Hello, my name is Phillip, and I'm a keyboarding teacher. I'm assigning blogging to my students as a project based assessment. We've spent two grading periods working on common grammatical errors as well as building speed and accuracy in typing. Now, they are going to be tasked with publishing an article a week while putting their keyboarding skills to work. They are able to choose the topic they blog about, and we are going to post their blog addresses in the hallway outside of our classroom.
Their immediate audience will be their peers, but potentially, it will also be the world. Writing about something they feel passionate about, as well as having a global audience should raise the stakes for them. Hopefully, they will rise to the occasion and produce something through the writing process, that is worthy of public consumption. We shall see.
In the spirit of leading by example, I will be writing about writing.
I write for fun. I love telling stories. The moment of self realization, when I thought, "I'm a writer!" was not only freeing, but also shaping. Until that very moment I didn't really "know" what I wanted to be. I worked a mediocre job and made enough money to pay rent in an efficiency apartment. I didn't have cable. Most of my weeks were spent working a midnight shift as a police dispatcher. After 2 in the morning, when all the drunks had finally gotten home, this left lots of time to sit and read, think, and write. What was I writing back then: Dungeons and Dragons adventures. Lots of writing goes into successfully running a campaign. By trying to write better campaigns for my friends I was building tools for writing without even realizing it. My first audience was a small cadre of four or five friends. Some of them were just old enough not to need babysitters while others owned businesses or had full time jobs. They bought all the cokes and pizzas.
I had to learn to world build. We didn't have much money so instead of buying published campaigns I had to write them myself. What kid of governments were in play? What kind of magic was available? What level of technology was available? You had to know the deities, the major factions, guilds, and social classes. Towns, forests, deserts, and caves all had personalities if they were worth adventuring in.
I learned to build characters. The Dungeon Master (D.M.) has to consider what everything in the world is besides the player characters. Every shop owner, bad guy, guard, and victim must be described by the D.M. A good D.M. learns quickly that knowing what these people are ahead of time makes running the game go more smoothly. Now, there were tables you could roll against in order to come up with a random mix of personality traits. These kinds of characters could be entertaining but usually the were stiff. It was my privilege to create some motivated villains. I had to know why they wanted to do dastardly deeds.
Writing role playing adventures was a strange kind of writing because you still had to weave an interesting chain of events with a beginning, middle, and end, but you controlled everything but the main characters. They have a will of their own in the players, which is why they are called player characters. This is what makes role playing games so rewarding as well as so frustrating. It was this frustration that made me realized that I was, at heart, a writer.
I would weave this tale that would be so awesome if it only unfolded as I had intended. Then the players would react as they chose. Entire story lines had to be scraped in reaction to their choices. I would become disappointed but would trudge on.
Other times, I got to play and would do the exact same thing to whoever was the D.M. that night. Whenever that D.M. would contrive events so that you had to choose the way they had intended you to, I realized that they were no longer running a role playing game, but they were instead telling us the story they had written. I resented them doing that and would say, "Then I no longer have free will." I'd drop my pencil and dice and tell them, "Go ahead and just tell us how this is going to end because now you're just storytelling."
Shazam! I started to build worlds, colorful villains with real motivations, and heroes to battle them with. I got to put in all the traps, lies, and scenarios that they had to defeat in order to deserve to level up, change, and become more powerful and interesting. After that, I sought out writing contests and bulletin boards that accepted short stories and published adventures. My college major was declared as English with a minor in Communication. This is what I wanted to do from then on.
I will alternate this blog between stories I've written, writing tips and tools I've picked up, and also memories about growing as a writer.
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