In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 204.
There are only six men alive who know what I look like, what I sound like, when I am not August Thompson but Mordreth the Guwop, a high elf wizard banished from the kingdom of Aerenal. This transformation comes each time my “party” and I sit down to play Dungeons & Dragons (DnD). Long relegated to the kingdom of nerds, DnD is a fantasy tabletop role-playing game centered around adventuring, cooperation, and fate dictated by the roll of twenty-sided dice. As a writer, I’ve found the game to be more than old-fashioned, geeky fun: It’s a benefit to my work, offering the perfect relief from the anxiety of authorship and a perpetual source of inspiration.
A great difficulty I face as an author is my almost constant preoccupation with my writing when I’m away from the desk. It’s not that I’m rendered useless when in this overthinking writing-mode. I can do plenty of other things. In fact, life insists I do: I read, go to the movies, get drinks with friends, and, mainly, work day jobs. It’s just that I do all of this with a constant, buzzing guilt in the background, like the screech of a mosquito right behind my amygdala. Life itself becomes a type of miserable word-association game: If someone mentions, say, an adjective I type too much, like “oblong,” or a ridiculous date they had, or any single thing that might be related to the novel I’m working on, the present is robbed from me. I am no longer here and now, instead focused only on what is wrong with my novel and what I should be doing to fix it.
It seems the only time I’m not anxious about my writing is when I’m role-playing during DnD, which is an act of total embodiment. That might sound counterintuitive, given that one becomes someone—or something—other than oneself during the game (look up tiefling to get an idea of just how freaky things can get). But in DnD’s performance I have found a rare opportunity to inhabit the moment, to quiet that buzzing anxiety, to achieve catharsis. The experience helps me to return to the writing desk feeling refreshed and renewed.
The presence one attains through DnD is much like the reflex one feels while playing a sport, which draws on natural instinct and hard-earned muscle-memory. A good DnD session is predicated on the combination of a thorough foundation in character creation (the role-playing equivalent of years of athletic conditioning) and very quick thinking. “Hark the fireball coming to kill you, cast counter-spell in time to survive,” I, as Mordreth the Guwop, might think during a session. There’s no opportunity to ponder my response to another player’s move or to dawdle, lest I annoy everyone else in my party—one of DnD’s true faux pas.
Because of the speed of creative decision-making required by DnD, during sessions I am constantly witnessing my friends, in character, make choices that surprise me. Choices that affect every player around them, that affect the very nature of Eberron, the world in which DnD is set. This brings me to DnD’s second great boon to my writing life: the reminder that characters must live by their decisions. Whether these choices are brash or logical, unethical or just, you move forward, no mulligans. This goes for the more diplomatic side of the game—namely, trying to get quest-related information from the non-player characters in the world around you. And it goes for combat—namely, trying to kill a whole bunch of goblins, ghouls, or other creatures before all of you die.
What I love about this game is that I am constantly inspired and taken aback by the spontaneity and ingenuity of my compatriots, who have found brilliant ways out of predicaments, outwitted noblemen, crushed hordes of bandits, saved my (metaphorical) life. Their decisions in DnD, as in the real world, can be arbitrary, panic-driven, gut-reactionary, or wise. But the result is always the same: Their actions manifest consequences that ripple outward in unforeseen ways.
Unpredictability and the power of cause and effect are easy for me to ignore while I’m writing; this solitary act can lead to a kind of solipsistic thinking if I’m not careful. I can grow overly intimate with the characters I create, assuming I know everything about them, including exactly how they will behave at any given moment. Without even realizing it, I can force my characters to follow a neat logic that matches the narrative I have in mind for them. I can give my characters a do-over. (And I do, of course—we, in the biz, call that editing.) But I’ve realized that is often a cheap way to dodge difficult authorial decisions. If a character in my novel cheats on a partner, for example, it’s tempting to erase all of that in order to make them more likable or to avoid writing about a messy, taxing situation. This is where the dreaded “character arc” comes in. The arc is beautiful in theory but dangerous in practice—because there is an element of artifice to it.
In truth, my favorite people are much like the gnomes and half-orcs I run with during my DnD sessions. They act on impulse, move quickly, are inconsistent. They mean well, usually. They change their minds often. But most important, they are wholly present, doing their best to survive the moment while staying true to themselves. People rarely follow trackable arcs. While playing DnD, witnessing my friends go into character, I am reminded over and over of the joy and importance of making mistakes. Predictability is an unfair expectation and, I think, an un-fun way to live, let alone to write. At the end of the day, spontaneity is what makes people people, tieflings tieflings, compelling characters characters.
August Thompson is the author of Anyone’s Ghost, published this month by Penguin Press. Thompson was born and raised in the middle of nowhere, New Hampshire, before he attended middle school in West Los Angeles. After surviving California optimism, he moved to New York City for his bachelor’s degree, studied in Berlin, and taught English in Spain for two years. He recently received his MFA from New York University’s creative writing program as a Goldwater Fellow.
Art: Nika Benedictova
