The Magic Item That Made My Novel Better

One of my favorite things about playing a video game is when you beat it and actually get to continue spending time in the world.

I love story-driven games, but sometimes I just want to keep playing. I’ve beaten the bad guy, I’ve got all this power and equipment, and now I have to leave?

Just let me play a little longer, please.

That’s part of what I was thinking about when I came up with a monster-hunting sidequest for Virtual Boy, the GameLit novel I’m writing.

You go to a bounty office, they give you an item, and you go hunt down creatures, capture them, and get paid. You get rewards, items, money, whatever. It could be a legitimate little sidequest engine built into the game.

But there’s another side to that. The next reward could keep my hero chasing monsters long after the adventure had stopped meaning anything. Cool armor, better gear, one more hunt. It’s fun, but ultimately it can be kind of pointless.

I’ve since abandoned that version of the story and done something else. But I kept the magical item I’d invented for it.

When I first created it, I had an idea for using it to conceal something and to set up an escape. That was a ton of fun to write.

Then it occurred to me that I could keep playing with the possibilities of this thing. If it can contain something, what else can someone realistically do with it within the confines of the world?

I had one use in mind for a long time. But the specifics of a later strategy came to me on the fly. I suddenly thought: Oh, this is how he’s going to get through this encounter.

It’s a trick, almost a cheat move, and it’s fun. It lets my hero beat people who outclass him without simply handing him a bigger attack.

Of course, you can’t do that every time. You need the rules to make sense, and you need a real struggle, too.

I don’t want chapter after chapter after chapter of battle, battle, battle. The tricks help me mix it up and vary the pacing. My hero gets to be cool, then he gets humbled.

And here’s the part I like most: the idea didn’t stop being useful there.

As I continued working out the larger story, the same piece of magic gave me a way to connect things I had already planned but hadn’t fully figured out. Suddenly, the pieces clicked into place.

An item that began as part of an optional sidequest became important to the central conflict.

What I really like about that is that I’m reusing mechanics and upscaling them in a way that makes sense across the world, across the adventure, across the possibilities that exist once you introduce this kind of magic.

I’m still revising the rules and checking for consistency. But this is one of the things I love about writing forward.

I made something because it sounded fun. I kept asking what it could do. And it ended up helping me solve much bigger parts of the story.

Want a taste of my fiction?

Get In Which Grunts Catch a Ride, a free short story set before my middle-grade fantasy novel Mockwing Mayhem. It’s a fun introduction to the tiny guardians of the Grobug Chronicles, and you don’t need to have read the novel to enjoy it.

Subscribe to my free Author Journal and get the story.