Righting My Writing

As you've probably noticed, I've been writing noticeably less these past few months. A few key changes contribute to the tightening of my prose spigot. First and foremost, I had been doing a good chunk of the writing at work, mostly during lunch and whatnot, but sometimes not. Work has been kicking my ass as of late, and so the quantity diminished (I've opened myself up to a "quality" joke here, but I'll let you fill that in yourself). Within a week or so, I'm going to begin the first big steps of opening a brand new library, so discretionary time will not only disappear at work, but at home as well.

Another factor is that I had been writing my D&D group's weekly session summaries. Please, click the link and sally forth, especially if you enjoy inflicting bad fantasy writing on yourself. Based on a table-top role-playing game no less. I'll admit it, I had a lot of fun writing those summaries. It was fun distilling a night's worth of adventuring into seven or eight paragraphs. But over the long haul, it got tedious describing three hour long combat fights. Over time, you start to run out of ways to describe someone stabbing, decapitating, or eviscerating a fellow humanoid. And so towards the end, I shifted gears. I moved away from step-by-step accounting of how a fight went and moved more towards focusing on the story and filling in some gaps in-between.

I think that proved satisfying to me, but probably less so for my fellow players. Filling in blanks spots involved me taking artistic license with other people's characters and that leads to creativity and innovation, but also me just plain putting words and actions onto someone else's toon. Not so cool. Not so fair either.

For instance, Cedric the Wizard died the very last session we played with Craig as our Dungeon Master. Thinking about his death, I came up with an idea that I thought was hilarious: have the members grieve for Cedric ever so briefly and then proceed to discuss what a pain-in-the-ass it would be to try and get the poor slob back to town and resurrected. And then ultimately strip his body of loot and leave him lying in the middle of a dungeon floor. You can read the entire summary here, but what follows is the end:

Their foes dead, the party collapsed next to the still form of Cedric. Tears were shed. Sobs choked down. Finally, Gilic said, "Ack, he was good laddy. A wee bit chatty at times, but one of the good ones."

Gareth chuckled, "Yeah. Remember when he thought he could fly? He had to crawl across that blood chamber's ceiling like a hermit crab when it turned out he could only levitate."

The rest of the party laughed along with Gareth. A silence then came over them. Taegahn finally stood and said, "So, uh, what do we do with him now?"

When no one said anything, Shava responded, "We could take him back to Cormyr and perform a ritual to bring him back." Her idea seemed more a question then a statement.

The heroes glanced around at each other awkwardly. After a long time passed, Queequeg said, "I don't know, that seems like an awful lot of trouble. What with dragging the body back, storing the corpse, paying for the components. I heard the ritual only requires a thumb-sized piece of the person, but who wants that in their satchel for the next week?" The dragonborn's voice trailed off. No one said anything.

Gilic coughed uncomfortably. Orchid suddenly chimed in, "Say, didn't we meet a wizard in Seven-pillared Halls? That half-elf with the lazy eye and strange smell?"

Taegahn's face brightened. "Yeah, yeah. Babar, I think his name was. He asked if he could join up with us but we told him to piss off because, you know, we already had a wizard with a lazy eye and strange smell. Hey, do you think he's still there?"

Shava clapped her hands together happily and cheered, "Let's go see!" "To Seven Pillared Halls!" Gareth bellowed. Gilic grinned broadly, slapping the fighter on the back smartly.

And so, the Victors of Shadowfell Keep made ready to depart, but not before relieving Cedric of his notable gear and coinage. The heroes shuffled out of the chamber one at time, Queequeg the last. The dragonborn paused before exiting, turning back for a final look. Cedric, stripped down to his underwear, lay still and calm, seemingly sleeping but for the charred flesh and the blood trickling down from his nose and mouth.

"Uh, yeah," Queequeg intoned apologetically and then turned and left the labyrinth forever.

Ah, reading that again still cracks me up. But I did completely re-imagine the ending, which obviously didn't involve the party abandoning Credric's naked corpse in the middle of a dungeon. Which probably explains why Sean, the dude who played Cedric, was the only one that mentioned anything about the entry. I didn't summarize anything, just wrote an ending that cracked up one person: the author.

A few weeks earlier, I wrote an entirely invented scene inspired by the inane time-traveling nonsense going on in the current season of Lost. The whole thing was based on Craig, the Dungeon Master, momentarily forgetting that Uthlin never bought the crown the party had attained during their adventures. It was a good laugh at the session and it gave me the idea to write a summary where Uthlin hacks the party to death when they don't return the crown they "stole" from him. The summary is entitled "White Light," based on the space-time continuum returning to normal right before Uthlin is about to sink his axe into Cedric's head.

Ah, Lost, where would we be without your time-traveling hijinks. Watching good TV, that's where.

I mention both these entries because they highlight not just the transfer of my writing time and energy from this blog to the game's, but also the sheer joy I got from moving away from straight summaries and into retold tall tales. Which serves almost no utilitarian summary purpose and rivals the creative writing talent of a much sheltered junior high school student.

So I stopped writing those summaries too.

But I enjoy writing. And I enjoy twisting a base event into something I think is funny or ironic or tragic or a good, uneven mixture of all of those. So I think I'm going to shift my writing focus back to this blog. Not only that, I think I'm going to take the D&D toon I'm currently playing, Rend-fol, and write about him. I haven't quite figured out how I'm going to write about him. I'd like to chronicle his current adventures, but I want to shy away from characterizing other players' characters. My initial thought is to start with the adventures, make new names and classes for the other players, and then go from there. Maybe. I'm not sure yet.

Whatever approach I take, let me at least introduce Rend to you. "Bristol Watch Patrol" is the very last summary I wrote for the start of the new campaign we're currently playing. In it, I completely invented a confrontation between Rend and a fellow player's character, Rhogar. It won't take you long to conclude that Rend is a total asshat, which made writing the summary so fun and playing Rend so interesting. The summary is posted directly below this one. Enjoy.