✨Welcome to Vincent Russo Writes ✨

🐉 D&D 🔮 to My First Novel: How 15-Love Started

Hey friends,

I never really planned on writing a book. No lifelong dream, no creative writing degree, nothing like that. It actually started with… Dungeons & Dragons. Yep, the dice-rolling, dungeon-crawling, occasionally set-things-on-fire game.

Four years ago, I joined my first campaign. Everyone was told to come up with a character and a little backstory. Most people wrote a quick paragraph. I, of course, showed up with a full-page essay. My character had a tragic past, a frenemy, complicated feelings about magic, and way too much family drama. I even went as far as writing little backstories for other characters my hero knew (Friends, Family, Long-time crush). Which, spoiler, never came up in the actual game.

That’s when I realized: it wasn’t just the game I loved. It was the storytelling.

Around the same time, I was working in creative production, writing briefs for photo shoots and campaigns. Basically, I had to explain to photo production studios across the country and the world what the vibe, tone, and energy of a project should be. Looking back, that was training. It forced me to get clear, detailed, and intentional… all things that ended up sneaking into my writing style.

Now, don’t get me wrong, writing 15-Love was not all fun and magic. It was a lot of staring at a blank screen while my coffee went cold. Some days I wrote five pages and deleted four. Other days, I convinced myself that maybe I should just stick to character outlines forever.

What helped me keep going were a few free tools:

Reedsy Studio – Like a digital corkboard where I could shuffle scenes and keep track of character arcs.

Story Planner – Templates that saved me from wandering off into plot chaos.

The Most Dangerous Writing App – The name says it all. Stop typing for too long, and poof, your words vanish. Terrifying, but it worked.

They didn’t make the writing easier, but they helped me finish. And finishing was the real magic.

So yeah, 15-Love basically started because I couldn’t stop overthinking a D&D character, got trained by writing way too many creative briefs, and forced myself to type like my words were on a self-destruct timer. Not exactly the glamorous “how I became a writer” story, but it’s mine, and I love that it’s chaotic, weird, unconventional, it’s 100% me.

More soon,
Vincent
#VincentRussoWrites

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