear “dungeon crawler” type games.
If you are looking for inspirations for plot developments, I recommend the Writer Emergency Pack which is actually kind of tailor-made for this sort of storytelling and even gives you suggestions for branching options.
Stranger
I honestly thought the thread title said you wanted to write a “Choose Your Own Adventure” book for Christians.
I should do that too, and every time they choose Trump/MAGA, I send their characters to Hell.
Yes. This is formulaic.
Get your characters outlined.
Figure out your hook.
And have the ending consequences outlined.
Then all you gotta do is fill in the narratives for adventures to get to an ending place.
Just as an aside: I’d get my kids “Christmas” themed books, coloring books and games.
I found they didn’t want them after the holiday season.
I quit buying them and chose things not Christmas themed.
This is a fantastic resource, thank you very much!
Ordered!
I’m probably biting off more than I can chew. Never tried fiction before: I wrote one very short story (about 1k words), and that was over a decade ago.
Anyway, the idea is to come up with a general story about a couple doing an adventure. Then I’m going to, using GPT (or its variants), create cartoons of people in my life - Inna and me, Sophia and her wife, Max and his wife - in book situations.
Then I’m going to export all this, format it into a printed book, and then make 3 copies - 1 for us, 1 for Sophia, 1 for Max - each of them with their own pictures.
One story, three custom books. Christmas… at least the good gift… will be done!
… at least that’s the plan. Like I said: Biting off a lot here, especially with no experience whatsoever in any of this. 
But, would life be fun if we only limited ourselves to the things which were easy?
Again, thanks to all who have helped!