Hey friends! Welcome back, and thank you for joining me again this week. Sorry for skipping last week, and being late (again) this week, but I’ve been finding it more and more difficult to find new and interesting things to write about. I do like having this to look forward to every week, but I want to be able to write about a variety of subjects so that you all don’t get bored reading about the same stuff week after week, and with the coronavirus pandemic being on the forefront of everyone’s minds all the time, and keeping us from being able to go out and interact with others and create stories to tell, I feel as though I’ve fallen in to a rut. The majority of my creative thinking or (to me, anyway) interesting thoughts lately have been revolving around D&D (either the campaign I’m currently playing, or the one I’m trying to create), and I know that most of you are probably disinterested in that subject.
One thing that all of my D&D focus has shown me though is something that, on the surface seems as though it would be discouraging, but in reality is oddly motivating. I have discovered that I’m not as good of a writer as I had previously thought myself to be. When it comes to creating a world (whether it’s my D&D campaign or the novel I’ve been ‘working on’ the last couple of years), with societal conflict, political intrigue, economic tensions, and hell, even interesting geography, I am almost laughably bad. This may be due to the fact that none of that really interests me in the real world, so I feel less of a need to create them in my fantasy worlds. Instead, the aspect I find most interesting about world creation is creating the characters. I find individual’s stories and feelings and motivations and struggles and triumphs infinitely more interesting than whether one country has lifted trade sanctions on another.
I know that there’s a good chance you’re currently thinking something along the lines of “most people’s stories are influenced by the happenings in the world around them, so in a way, in creating character stories, you’re fleshing out the world around them,” and to an extent, you’d be correct. However, focusing on the individual characters brings those issues and conflicts down to a micro scale, and viewed through a biased lens based on the character’s motivations and goals. For example, if there was some old coal mine somewhere that had for decades been a government-run entity, but had recently been bought out by an independent firm looking to grow their business and cut costs, that would be viewed very differently from the perspective of one of the mine workers than it would be if told from the perspective of the president of the mining company. The situation would be the same, but the story would be very different based on who’s telling the story. It’s hard to explain cohesively, but creating macro-level intrigue and settings are much more difficult to me than focusing on the micro level.
Interestingly enough though, to me the absolute most difficult part about writing is coming up with convincing, realistic, and natural sounding dialogue. You would think that having such a focus on character-level creation and development, this would be a very simple task – just make it sound like two people talking to one another. For some reason though, all dialogue I end up writing sounds incredibly campy, awkward, forced, and unnatural. Occasionally I’m able to retool it enough to make it sound more believable, but it’s a pretty heavy lift to get it there. That may say more about me as a real-life conversationalist than I’d like it to . . .
Anyway, what’s the point of this post this week? It’s to say that I’ve realized that I’m further from my goal of being an effective writer than I had thought I was, but that instead of letting that discourage me, I’m going to try to have it motivate me to become better. This may mean that I post more D&D and D&D-adjacent things in the coming weeks, but for now, that’s where my creativity is focused, and where I believe I can best work on honing my craft. If you have any other ideas of things I could write about to help that aren’t D&D related, please feel free to leave me a comment below! For as much as I’m doing this blog for myself, I want to make sure that it remains interesting for you, the reader, so any input is always very welcomed.
Thank you again for joining me this week, and I’ll REALLY try to get back to an every-Thursday schedule starting this week. Until next week, friends, stay happy, healthy, and safe! 🙂
Musings Of A Struggling Creator 