Character Creation (not just for stories)

Published on November 17th, 2025 by Emma

There has been a STAGNATION with my blog posts, and I won’t lie and say that I’ve been writing the whole time. Actually, big surprise to no one, I have NOT been writing. A fun fact not yet revealed, I am a uni student in my FINAL year of undergrad. Everything else has been a factor, whether that be planning for the future, the harsh reality that I may not see a handful of my uni friends after graduation, and that I’m growing up.

All of that? Not the best support to get into a creative state of mind. However, there is one thing that acts as my respite, and I have been doing that a lot more lately:

Table-Top Roleplay Games.

TTRPGS are not a new thing for many creative people, it’s yet another outlet to be creative. I have been playing a myriad of ttrpgs in the past couple of months, and frankly? They’ve been one of the few reasons I’ve been able to even function.

I’m in three stories/campaigns right now, but my main focus will be the DND one. My wonderful friend has been running this for a year now, and I’ve been a part since session 1 (one). My character is a human paladin, Opal, and when I started playing her? Very bare-bones. Serves a princess, is a holy knight, kinda stoic, and has an affinity for healing. That was all there was to her.

Now as a writer, you would say “Hey Emma, that’s really flat,” and YOU WOULD BE CORRECT! It IS very flat for a character, she has no motivations, no drive, and no real sense of why.

So I started to do something that was inspired by my fellow players. I wrote a backstory. Without having to think of a world and place to set her in, a character just flowed. A backstory with a family, a personality for her, motives, what makes her angry, what makes her cry, what makes her feel. And frankly, it got me into a writing mood.

Getting to step back and also embody the character in a way that does not require writing, but rather playing a game with friends as–I would say–ignites the embers beginning to fizzle out within my writer spirit. I’d recommend it to writers. Play a game with your friends, you may just find an open door of “oh my god, this totally happened in [insert character name]’s past, I have to write this to share with my table” that’ll end with you realizing you ARE writing again.