I spent a significant portion of my younger life playing role playing games. I started by making up games and scenarios late into the afternoon while I waited for someone in the neighborhood to play with. It continued into college with an ever shrinking cast of friends who enjoyed the practice of spoken imagination. We told stories and acted out those stories, each of us in the role of a different character, and through those eyes we saw worlds shaped by our own creativity. I’ve written about those worlds and characters for years. Since the play has diminished the creation too has diminished. I used to imagine new realms every week. Now it has been a year since I considered what a world different from that which I already know and write about could look like.
To say there is a connection between play and writing is to say there is a connection between exercise and good health. One enables the other in a very basic way. When you exercise the ability to create you become better capable of creation; moreover, you develop and continue the habit of creation. It is a habit of mind no different than questioning or gathering data. It is a habit of mind that I have long been conditioned to ignore. Creativity never held value in my family. Even through marriage creativity continued to be defined as a distraction from the more pertinent habits of mind. You could say I have always resisted through creativity.
Yet, now I find myself in a void of sorts.
I don’t stimulate creativity in my home or in my family. I don’t lead a culture of creativity. In many ways I do my work in secret; locked away in my office with the work product –even the work process–never shared with my kids. I let them rot on video games that inspire nothing more than repetitive button mashing in memorizable environments which offer nothing more exciting than the satisfaction of reaching a point and a product before someone else does. Where I am made of creativity I give them cold, hard math.
Understanding is always my first step in growing. So, let us see where it goes from here.