{"id":72,"date":"2026-05-05T19:08:34","date_gmt":"2026-05-05T19:08:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/digitalwriting.cornellcollege.edu\/literaryarts\/?p=72"},"modified":"2026-05-05T19:08:37","modified_gmt":"2026-05-05T19:08:37","slug":"writing-for-dnd-by-austin-palm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/digitalwriting.cornellcollege.edu\/literaryarts\/2026\/05\/05\/writing-for-dnd-by-austin-palm\/","title":{"rendered":"Writing for DnD by Austin Palm"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Hi there! My name is Austin Palm, and I\u2019m an English – Creative Writing major at Cornell College. If you\u2019re a student, you might recognize my name from some articles in recent issues of The Cornellian<\/em> regarding our esports teams and what they\u2019re getting up to. Outside of writing for the newspaper (and classes, obviously,) I haven\u2019t 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<\/em>. We play every Saturday, and it\u2019s a great way to socialize and make sure we have time to hang out every week.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019m 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\u2019s basement rather than on a group call, miles apart from each other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Writing simply for the joy of it was amazing. I couldn\u2019t even say how long it\u2019s 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\u2019t 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\u2019s response to the writing was incredible as well. I was worried that my friends wouldn\u2019t 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\u2019ve happened if we were actually close enough to play in person.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since this instance of just writing out of the blue, I\u2019ve 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\u2019d react to something if we were sitting around the same table together, there\u2019s no reason not to. It\u2019s much more fun to write something for yourself, and if it\u2019s fun you\u2019ll put more effort into making something you\u2019d be happy to read. TLDR: Writing for fun made me realize that writing is<\/em> fun.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hi there! My name is Austin Palm, and I\u2019m an English – Creative Writing major at Cornell College. If you\u2019re a student, you might recognize my name from some articles […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":96,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_EventAllDay":false,"_EventTimezone":"","_EventStartDate":"","_EventEndDate":"","_EventStartDateUTC":"","_EventEndDateUTC":"","_EventShowMap":false,"_EventShowMapLink":false,"_EventURL":"","_EventCost":"","_EventCostDescription":"","_EventCurrencySymbol":"","_EventCurrencyCode":"","_EventCurrencyPosition":"","_EventDateTimeSeparator":"","_EventTimeRangeSeparator":"","_EventOrganizerID":[],"_EventVenueID":[],"_OrganizerEmail":"","_OrganizerPhone":"","_OrganizerWebsite":"","_VenueAddress":"","_VenueCity":"","_VenueCountry":"","_VenueProvince":"","_VenueState":"","_VenueZip":"","_VenuePhone":"","_VenueURL":"","_VenueStateProvince":"","_VenueLat":"","_VenueLng":"","_VenueShowMap":false,"_VenueShowMapLink":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-72","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\r\nWriting for DnD by Austin Palm - Cornell's Literary Arts Community<\/title>\r\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Austin found a new joy for creative writing after a game of DnD. 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