Hello team!
Today I wanted to talk about a significant influence in my writing that could be considered unique: Dungeons & Dragons. In the fourth grade, I read Lord of the Rings and the Redwall series during countless sessions of recess. The love of the fantasy genre was the focal point in inspiring me to write and aided in developing as a writer. When it comes to good storytelling, I owe a great deal of credit to dungeons and the dragons that may or may not reside within them.
After re-reading Lord of the Rings began render a diminishing return on feeling whimsically fantastic, I sated the thirst by forcing my friends to play D&D campaigns I developed for years to come. I'd like to say that I'm the type of Dungeon Master capable of pulling together a compelling plot that fully engages all those involved. That would be a lie however, and most of my planning would fall apart a few hours into the first session. It's almost impressive how quickly your friends will abandon a noble quest in favor of enslaving a boat full of orphans and throw a bard into a pile of burning lumber...
Anyway, when your characters are constantly changing the events of the story on you, it teaches you to be a more adaptive storyteller. If a player character's pet boar randomly kills a character essential to the plot, then you need to be dynamic and change the scope and spectrum of the plot (this is an actual example of what happened).
The same can be said for webcomic writing. Since we're more or less creating a comic every week at the moment, we can only plan out a panel so much. Though we have a completed script, there is a fair amount of condensing and rearranging; a lot of which is done as late as a few hours before we make the actual update. I still do a fair share of staring at the screen, but honestly the past few months of dialogue were cooked up relatively on the spot from my mind brain. It is by no means the ideal way to write, but it is often what ends up happening when reality flips over your breakfast table and kidnaps your son...wait what?
This quickened process is by no means a solitary exercise. After all, Dungeons and Dragons is contingent on teamwork and interacting with other players. Improv comics have a rule called "Yes, and..." that applies similarly. The idea is that to keep a sketch running, you affirm your partners idea and run with it as opposed to shooting it down in order to assert your own input. Most of the fun in a campaign comes from serving an event to the player, letting them take it in a certain direction, and then react accordingly. It's more interesting to work alongside the journey of a character than stomp them to pieces for deviating from the linearity of your story.
Just the same, Katy and I adapt each other's mode of storytelling to one another so that the plot frames the artwork, and the art in turn informs the dialogue. There is a lot of back-and-forth between the two of us as we work on each aspect. I find that our best panels come from a long-discussed compromise or a very positive sequence of ideas communicated between us.
Writing is bolstered by your experiences and your ability to recollect them, but it certainly helps to have an ability to pull things out of your brain on short notice. I'd say more than anything else, working within severe limitations can sharpen your creative skills quickly. I have D&D to thank for teaching me to create with otheres when time is a very limited.
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