One More Thing - My American Life

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/63/one-thing

Like anyone, there were moments in my life where things start to revolve around one thing. Around high school there were times that my attention revolved around orchestra, or solos, or science, or anything that I could have been working on, or even those rare times that I was a normal kid and things focused on things like fun. I've had a few that have gone up and down, a few that have been bigger or smaller obsessions than others, but this is how I knew, and I mean, really knew, that I was going to go into my major.

Whenever I got into trouble I would be limited to only the basics, school, home, and if I was lucky (or if it was for an extended period of time) the library. No TV, no computer, no friends, no phone, not much of anything to talk about, but I had books and the ability to write.

This is where I have to get down to specifics. I'm not a fan of books, that's not where the obsession lies. Books are great, they're fun, they're interesting, and you can get some good stuff out of them, but where things really kick into interest for me is when I get to create.

Creating a world, creating a story, creating something that no one else has ever seen ever before, creating something that is truly mine, creating something that is unlike anything else because I have ownership of it, that is something that I absolutely love, and the funny part is that it's not just with writing stories. This is why I love D&D so much. Writing stories is nice, but D&D is pure creation, and then letting other people play around in it. Writing you don't get people's moment to moment reactions of what is going on, what they like, and what they don't like from your creation, but in D&D you're right there and you get told exactly what people are thinking as you play.

Now, I'm sure that this is also true for writing, when you finally get published, and there are more people than a few dozen that read what you're writing, but for now, the biggest (and most consistent) audience I have ever had to go through my creations is in D&D.

Recently at work, one of my co-workers has started to read the draft of DA that is on google drives and I can not tell you the pure excitement it brings m when I get a random message from her about what I wrote. It's amazing for me to see that what I created is getting the reaction that I'm wanting, it's making her go through the exact things that I wanted her to go through, and it's grabbing her and not letting go. It's amazing to watch what you created to do what you actually want it to. People say that creative writing is nothing like engineering or building, but I have to disagree, having to do manual labor and at the end of the day knowing and seeing everything that I had created for that day is just about the same feeling as when I finish a chapter and someone reads it and everything goes perfectly planned. That same feeling an architect gets when their building is finally made and kids are playing in it the way they intended is the exact same feeling that I get when someone reads my creation (or plays my creation) and it works exactly as I intended.