Tag: author

The Similarities of Playing Magic: The Gathering and Writing Fiction

I’m sure you’ve heard of writing. Question is, have you ever heard of Magic: The Gathering?

Magic is the world’s most popular trading card game (and also its first). Created in 1993 by doctoral student Richard Garfield, the game has millions of players all over the world. Players bring customized decks to the table and battle their cards against one or more opponents.

I like Magic. And I like writing fiction. And the more I do both, the more I realize how similar the two activities truly are. They both feature…

Endless Decision Making

When playing Magic or writing fiction, the player/author makes numerous decisions. In Magic, players start with seven cards in hand, then draw a random one from the top of their deck each turn. As a Magic player, every turn presents new decisions to be made, chiefly which of your cards you should play, and in what order. Your opponent’s decisions will further influence your own.

In writing, your only opponents are time, procrastination, and the occasional cup of coffee spilling on your keyboard. Still, there are plenty of decisions to make, probably even more than when playing Magic. For example: What are your characters going to look and act like? How does the setting influence them? What adjectives should you use to describe your protagonist? What’s your protagonist’s cat’s name (very important)?

Decisions, decisions. In both Magic and writing, they’re everywhere.

Contextual Factors

This is one of the coolest aspects of both Magic and writing: individual components change value based on what’s around them. Let’s start with Magic.

Let’s pretend that Magic cards are game pieces. The power level of pieces in most games are flat and predictable: a pawn advances at most two spaces at a time, and a queen moves as many spaces as she wants in any direction. In no game of chess has a pawn ever been more powerful than a queen.

Magic is a great game (the greatest, in my opinion) because its pieces vary in power level depending on what’s around them. For example, goblins appear frequently in Magic. In some decks, they might be annoying little attackers that don’t contribute very much to the game. However, in decks where they’re surrounded by more goblins, they might suddenly become a lot more powerful.

Everything’s contextual in writing, too! Take genre, for instance. If an author writes a novel about zombies, that author had better be aware of all the other zombie stories that have come before, after, and simultaneously. An author might write the best zombie story ever—yet if it comes out in the same year as ten other really bad zombie stories, it could easily lose value for the audience.

So Many Goddamn Rules

Magic and writing have a heck of a lot of rules. Let’s start with Magic.

In Magic, players strive to bend the rules in ways that are either competitively advantageous or just plain cool. No, this does not mean cheating (though that was certainly an issue in the game’s infancy). It means that players seek ways to combine cards in new ways for amazing results.

For example, consider the cost of cards. Magic is essentially a resource management game: players are allowed to play one land card per turn, and these land cards allow them to play their other cards. The game is designed so that, generally speaking, more powerful cards require more land cards to play. If players can find ways to play expensive cards sooner than usual, they can expect good results.

In writing, there are also tons of rules. Grammar, for instance, dictates how you express your ideas on the page. Then there are the rules of storytelling, which almost always come up when writing fiction.

Of course, as is the case with Magic, the fun part of writing is learning the rules, then breaking them. Fiction usually isn’t that interesting when it follows the template you expect it to follow; it’s often more compelling when the story diverges from established norms.

These are two of my all-time favorite subjects, so I’d better stop myself before I start rambling (if I haven’t already). If you like Magic, you might like writing fiction. If you like writing fiction, you might like Magic. Try ’em both!


Kyle A. Massa is a speculative fiction author living somewhere in upstate New York with his wife and their two cats. He has written two books and numerous short stories, both published and yet-to-be published. He enjoys unusual narrative structures, multiple POVs, and stories about coffee.

I’m A Writer, But How Do I Tweet?

Social Media Icons

For some writers, social media is one of those do-I-have-to? commitments. It might seem like one more distraction from your writing, one more unnecessary to pile onto all your necessaries. I’ll admit it–I used to feel the same way. I guess I just never saw the point in it. Could Facebook or Twitter actually make me a better writer?

Well…no.

But even if you’re this generation’s Hemingway, no one will buy your books if they don’t know you exist. That’s where social media comes in. It’s the best form of advertising a writer can ask for: it’s free, you can do it yourself, and it’s a great way to get a direct line to fans and other authors.

Before we continue, let’s take a step back. I learned what I know about social media marketing from working at a company called TeamSnap. We produce an app that condenses everything a youth sports coach or parent needs into one place. So if you need to know who’s coming to the next game, when and where that game is, and who’s bringing what refreshments, you’ll want to try us.

I help run the social media accounts for TeamSnap. Basically, I post the day-to-day content, answer questions folks might have for us, and drive traffic to our marketing site. It’s a very unique company and I’ve learned a lot about social media marketing from my coworkers.

One thing I’ve learned: people are brutally honest on social media. As a marketer, that’s good information to have; if people are upset with your product, they’ll write angry statuses about it.

It’s the same thing with your book. If you’re an author, the people you should be pleasing most (after yourself and your mom, of course), are your fans. So if you’ve got a character in there that everyone hates–the Jar Jar Binks of your novel, if you will–your readers will tell you. In your next book, maybe you can kill that character off, or write him out of your series by inexplicably giving him a position on the intergalactic senate…

Furthermore, having a direct line to other writers is something that didn’t really exist before Twitter. Let me tell you a story: I happened to tweet about a guy named Paolo Bacigalupi, who you might know as the author of The Windup Girl, which Time Magazine named as one of the top 10 fiction books of 2009. Here’s my tweet:

And here’s the response I got (which I was not expecting):

Yeah. This is why I like Twitter.

Don’t think of social media as some stupid thing people spend all their time on. Well, it can be. But it doesn’t need to be. For us writers, social media is a medium through which we can discover potential readers and fellow writers. At its best, it’s another tool in the toolbox (you’re welcome, Stephen King).

So get on Twitter or Facebook and give it a shot.

And feel free to follow me on Twitter here.

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