If you don’t know already, I play Dungeons & Dragons (DND or D&D). I am primarily a dungeon master now and so that means I have another avenue of creative output. I love world-building, character development and writing stories already and so it has been fun to bring to life my creations via the game. It has made me realise, however, that story telling is a different skill to story writing. Being able to articulate my writing in a verbal manner and often in an improvisational form has been a lot harder to do than I first thought. It’s an entirely separate skill as I’m not simply writing words for someone to read but am rather writing as I interact with them. I’m not terrible at it, in fact I’m getting rather good at it, but it is an interesting skill journey. Learning how to apply my world and characters in real time without fussing too much about control has been my greatest development. I don’t like to think about myself as a “control-freak” but there is definitely more resistance to change when it is something of my creative construction. Getting used to players upending my intentions is the fastest way to shrug off the tension of control and get into the game, though it can be a little heart breaking (⌒_⌒;)

Interestingly, improving these skills have provided me with a more flexible approach to my writing and a better trust in my “improv” or ability to just throw story to the paper and then refine later. I’ve become less worried about the “masterpiece first, practice later” because not much goes as it “should” when one DMs in DND. My preparation for story telling in DND has also helped me develop better plot planning/brainstorming and more flexibiliy and freedom when doing so. Rather than sitting down with a rigid plan, I start dot-pointing the main plot points and then how I want to achieve bringing those about. From there, all thoughts go into dot points. It’s easier to hurriedly write down in a document but is also a lot of fun scribbling it down in a journal where your dot points eventually morph into a giant mindmap of notes. It’s exhilirating, gratifiying and there’s so many “aha!” moments. If I’m ever stuck creatively or motivationally, I start to help get the tap going by doing these “planning storms”. Sometimes if you offer a few small portions of food at first, the appetite will build itself.

DND is also less punishing becuase you’re playing a game in real time and aren’t trying to polish something to make it exciting and palatable for people to pick up on their own. I also only play with people I know and my current group include most of my close friends which means there is little to no issues at the table at all. One thing that seems to be a recurring stake to my heart is that the group seems to always get more excited over DND developments that I improv ( ° ᗜ ° “). All of my meticulously planned interactions seem to get overshadowed by things I make up on the spot and it hurts my overplanning heart (っ,-). It has been a good way to tell myself that I don’t need to push myself to overplan. I still do overplan, to a degree, but I combat it but re-summarising the runaway ideas and it seems to balance out.

So, it has been interesting that the two forms of storytelling work better with different methods. Of course that seems like a given, but it’s still interesting to think about. The DND group prefers my spontaneous descriptions over my (perhaps longwinded) prepared descritptions but I don’t think I would get away with doing the same thing for a novel. But that has made me wonder if I should find a midpoint and try dictation again. Dictation has the limitations of being a recording and perhaps hard to organise or stay on track, but I’m curious as to what verbal spontaneity might give way to interesting writing that I might otherwise not put from brain to paper? 

It was suggested in a forum that maybe putting up sticky notes with base points would help with dictation and I thought this was a good idea. I want to practice dictation for character and scene construction, where I’m given a prompt or one of my characters and I dictate as if I’m describing them to someone else, not thinking too much about how I want them to exist as in the book. I don’t know if this will bring about great writing, but I’m thinking it would be good for thinking more about how I construct people, places and things, and could be a great opportunity for me to practice my verbal storytelling, dramatic flairs for DND and provide an outlet for when my mind gets jumbled and I can’t seem to write it down.

My biggest obstacle is reviewing and editing the audio “( – ⌓ – ). I’m not good at that. I could make it a goal of mine with some easy targets to achieve until I get used to it. I’ve also been looking into apps that record and transcribe at the same time so that most of it ends upt digitsed in text at the same time. Otherwise, it’s not a bad idea for me to then translate my storytelling into storywriting. It’s a good time for me to practice dictation whilst I’m not able to get to my main computer and am on the couch for most of my time. 

Also, happy Lammas! May your first harvest reap well (˶ᵔ ᵕ ᵔ˶)