HOW DO YOU TRAIN TO WRITE?
We get that question a lot.  At conventions it comes up from time to time, but mostly we get it because we both teach writing.  And there are a few answers.  The obvious one is: write.  You can’t be a writer until you brave putting words on paper and letting people read them.  A less obvious answer is: read.  You cannot tell stories without reading stories.  The least obvious answer, and the one we’re focused on here: game.
We’re not talking about video games (though we play those, enjoy those, and story-driven games like the ones from Bioware can help train you).  We’re talking about role-playing games of the pen and paper variety – Dungeons and Dragons and the many games that built on its legacy.
We are gamers.  Our group includes several other writers and even an artist, and we play a variety of games, from the old West End Games Star Wars, to White Wolf, to the Hero System.  We’ve explored the Dragon Age RPG, but our fantasy game for the last decade is 7th Sea.
We’ve used gaming in our stories forever.  When creating new kids for the X-men universe, we pulled powers, concepts and the occasional full-fledged character from a Champions campaign.  When we wrote our graphic novel “The Tomb,” the two leads, and two supporting characters, were pulled from our Stargate campaign.
The lead in our book Bad Medicine was based off a character created for a Star Wars campaign by a friend, who then repaid the favor by working one of our characters into a small place in Star Wars canon when he started working on the new Star Wars universe material.
And our current 7th Sea game?  The miniseries we’re writing now, Dragon Age: Knight Errant, features 3 characters created for that game, including the two leads.  Of course, the characters evolved – first we rebuilt them to fit seamlessly into the world of Thedas (a fun task given our love of that world).  Then they were tweaked based on the notes from Bioware and Dark Horse.
That last part was easy.  The notes we’ve gotten from Bioware and Dark Horse have been amazing.  Clearly, the teams at both companies live and breathe story.  For all we know, they may be gamers too.
And that brings us to another thing you get out of being a gamer (beyond the piles of characters and ideas).  Games build stories as a team – and that can’t be underestimated as a skill.  Creating stories, collectively, is the hidden part of being a writer.  A novelist has editor and publisher notes.  Film is an entirely collaborative medium.  TV even moreso as it’s built by groups of writers.  And comics are all about collaboration.  You have to work together, focused on story and character.  The stories are built as a team – just like in gaming.
So if you’re thinking about becoming a writer and want to know how to train…  Write.  Read.  And game.

HOW DO YOU TRAIN TO WRITE?

We get that question a lot.  At conventions it comes up from time to time, but mostly we get it because we both teach writing.  And there are a few answers.  The obvious one is: write.  You can’t be a writer until you brave putting words on paper and letting people read them.  A less obvious answer is: read.  You cannot tell stories without reading stories.  The least obvious answer, and the one we’re focused on here: game.

We’re not talking about video games (though we play those, enjoy those, and story-driven games like the ones from Bioware can help train you).  We’re talking about role-playing games of the pen and paper variety – Dungeons and Dragons and the many games that built on its legacy.

We are gamers.  Our group includes several other writers and even an artist, and we play a variety of games, from the old West End Games Star Wars, to White Wolf, to the Hero System.  We’ve explored the Dragon Age RPG, but our fantasy game for the last decade is 7th Sea.

We’ve used gaming in our stories forever.  When creating new kids for the X-men universe, we pulled powers, concepts and the occasional full-fledged character from a Champions campaign.  When we wrote our graphic novel “The Tomb,” the two leads, and two supporting characters, were pulled from our Stargate campaign.

The lead in our book Bad Medicine was based off a character created for a Star Wars campaign by a friend, who then repaid the favor by working one of our characters into a small place in Star Wars canon when he started working on the new Star Wars universe material.

And our current 7th Sea game?  The miniseries we’re writing now, Dragon Age: Knight Errant, features 3 characters created for that game, including the two leads.  Of course, the characters evolved – first we rebuilt them to fit seamlessly into the world of Thedas (a fun task given our love of that world).  Then they were tweaked based on the notes from Bioware and Dark Horse.

That last part was easy.  The notes we’ve gotten from Bioware and Dark Horse have been amazing.  Clearly, the teams at both companies live and breathe story.  For all we know, they may be gamers too.

And that brings us to another thing you get out of being a gamer (beyond the piles of characters and ideas).  Games build stories as a team – and that can’t be underestimated as a skill.  Creating stories, collectively, is the hidden part of being a writer.  A novelist has editor and publisher notes.  Film is an entirely collaborative medium.  TV even moreso as it’s built by groups of writers.  And comics are all about collaboration.  You have to work together, focused on story and character.  The stories are built as a team – just like in gaming.

So if you’re thinking about becoming a writer and want to know how to train…  Write.  Read.  And game.

—Nunzio DeFilippis, Christina Weir