LitRPG Writing Tips from the Pros: Bruce Jamison
So, you want to write a LitRPG… Here are 5 things you need to know first:
It’s 3 AM, and once again, you’re wide awake because you can’t put down the book. Your favorite MC is in a tough spot, and you can’t see how they’ll ever get themselves out of trouble and save the world. Then the author reminds you about that ability the hero got back in chapter 2, or those 8 unused attribute points sitting in their status—now there’s a glimmer of hope as the suspense builds.
Against all odds, the protagonist finds that one-in-a-million opportunity, and they prevail. Unfortunately for you, it’s now 5 AM, and you’ve barely got time for a single REM cycle before you have to drag your tired body to work—totally worth it though.
Whether it’s Nicoli Gonnella’s Unbound series, Stuart Thaman’s Forsaken Talents, or J.T. Wright’s Infinite World, LitRPG has taken the literary world by storm in the last decade and deprived Sci-Fi/Fantasy readers of countless hours of sleep, this author included.
Now, you want to get in on the action. You’ve had the perfect story in your head for years, or maybe you’ve thought of an amazing world or a new magic system that’s never been envisioned before. How do you get those ideas out of your head and onto paper? I have a few recommendations to get you started.
Here are 5 things I learned while writing my first novel.
1. A solid outline will pay huge dividends
With any genre of fiction, you need to know where you’re going and where you’re at if you’re want to make the journey without getting lost. Mapping out your story in the form of an outline is extremely important with LitRPGs, because if you don’t clearly chart your course, there’s a good chance you’ll go down a rabbit hole from which you can’t work your way back and have to back track, potentially costing your thousands of words and weeks of effort.
If your story has a significant number of RPG elements, especially ones that are constantly growing and evolving throughout the story, you need a way to keep track of them, and the more detail the better.
Abraham Lincoln said, “Give me six hours to chop down a tree, and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”
Abe wasn’t a main character in a fantasy story, unless you count his time as a vampire hunter, but his quote perfectly sums up how to create your novel. Map it out, get feedback from your peers, and keep adding greater levels of detail until you have an outline that flows smoothly from beginning to end.
I recommend keeping a running update, by event or chapter, of all significant characters as they develop through the story. This is much easier than tracing the entire manuscript every time you need to remember where a rogue attribute came from.
Of course, you can just start writing and hope for the best, and if you can keep all those details straight in your head then I bow down to your superior intellect. However, if your mind is a jumbled mix of ideas like mine, and you want to save yourself hours of re-writes and do-overs, then I recommend an iterative process of finer and finer detail until you’ve got all your thoughts organized.
If you have a good outline, the next piece is much easier…
2. Consistency is key
Consistency is the bread and butter of LitRPG writing. You’re going to have an extreme amount of detail in your writing, and you want it to add to and supplement your story instead of distracting the reader as they try to figure out if “Magic Reserves” is the same thing as “Mana Storage,” or why you have the word “Dwarven” capitalized at one point but not the next.
It could be something as inconspicuous as a colon after the name of an ability or an indent in a list of attributes, but however you chose to build your system, it needs to be the same throughout your book and throughout the series if you have multiple installments. This includes spelling, grammar, capitalizations, formatting, italics, Oxford commas, bold type, and especially any fictional names and places you’ve fathomed. If you use a computer to write, Ctrl + F is going to be your best friend. Take the time to find and replace every iteration of a concept with the correct format.
But consistency is more than just using the same punctuation or capitalization throughout your book. Your RPG mechanics and the story as a whole must be consistent.
Your magic system, your progression system, and the way you use those elements to progress your story have to follow the rules you create or your reader will got lost in the chaos of poor writing.
If your mechanics apply differently to different characters and situations, you have to explain it. Does one character get their powers from a magical rock and another from a deity? Why does one character get 25 experience points for killing a hobgoblin and another only gets 10?
These consistencies can be easy to fix, but sometimes very hard to find. The problem is: you have an idea in your head of how things are supposed to work in your story, but that may not be apparent to every reader. Hence the need for the next recommendation.
3. Find good Beta Readers and help them help you
What is a Beta reader? A beta reader is someone who goes through your unreleased manuscript and provides feedback to help you refine your work. Their purpose is to tell you the good and the bad and let you know if you have a product that is enjoyable to the reader. It can be someone you know personally, a peer in a writing group, or you can even hire a professional Beta Reader. The important thing is to make sure you’re getting honest feedback to help you improve your writing.
Also, did you notice how I changed the capitalization of Beta Readers throughout the last section? Was it distracting? If you do that in your book, your readers will notice, and they’ll spend valuable brain bytes on that instead of enjoying the story.
Anyway, what guidance do you need to give your Beta Readers? First, let’s talk about what a Beta Reader isn’t. They aren’t proofreaders or line editors—that comes later in the process. Beta Readers should worry less about things like spelling, grammar, punctuation, and formatting—unless its egregious or interferes with consistency. Their inputs should be focused on answering a few simple questions:
-Does the story make sense / was there anything that was confusing?
-Are there plot holes that need to be addressed or anything that conflicts with another part of the story?
-Are they sections of the story that need to be added, changed, moved, or deleted?
-Most importantly, did they enjoy it, and what can you do to make it better?
Remember, Beta Readers are going to help you understand if you’ve done a good job of using RPG elements to create your own unique world.
4. Incorporate RPG mechanics into your world building
Let’s create a fantasy world real quick:
Three races made up the inhabitants of the island continent of Isdolor. The Agronians were birdlike creatures with high dexterity and intelligence. They were very skilled with magic, but their frail bones afforded them poor strength and even worse constitution. The Gorgs were a brutish race of humanoid salamanders with monstrous strength, but too little wisdom to facilitate the use of magic. Then there were the Necronoids—the rotting undead that used forbidden rituals to claim the souls of their victims and rejuvenate their decaying bodies.
In this example, how does our RPG system interact with the world we’ve created? Maybe the Agronians have 10 magic points that they can spend per day, or the Necronoids can perform 2 dark rituals per cycle. What if the Gorgs can lift 30 pounds per point of strength? Those are just a few minor details that all come together to show the reader how our mechanics interact with the world and progress the story.
Understanding how those LitRPG mechanics integrate into your world will help you fine tune those details that make your world unique and special. This is something you’re going to parse out during your outline, but here are a few questions to get you started.
Do all characters have access to your system?
Have only a chose few been granted the honor of learning sun magic?
Can any player log into a virtual reality game and interact with the world through a heads-up-display?
When are the elements available: only when they’re in the game, or is there a single reality?
Is your magic system clearly defined and articulated or is it a nebulous idea that’s subordinate to other plot details?
These are just a few examples of something you might need to flesh out in order to understand how heavily to rely on your system to supplement the story.
5. Use RPG mechanics as a tool, not the whole focus of your book. You need a good story first.
Game mechanics are just that, a system of tools to help you tell a story, not the story itself. If you spend too much time on numbers, statistics, item descriptions, etc., instead of progressing the story, your reader may lose interest. They may get bogged down in the details and miss something important.
If your hero spends five pages updating their status or selecting a key ability, but only a page or two in a key battle, your reader may get bored. Don’t interrupt an action sequence to muse about progression.
The key is to have your reader burning through the pages, excited to see what ability the magic sword possesses, or curious about how the MC progressed to their current condition. If you throw in chaff for the sake of having any RPG element, you’re wasting an opportunity to progress the story in a clever way.
However, there is a balance. If you’re going to write a LitRPG, you want to supply the reader with enough gaming elements to support your plot and accurately describe your world. This goes back to constancy. If your reader expects a status block with the introduction of a new major character, don’t leave them hanging.
You’ve spent thousands of hours taking those ideas out of your head and carefully organizing them into a novel. The most important thing to remember is that you owe it to yourself and your audience to create the most enjoyable experience possible.
Happy writing!
For more writing tips and tricks, click here.
Dead Again: No Sun Under the Mountain
Henry already died once. Does he really need to do it again?
Now he's a skeleton with a stat sheet, skills, and an insatiable desire to kill humans. Lurking in the very depths of his bleached skull, some remnant of his old self still remains—and it wants to break free just as badly as Henry wants to figure out how he's a skeleton in the first place.
And Henry isn't the only one. Other skeletons are gaining sentience all over Jallfoss. Is there any way back? Any way to break the curse that holds all of Jallfoss in its icy grip?
More humans are coming, and if Henry doesn't learn how to keep himself alive, none of it will matter.