Just Lauren

The Dungeons and Dragons campaign that Sidney is DMing has been going quite well the past two months. It’s a learning process for all of us as it’s our first 5th edition game and Sidney’s first time being a dungeon master. But Sidney has done a fantastic job creating the world and the story so the bumps are well worth continuing to see where we go.

During our sessions of play I take notes about what is happening and retype them later to create a story. I love it because it allows me to write more and I don’t have to think about what the characters do because we took the actions while we played! I even write down what we say while we’re playing so the majority (maybe 85%) of dialogue in the summaries are what we really said. I do put my own spin on some things of course, to help make the story flow better and because what I write is going to be biased (that’s life), but 98% of what is written is what truly happened.

Just from writing these few summaries I believe I’ve already improved my writing style (it’s been way too long since I’ve written fiction this frequently). Instead of saying “she said, shaking her head” over and over again I’ve learned to just put the action after the dialogue: “she shook her head”. Took me way longer than I’d care to admit to figure that out though. I also learned that writing fight scenes is difficult – how many times can I say “she hit the rat with the quarterstaff” in new and interesting ways? Typing “synonym: word” in google has become my new best friend. In the newest summary I’m working on I almost completely stopped writing notes about our combat. This time I’m going to try to shorten it quite a bit. Probably a good idea as we’ll just have more and more combat as we go along and I imagine no one wants to read page after page of fighting (well, I don’t at least). 

If you’re interested in our adventures you can read our story thus far here. I’m hoping to create a website for the campaign but for now the summaries will be housed in Google Drive.

(For context: I am Pidget, Gene is Eberk, and Elisabeth is Zhira.)