Reviving My Creative Spirit Through Dungeons & Dragons
How I took a chance and rolled a natural 20 for inspiration.
“The creative adult is the child that has survived” — Ursula K. Le Guin
In my younger years I was always praised for my creativity. In elementary school, my friends and I had a “traveling notebook” that we used to collaborate on elaborate tales of love and adventure. I would often doodle what I imagined my characters to look like, and tape my work on the walls of my room. My own writing was selected for essay contests, and to this day my dad goes on and on about the praise my teachers supposedly heaped on me during parent-teacher conferences. Perhaps influenced by this penchant for creative pursuits, I have also always been a bit on the nerdy side. I especially love video games, fantasy novels, and comic books; I’m really just drawn to great story-telling and unique settings and characters.
However, as I grew up and eventually entered post-secondary education, my life became more centered around writing academic research papers rather than short fiction. Any free time I would have spent on crafts or playing video games quickly fizzled into either trying to catch up on sleep or outrun the “Freshman 15” that sedentary dorm life forced upon me. A typical tale of the American college student.
In the summer after my first year of grad school however, I learned that a toy store down the road from where I lived hosted Dungeons & Dragons games every Monday. With my interest in fantasy and gaming, it may be a surprise that D&D never interested me until this point. In fact, in my earlier years I intentionally avoided it. I’m sure my prejudices against the game mirrored those held by many: my image of D&D players looked a lot like neckbeards huddled around a table in a dingy basement à la Stranger Things taking out their frustration with mainstream culture on fictional goblins. But a friend of mine wanted to check it out, so I joined in.
Upon walking into the store, I immediately realized my reservations had been unfounded. We quickly joined a group of friendly, patient folks who were eager to show me the ropes. One thing I hadn’t expected about the game was how much of the experience is truly about imagination and inventiveness. Although there are rules and guidelines administered by your Dungeon Master, mostly anything you can imagine doing with your character is fair game. At one point in my D&D journey, my character was a pirate on a flying galleon, outrunning cloud sharks with a miniature polar bear in tow. I didn’t know at first what imaginary shenanigans I was about to get myself into.
It had been so long since I had flexed my creative muscle that I initially floundered with all of this freedom. My first character was ridiculously one-dimensional: no compelling backstory, no motivations or inner turmoil to speak of. I was lucky that my new friends allowed me the space to experiment with role-playing, and as I learned more about the game, I also became more comfortable thinking up creative twists to add more flavor to my character and the story.
After a few months I found that when I wasn’t playing D&D, I was thinking about what I would do at our next session, drawing my character or dreaming up new, more colorful characters to use in future campaigns. Around this time, I started writing regularly again, picking up on old story ideas I had abandoned four or five years ago. I was inspired to pick up sewing as one of my first new hobbies in a long while. Coincidentally, during my last semester of grad school I had a professor tell me she loved my writing, and asked to see some of my fiction work. It was this event that caused me to stop and look back at the year that had passed through a creative lens.
All of the recent growth I had made all seemed to point back to my weekly D&D sessions. I went from never allowing myself time or space to get creative to consciously scheduling time every week dedicated solely to doing nothing but that. Although I hadn’t planned on it, this revival of my child-like imagination spilled out into other aspects of my life, and ultimately made it better. Not only did I make new friends along the way, but I can say with confidence now that I feel more myself than I have in a long while. I’m still riding this creative wave today, and that’s one of the things that motivated me to try writing on Medium.
As I write, I’m on the way home from my second Dungeons & Dragons convention. Even a couple of years ago, I never thought I would say that. I’m so glad that after years of having inadvertently lost my identity as a creative, D&D serendipitously turned me back towards that precious part of my life that brings me happiness. And all I needed to do was get over myself and roll the dice.
