Hi there! My name is Austin Palm, and I’m an English – Creative Writing major at Cornell College. If you’re a student, you might recognize my name from some articles in recent issues of The Cornellian regarding our esports teams and what they’re getting up to. Outside of writing for the newspaper (and classes, obviously,) I haven’t spent much time with the creative side of creative writing until this December. You see, late this year I joined a group of my friends to play Dungeons and Dragons. We play every Saturday, and it’s a great way to socialize and make sure we have time to hang out every week.
Like many DnD groups, we play entirely online due to the distance between us. Our Dungeon Master and his wife who plays in the party live together in Indiana, and another player lives nearby. Outside of that, one of us is in Texas, I’m here in Mount Vernon, and our furthest player is all the way in Germany. In short, meeting up in person every week is a little bit out of reach. That being said, I wanted to imagine what one of our sessions might look like if we were somehow able to play consistently in person. One Sunday after we had played, I opened a blank document and began to write. It had been right after a Thanksgiving themed session, drunk uncles and cousin walk included. I wanted to capture the more goofy and casual vibe that our characters had experienced, so I wrote as if we had just finished the session, playing in our DM’s basement rather than on a group call, miles apart from each other.
Writing simply for the joy of it was amazing. I couldn’t even say how long it’s been since I wrote something without a rubric or requirements to dictate the quality of it. If the vibe of something was right, I wrote it. If it didn’t fit then I tried again. There was no time limit, no upcoming peer review, no grade to strive for. I wrote my friends’ personalities and dialogue the way that I know them without trying to create characters that fit a certain role in a story. The only audience ever reached is the group itself, so there was no worries of it being critiqued by the public. I just wrote for four hours, ran a spellcheck, and sent it to the group chat without even proofreading it. Hearing the party’s response to the writing was incredible as well. I was worried that my friends wouldn’t enjoy what I made, but the reactions were the exact opposite. They were all excited to have been included in the story, some even saying that the way I wrote them was pretty much exactly what would’ve happened if we were actually close enough to play in person.
Since this instance of just writing out of the blue, I’ve started just throwing ideas that I have onto documents to get them started. Even if it’s just a few sentences of interaction between our characters in game, or how we’d react to something if we were sitting around the same table together, there’s no reason not to. It’s much more fun to write something for yourself, and if it’s fun you’ll put more effort into making something you’d be happy to read. TLDR: Writing for fun made me realize that writing is fun.
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