How Video Games Helped Me Write My Book

Photo: Goszton

Have you ever wanted to write a book or a longer story, but when you looked at how many words it’d take, it felt like too much?

This was me, and it’s taken me two decades to get to where I am today with my writing. But now I have a book in its third draft along with several published short stories.

Let me share with you two things that have helped me immensely to overcome this feeling, and how an online game, RuneScape, laid the foundation for what ultimately unlocked my writing potential.

(Also, I’ll be sharing early access to a super secret project at the end for newsletter subscribers. Plotters and Planners, you definitely don’t want to miss this).

You can also listen to this read by me here:

Laying the Foundation with RuneScape

It may not come as a surprise to some of you, but I love video games. There’s something magical about being transported into another universe to explore and go on adventures in.

Growing up, one of my favorites was a game called RuneScape, where you had a character with a bunch of different RPG type skills to level up, quest, and explore. Being a person who likes to make things, I was drawn to the smithing skills (making metal and armor). Specifically, it was a set of Runite plate armor I had my eyes set on. This (at the time) was the best armor you could get in the game.

So I set out to make my Runite armor, but having just started, I only was level 1 in many of my skills. In order to make Rune armor you needed to be very high level in smithing. The first few levels went by pretty well. But as I progressed, it got slower, harder, and more complex.

After a while, I decided to see how much experience I would need. At this point I had a few thousand experience after hours of play, so I figured it couldn’t be much more. The total amount needed? Over 4 MILLION exp.

I tried to keep going a bit further, but after another few weeks I gave up. The task was too big, it seemed, and it felt like I wasn’t making much progress.

How it Relates to my Book Writing

Does this sound familiar? If not, let me share with you how this same problem is one many of us writers face and the two things that helped me to overcome what seemed like insurmountable goals.

When I set out to write my first book a few decades ago, I knew roughly what I wanted to write and how many pages I wanted it to be. Not knowing how to approach it, I winged it, and I got about 10,000 words deep into my manuscript.

It felt good to get words on the page, but then I looked to my goal of 100,000 words (or roughly 350 pages), and it felt like a number too high to achieve. I couldn’t get past the mental barrier of how much was left remaining. So I put it down.

I tried again a few months later, and made it even less progress, only a few thousand words, before yet again I gave up. It seemed like it was impossible to write 100,000 words or that it would take a crazy amount of time.

If this sounds like you, this next part unlocked it for me and has enabled me to write many thousands of words across all my stories.

Unlocking Your Writing Potential

The first method I’ve learned, was taking a huge project and boiling it down into a simple concept, and then expanding on it. It’s based on the Snowflake method, with a bit of my own personal spin to it. (you can read up more on that here.)

But the second way was something that RuneScape unlocked, and it’s a single word: Math. Well, a few more words to explain it, but that’s the core.

I had always looked at the big number at the end of my writing path and it seemed too difficult. In RuneScape, I felt intimidated by the massive number of 4 million experience, and so I never tried because I felt like it was too much. In a similar way, with my books, I felt like 100k words was too high a bar to reach.

But if I took that same number, and broke it down, suddenly that millions of XP (or thousands of words) didn’t seem so impossible.

If we take the book example, 100,000 words. And break it down into parts.

Over four months, you have 25,000 words per month. Still a big number, especially as you’re starting out, but lets break it down further.
Divide that by four weeks, and you have 6,250 words per week. Getting closer, but lets go one more level down.
Divide that by three sessions a week, now you’re at 2,000 words per session.
At an average speed of 35 words per minute, that is around 60 minutes of writing.

With that math done, another you way you could say it, if you start at the time this is published,

Writing three times a week
for around an hour,
over the next four months,
you will have a finished draft by the end of the year.

Wow! That sounds way more doable.

Closing

Now, not everyone has three hours a week to write and maybe some people write faster or slower. But the point here is that you can take large goals, break it down into smaller more achievable milestones, and pick away at it over time.

In this way, after decades of trying, I was able to finally finish a book draft and I can’t wait to get into my next. (As an aside, I did finally level up my smithing in RuneScape and actually achieved level 99, which is well over 5 million experience).

If you want to learn from what I’ve found helpful to help make your writing journey a little easier, or just someone to encourage you along the way,

Subscribe to follow along, as you walk out your writing journey.

Most importantly,

Keep writing, and stay creative.

Sneak Peek!

If you enjoyed that word math, and are someone who, like me, enjoys planning things out and seeing how you’re doing over time, I have a special sneak peek for newsletter subscribers.

And if you’d like to see the latest releasing Indie books, check out the Indie Release Radar!