I had just started writing my book, I was maybe 200 pages in and convinced I had struck gold. At the same time, I was also the dungeon master for my dungeons and dragons group. I thought I might home-brew a campaign, which would let me test out my ideas, play around with storytelling in real time, and also satisfy my god complex.
I spent days crafting a villain for my friends to fight. He was an oathbreaker paladin who had watched all his companions die. Cursed to survive, he had joined forces with an evil god of death to resurrect his companions. Typical fantasy cliche, but I was immensely excited by it. I named him Zelam Zessam, and he was going to rock their worlds with the sheer tonnage of his edgey awesomeness.
Anyone who has played D&D knows what happens next. I trotted out my little npc, Zelam Zessam. He gave the evil monologue, flexed his jagged metal armor, and I watched as my friends dubbed him Salami Pastrami and laughed. Cue the snare drum, the villain was now a joke.
Now I look back and chuckle myself, but at the time I was crushed. How could have my lovingly crafted, dark and gritty villain so disastrously misfired? Easy, I had built him to act as a pillar in the story, had, in fact, built the story around him. So, by my own design, he was the weakest link.
Players want to enjoy the story, but they also want to win. So they attack the weakest link, and the best way to beat the villain is to make them a joke. Mel Brooks and Darth Helmet knew this, and now so do you.
I learned a lesson from this, and it has made be a better writer. Dungeon Masters love villains. They are the closest we get to being a player character in our own story. They get to hurl lightning bolts, give evil monologues, and hang out in a castle lit with flames. Who doesn’t want a piece of that? Authors have that same love.
Yet in our weakness, sometimes we fall in the trap of Salami Pastrami. We build the story to serve the cool villains we want to be, rather than the heroes that we are serving. Such behavior should be laughed at.
Instead of crafting a vehicle for myself, I should have built a villain it made sense for my heroes to fight. I should have culled their backstories, found the pain they had built into their characters, and used all those wonderful little things to forge a character they wanted to beat, rather than one I wanted to role play. That is a villain worth fighting for, even at the risk of death saving throws.
I went back to my 200 pages after this experience and looked for other spaces where I was writing something just to be cool, just to have a new toy to play with. I looked for ways to make the villains serve the story, and not the other way around.
Dungeons & Dragons lets writers do this. You can try your ideas in real time. You can see what works and what sucks. You can find out what your readers love and what they laugh at. Without I may have had to wait 300 pages and years later to discover that my book was filled with Salami Pastrami.
If you’re looking for a way to improve your writing, I recommend playing D&D, and playing as the dungeon master specifically. You get to road test your ideas, let others kick them around, and find out how to make them better.