King of the World

Sometimes I envy gamers, who chase each other around their virtual worlds, fighting battles and razing imaginary countrysides. We writers tend to be odd folks who type furiously at our keyboards for hours to produce a just few paragraphs. Not exactly team players, and definitely not your A-list party folks.

We can, however, get together and write. How does that work, you wonder (if you're not rolling your eyes or snoring at this point.) Tonight a few of my writer friends and I met to listen to each other's latest writing and practice our craft spontaneously. We pulled slips of paper with previously written phrases from a box and wrote about them for five or ten minutes. We timed the writings. The rules are that you don't edit as you go and you have to keep writing, even if you have nothing to say ("I have nothing to say" is popular in this circumstance). Spontaneous creativity can be amazing. Enthralling scenarious often emerge, sometimes even surprising their authors.

Tonight we viewed a one-minute clip of a hot air balloon flying and landing. Three different writers wrote three completely different 10-minute pieces based on what they saw. One was dramatic, one was humorous, and one was touching. Who knew you could have so much fun sitting quietly around a table with notebooks and pens? (I did mention that we writers are odd folk, didn't I?)

So, maybe I don't envy gamers so much tonight. They have to play in the confines of the worlds programmers created for them. Each one of us writers creates our own worlds, like mad scientists, then we sit in our little cubbyholes and mess with our people's lives. We create them, kill them, and manipulate every little detail of their lives. Gamers seem almost benign by comparison, don't they?