Choice of a lifetime

When Phil Isles '03 — then a senior in high school — began writing what would become his first full-length novel, he had no idea how the project would end.

The recent publication of his choose-your-own-adventure novel, "Polyverse," however, has fulfilled a childhood dream and brought his written work into the public eye.

Isles' book — published in August and marketed by buybooksontheweb.com — will be sold in about two weeks on both amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com, though it is not available in bookstores.

Isles said he has always known he wanted to be a writer. And the sophomore has pursued this passion during his time at Princeton. As part of the University's creative writing program, he has worked with professors A.J. Verdelle and Chase Twichell.

Though Isles started his novel before coming to Princeton, he wrote the majority of the book this past summer while attending a Harvard University creative writing program. As part of the admission procedure for the program, Isles sent the school the first 40 pages of his work.

And while at the six-week program, he fleshed out the ideas that had been circulating in his mind for years.

One of the distinguishing features of Isles' work is its choose-your-own-adventure form, a style he said he feels works well for today's reader.

"People who read novels today can't pay attention for more than 15 minutes," he said. While choose-your-own-adventure books traditionally are aimed at children, Isles said he is targeting an adult audience.

Because of readers' short attention spans, Isles said he believes the novel's form "accommodates the way people read today."

In addition, the young author said he always had a hard time bringing his longer stories to a single conclusion. In the choose-your-own-adventure style, though, several hundred conclusions are possible.

"My biggest hope is that the specific story will tailor itself to the reader," he said.

As "Polyverse" opens, the book's main character — a boy named Phaedrus — walks into an evening party at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he sees his father and also meets a mysterious woman.

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At the end of the first chapter, the reader is confronted with the first decision of the adventure: to talk in safety with his father or to leave adventurously with the woman he has just met.

The choice presented at the end of the first chapter is indicative of the choices the reader faces through the rest of the book — a choice between love and fear.

Isles said he hopes readers will learn from the choices they make in reading the novel. In this book, he will be "teaching people how to love, and why not to choose fear in the decisions that they make," Isles said.

Isles said he hopes his story and its lesson will not end with this novel. In fact, he intends to follow "Polyverse" with a sequel. As yet, however, the second part remains unwritten.

For the time being, Isles said he hopes a bigger publisher will pick up his work, market this first book and publish the second. He said, though, that he envisions the sequel in a form opposite to that of his first story. Whereas the first story began at one narrative point and diverged into many possible endings, the second will pick up where these endings left off and conclude at a single point.