How are you creative?

My creativity stems from experience, my experience comes from life, and I am naturally curious. If something catches my interest, I want to take it apart and learn about what makes it work. Obviously I can’t do that with living things, so that’s just more observational, but I still learn from them.

The longer I live, the more things I experience and people I meet all lend themselves to how I generate ideas. The ideas of other people, the books I read, inform me of what has already been done. Is it something that will make my life easier when I’m working on something or is it something I can improve upon? Everything adds up.

If I’m working on a project at work and I encounter a problem, I usually resort to searching online. The chances are usually very good that someone else has experienced the same thing and they received help with a solution. With those situations I try to learn why things work the way they do and how to work around them. Additionally, I learn how to better search for things which make my future problem solving go smoother (hopefully.)

When it comes to writing, whether it’s for D&D or just writing in general, I pull from all the things I’ve read or watched. Science fiction and fantasy? Plenty of information all across the Internet and in the books I read from such authors as Brandon Sanderson or John Scalzi (my two favorite authors of the last 20 years. If for some reason they stumble across this post, hi!) Trying to come up with magic systems or how to provide some measure of logic to space travel and aliens is easier when you can see the rules and structures, dissect them, and reconfigure to try something new.

Where things have differed a bit is playing Magic: The Gathering. My friends and I love the weeks leading up to the release of a new set because they do spoilers. During that time we look at the new cards and start crafting ideas for how to build around them with existing cards we might already have. This has taken years of practice in playing the game to beat into my head the mechanics and rules, but where I have only been playing for roughly 10 years, my roommate has been playing for the better part of 20 years. So I lean on his brain a fair amount but I also don’t look to make my decks hyper efficient or competitive, instead preferring to go for silly of janky combos that often surprise my friends.

So that’s how I’m creative. I take my experiences and ideas, dissect them and try to do new things with them, possibly in unexpected ways.