Christopher's Imaginations

I have managed to inspire Chris to start his own blog too and he has very enthusiastically posted several pieces of his own writing there. It is appropriately entitled Christopher's Imagination because Chris is probably one of the most imaginative people that I have ever met (and I'm not just saying that because he is my husband).

At a young age he discovered Dungeons & Dragons and for Chris this proved to be a breeding ground for creative imagination. And in the twenty-plus years that he has been playing D&D he has managed to get all of his friends hooked on it too, to the point that even now they all still ask him when he is going to run a game. Now you see I am a newcomer to the whole world of role-playing games so for a while there I just wasn't getting it. Chris would tell me with great enthusiasm what had happened in a battle (that took four hours to play out!) and how they were surprised by some monsters but how quick thinking and a vast knowledge of spells and smart moves had gotten them through it. He would go into great detail about all the action, who said what and how they returned back to some pirate ships which belonged to them but that had been left for years only to find that a houseboat had been established in place of a serious pirate crew. And all this time I was wondering where these stories were coming from, how did they know what had happened to pirate ships that had been abandoned years before? How do you know what the bad guys are going to say? How do you even know what they are going to do? I mean as far as I knew this was a role-playing game where they made up the stories, so how is it any surprise when something happens? So finally I decided that I would have to admit my confusion and just ask. And in asking I discovered that Chris' imagination is so vivid that he comes up with these elaborate adventures that exceed any game I have ever seen played. He gets so into the game that the story just seems to build on itself.

Last Thanksgiving (American) I played my first ever D&D game with Chris and a few of his friends. And I think that for the first time I really understood exactly why everyone played with Chris and why after all these years they still wanted him to run these games. While the rest of us were sheepishly acting out what our characters might say or do, Chris was in full character, giving detailed descriptions of exactly what he was doing and how it be. "I am teaching a class when you come in to tell me the news of the brewing war in the land of 'blahblahblah' and I step away from the board but the chalk keeps writing furiously." Right, well that made my character's answer of, "uh, okay I will come to fight with you" look pretty lame and unimaginative. But it is because Chris is so enthusiastic about the story that makes it fun, even if at the beginning it is hard to let yourself get into character.

Chris, like so many of us, is an aspiring writer. For a few years now he has been working on a novel called Glevendreal: Saga of the Third Son, the first chapter of which won first place in the "Unpublished Writer Award" in the Science Fiction/Fantasy category of the Golden Triangle Writers Guild 1998 Conference. I have taken on the role of informal editor for his book and have been ruthlessly picking apart each chapter, not because I don't love it, but rather because I love the novel so much that I want him to produce the best manuscript possible. I am so sucked into the story that I am currently upset with him for not writing more! I love the world that he has created and the detail that he has put into it and I am growing with impatience for him to just finish it!

So, you are wondering, why is she writing this entry? You mean other than shamelessly promoting my husband and trying to encourage you all to check out his blog?

I am writing this because Chris' imagination and how he expresses it in the D&D adventures that he writes and the work that he puts into his novel sometimes make me jealous. But the good kind of jealous. The kind that encourages you to work on your own writing. I get so inspired to work on my own writing because I see him get so into his.

A few days ago, I was browsing through the Bas Bleu website again and came across a book called "Living With A Writer" edited by Dale Salwak and the excerpt passage really caught my attention and made me laugh.

How can two writers live under the same roof?...The one-writer-per-household myth seems so ingrained that I have come to imagine that one day, inevitably, our house will play host to a High Noon showdown: Anne and I will appear from offices at either end of the hallway, silhouetted in the glow of 200-watt halogen reading lamps. Manuscript pages will swirl around us in the coffee-scented air, the silence broken only by the hum of a distant fax machine. 'This house ain't big enough for the two of us,' one of us growls. 'Isn't', says the other. We reach for our pens. A moment later, when the ink has cleared, one of us is condemned to become a dentist.--George Howe Colt, husband of Anne Fadiman.

I love that passage. And now I must buy yet another book because what writer can resist a book about the writing experiences of other writers! Oh, that and the fact and I am bibliophile!

The other thing that I loved about the passage is that I slyly looked over at Chris and thought, which one of us will be 'condemned to become a dentist'? Naturally, it will be him ... though perhaps not a dentist ... teacher? computer guy? we'll think of something! No I am just kidding, who knows how this will all end. Perhaps we will in fact be fortunate enough to be that unfathomable entity of the two writer household! And then again, perhaps we will do exactly what we have been doing all along, write while also pursing our other passions. Anything is possible. But what I love about sharing my house with another writer is the fact that I live with someone who understands my quirks as a writer, and my aspirations and someone who will also ruthlessly edit my work, not to put me down, but to help me perfect my craft and become a better writer. And anyone with Chris' level of imagination is a good person to take advice from, not to mention inspiration.