I’ve just completed a blog interview (which I’ll link to when it goes live) that brought up a thought that hadn’t occurred to me before. In my youth I was heavily into role-playing games, I even was a game master, up until I started writing professionally. (Used the same part of my brain.)
What it got me thinking about was how that experience influenced my writing. While I’ve had a couple of novels that were consciously influenced by campaigns I played in (Teek and Stranger Inside if you’re curious) until I hadn’t thought too deeply about how it might have influenced how I write. One of my strong suits as a writer is the action scene (so I’ve been told) and I think one of the reasons I do it well is because of my experience in role-playing games. If you’ve ever done serious combat in a tabletop role-playing game, you need to develop skill in visualizing what’s going on around you, you also need to develop some creativity in dealing with your environment (a good GM will always reward you if you manage to think of something cool to do with the furniture during a barfight.) The visualization, the coreography, has become second nature to me until I have a scene fully mapped out and playing in my head before I start writing, and was in fact one of the most fully developed tools in my author’s toolbox when I started a decade and a half ago.
