Writers Not Writing: How Dungeons & Dragons helps Kat Lewis access her creativity
The Substack Bestseller author talks six-hour work days, videogames, and everyone's favorite tabletop RPG.
You’re reading Soft Hobbies, a weekly newsletter for creatives in all mediums, with a special focus on writers. Here you’ll find resources to nurture your creativity, advice to overcome perfectionism, and inspiration to make time for art. I’m Auzin, a Seattle-based writer in the fiction, poetry, and tech spheres. Feel free to visit my author website or check out my socials.
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Writers Not Writing is a series where I interview my friends and peers who are professional writers about their non-literary hobbies. I believe that doing hobbies outside of reading or writing is healthy, inspiring, and fulfilling for people who write as their main job.
Kat Lewis is a fiction writer and video game narrative designer based in Tampa. She is the founder of Craft with Kat, a bestselling Substack newsletter with practical craft lessons for writers. Her debut novel, Good People, is forthcoming from Simon & Schuster.
I adore Kat’s newsletter and consider it essential reading for fiction writers, so I was thrilled when she agreed to be interviewed for this series. This is a long post with a 15-minute read time—I’ll let you dive right in! Hope you enjoy our chat.
Soft Hobbies: Hi, Kat! I would love to know, what are the main aspects of your writing life?
Kat Lewis: For the last three years I was living in South Korea, where I worked as a videogame writer. I moved back to the US a couple months ago, so right now, I am writing full-time, which honestly means I'm just intentionally unemployed and living off savings.
And I'm working on my book, Good People, which is forthcoming from Simon & Schuster. It's slated for [publication] next summer but I don't know when officially yet, so I’m waiting to hear back for next steps. I'm actually working on my second book with my agent right now. Outside of that, I run a Substack called Craft with Kat, a best-selling newsletter on Substack with practical craft lessons for writers. I publish that every week on Sundays, so my time is split between novel writing and content creation for Substack.
Soft Hobbies: What non-literary hobbies do you enjoy, and how long have you been doing them?
Kat Lewis: I kind of split my free time between videogames and playing Dungeons & Dragons. I've been playing videogames since I was probably about three or four years old. I think I can credit the fact that I'm literate and able to read to the Pokemon games.
My first game was Pokemon Yellow. And I'd go up to my mom with my GameBoy and be like, what does it say? She was like, “just fucking read it?” [laughs] So that’s kind of how I got motivated to learn how to read before I was like, in kindergarten.
Soft Hobbies: That’s amazing.
Kat Lewis: Yeah, big Pokemon fan. And then for Dungeons & Dragons, when the pandemic started, me and my college friends started playing on Discord twice a week, and just kept campaigns going for the last five years. Our group chat is still called Dungeons & Distance.
These days I'm nomadic, mostly just traveling with my Mac, so I can only really play what runs on Mac, which is not very much. So right now, it's just The Sims and Baldur’s Gate 3, but mostly D&D is my main hobby.
Soft Hobbies: Very cool. D&D is fun because it's almost like collaboratively writing a story together.
Kat Lewis: Yeah, exactly. It's writing adjacent.
Soft Hobbies: I would love to know how your hobbies integrate into your day or week. When do you do them? How do you make time for them?
Kat Lewis: Since I'm writing full-time now, I write about six hours a day. So I do three hours in the morning, three hours in the afternoon, and break for about two hours, like around lunchtime. I like to listen to a Dungeon & Dragons podcast while I'm eating lunch, and it kind of breaks up my day and inspires my afternoon writing session.
Some of the podcasts that I'm listening to right now are Dungeons and Daddies, which is, like, my favorite one. It's so funny, and I can't recommend it enough. It really got me out of a creative rut a couple years ago. I also like Worlds Beyond Number. And then in the evenings, I watch Dimension 20 on Dropout with my partner.
I like that because when I'm deep in a novel project, like I am right now, it's hard for me to relax and watch television or movies without subconsciously analyzing the structure and the scene craft and figuring out how their execution of storytelling can help me solve problems in my own work. So then it doesn't really feel like free time, but a Dungeons & Dragons podcast is so improv-based, and improv is a completely different mode of storytelling, so I can kind of turn off and just enjoy and be entertained, and not come to the work as a writer trying to figure out how to be a better writer.
Soft Hobbies: That's fascinating. You're so structured with your writing schedule, I really respect that. Did you build that over a period of years, or did your MFA program help?
Kat Lewis: I had to take a break one year into my MFA program because I had gotten a Fulbright in South Korea. So the first year I lived in South Korea, the US government funded me to research a novel about Korean folklore, which is hopefully going to be my second book. That's the book that I'm working on right now.
When I arrived in Korea, there was no plan or anything that the Fulbright gave me, and my time was completely my own. I recognized that this might be the only time in my life where I wake up and the only thing I have to worry about is feeding myself and writing my book. So I was not going to squander that opportunity, because, like, you're very fortunate if you even get a week of residency to do something like that.
With the bad jet lag— I moved from San Francisco to Seoul —I was waking up at 6am so I was like, “Okay, let's just keep this [schedule].” I wake up at 6am, I'm in the chair. I work for three hours, break for breakfast, work for three more hours. And then I just kept that during the summers of my MFA program. And now, I don't have anything else to do and I'm just unemployed.
Soft Hobbies: So it’s a six-hour work day of writing right now?
Kat Lewis: Yeah, six-hour work day. Sometimes when I tell people that, they think I'm generating new pages for that whole time, but that's not what I'm doing for six hours. Some of it is planning; I'm a big plotter over a pantser. Some of it is applying to residencies, applying for grants, doing different admin things like communicating with my agent, talking to my editor about my upcoming release. But I would say at least four of the six hours, I'm actually at the computer working on the book, and then there's another two hours that are for planning or admin stuff.
Soft Hobbies: Cool. Back to hobbies — do you sacrifice anything or reschedule anything to make time for your hobbies?
Kat Lewis: When I was in Korea and I had the time difference, me and my friends were playing our Dungeons & Dragons campaign for, you know, twice a week for many years. And I really didn't want me living abroad to mess that up. So that meant me getting up and being in my chair on our Discord server at 8am on my Saturdays and Sundays.
So sometimes I was coming back from a night out with my friends in Korea, and the sunrise was pinkening the horizon. And I crash for three or four hours, and then I'm off to play Dungeons and Dragons. Really silly, because I'm, you know, losing sleep just to pretend to be a wizard. But that was a really important time for me, because I lived on the other side of the world. I had no idea when I was going to see my friends again, and so that was the connection I had with them.
Soft Hobbies: What have you learned from your hobbies that are applicable to your literary life?
Kat Lewis: I DM-ed for the first time a couple months ago, and I swear those two hours of DMing taught me more about storytelling than either of my fancy creative writing degrees. I think the main thing I learned, and this is something I also learned while working on video games, is that the player needs something to do. Your protagonist needs something to do.
I write literary fiction, and I went to very literary-fiction-minded programs, and they don't teach you how to write plot. So for years, I was writing these stories where it's just characters sitting in a room talking, and it's a total snoozefest. When you're working in isolation, you can't quite see that, but when you're DMing you have five real human beings who are your players sitting in front of you. And they're role-playing through a conversation with a bartender at a tavern, shit gets old really quickly, and so you have to give them something to do.
Every player, every character, protagonist, however you want to think about it, needs something concrete that they can win, stop, escape, or retrieve by the end of the story. And then you add complications, obstacles in front of them, consequences if they fail. So D&D has made me really, really critical of my own character development and my own writing, where I literally won't let myself start writing pages unless I know who my protagonist is and what she wants to win, stop, escape, or retrieve by the end of the story. Who is trying to stop her and what happens if she fails?
If I don't know those things, I'm just gonna write, you know, pages of people sitting in a room talking, and it might be funny, there might be banter and stuff, but it's just not a good story.
Soft Hobbies: Yeah, absolutely. This is so full of gold. I feel like you're an athlete, but with writing.
Kat Lewis: I appreciate that.
Soft Hobbies: I'm really curious about what draws you to literary fiction versus fantasy or sci-fi, because it seems like a lot of your outside writing interests are very like, fantasy adjacent?
Kat Lewis: The short answer is academic trauma, honestly. I'm very fortunate that from a young age, I knew exactly what I wanted to do. When I was about 15, I wrote my first novel with NaNoWriMo. You know, it's like 50,000 words of junk. But my parents saw that, and they were like, “Okay, this is what you want to do. Here are the universities you should apply to for creative writing and everything like that.”
When I got to college, I originally wanted to be a horror writer, and I would submit my stories about zombies and different horror things, and I would just be ridiculed by my professors, my classmates and everything. They would be like, “This isn't art. This is low-brow, and you need to write literary fiction.” It was a really horrible situation.
I really didn't want to deal with that negative feedback, because instead of talking about craft, like how I can use flashback better or make an authentic voice for my narrator, they would say, “Why does the story have werewolves in it?” And that's not helpful.
So instead of doing that, I wrote these ridiculous, over-the-top literary fiction stories about this college student who was a white girl raised by a Black family and a high-functioning alcoholic. And of course I got good feedback on that. Then one professor pulled me into his office hours and said “Let's talk about your stories. I think you have a novel with this character, Jo.” I was 20 and a piece of shit, so I kind of laughed in his face and was like, “I'm a horror writer. I just write this junk for class.” I had an attitude about it.
About a year later, after I graduated from college, I had about three months to figure out what I was going to work on before my MFA program. I took out those short stories, and ended up working on them a lot. I would read literary fiction to figure out a better way to do satire and make fun of it as a genre, but then accidentally fell in love with it, and that ended up being my debut novel, Good People, that's coming out next year.
Soft Hobbies: I feel like the reason you said that to your professor is because people were causing you pain every day in class by being like, “Why are you writing about this?” It makes total sense that you lashed out and were like, “Oh, I just write this shit for you guys.”
Kat Lewis: Yeah. And I actually do genuinely love literary fiction. I don't read that much commercial or genre fiction in terms of fantasy or sci-fi. I am reading Game of Thrones for the first time right now, mostly because I wanted to see how he handles multiple points of view. Which is something I've never done before, but I'm doing it in my book now. Literary fiction is what I'm doing right now, but that might change in the future.
Soft Hobbies: Really cool. Thank you for sharing that. I would love to know what you enjoy about your hobbies, like the podcasts or playing D&D, or videogames.
Kat Lewis: I like D&D because it's very storytelling adjacent, like we were talking about earlier. So I can still engage with that muscle, but approach it from a sense of fun that I can't usually do as a professional writer. It makes me think of something that Lynda Barry, who is a fantastic writer, says. All of my teaching pedagogy is kind of based on her beliefs about creativity, how creativity is a search for aliveness, and as an adult creative, you're trying to access the aliveness of your creativity that you had as a child.
I think Deborah Ann Woll said something about how playing Dungeons & Dragons is the closest you can get as an adult to being a kid on the playground and playing make believe, and I just love that. It's a great sense of community, it's a lot of fun, and it's storytelling without having to sit down and be alone.
Soft Hobbies: Do you identify as a perfectionist? If so, how does it impact your creative practice?
Kat Lewis: No, I’ve never really identified as a perfectionist, because I've been very good at establishing realistic expectations for myself at different stages of the creative process. This might be a hot take, so people might get mad about me saying this, but I do feel like a lot of perfectionism is rooted in investing a little bit too much in what other people think about you and your work.
And I personally couldn't give a shit. Other people's opinions of me is none of my business. I just try to focus on what would be the most fun thing for me to do in a writing session, and I don't really let the concept of perfectionism or what it means to be perfect affect my writing process.
Soft Hobbies: How do you think you arrived at that mindset, where you don't care about what other people think of your work? Is that something that's always been with you?
Kat Lewis: I mean, I grew up Black in the South, in a predominantly white town, so everybody in my community always expected very little of me. I was stereotyped constantly, and then I was also kind of isolated because being the only Black kid in the classroom, it's hard to make friends and everything like that.
I feel like that [experience] could make some people crumble, but there's some bone or organ I was born with where I was like, “Okay, that's fine. I'll just focus on satisfying myself, because nobody will ever expect very much around me.” It sounds sad, but it's helped me a lot as a creative I guess.
Soft Hobbies: No, I understand, and it's helped you do amazing things.
Kat Lewis: You know, sometimes trauma helps. [laughs]
Soft Hobbies: How do you get into creative flow? It sounds like you have a really strong routine.
Kat Lewis: This makes me think of something my mom used to tell me when I was growing up, particularly in high school. When I was in high school, I was a springboard diver. So I would jump and do flips off the board, and it's a scary sport. There's a lot of fear that you have to conquer. Whenever I was struggling to get a dive, or I would just be sitting on the board, my mom would yell, “Just fucking do it!” And then sometimes she would say, “JFDI!”
So for me, when it comes to a creative process, I don't have to ease into it. Some people have their routines and their rituals, and they're very spiritual about their creative process. But for me, it's like a job, so like, just fucking do it. If my professional career as a writer has taught me anything, it's that everything is temporary. I've survived so many layoffs in the game industry and then so much disappointment trying to sell my book. None of this is permanent. The only thing we have forever is ourselves. So you just have to do it for yourself. Just fucking do it for yourself. That's how I get into it.
Soft Hobbies: That makes total sense. And I think that workman-like ethic comes through a lot in your Substack, just from the way you approach writing and craft. So that's how you approach creative writing in your daily life, too.
Last question, and I think I know what your answer is, what's a hobby you recommend to other writers and artists?
Kat Lewis: Yeah, Dungeons & Dragons, or improv in general. I've just gotten a big appreciation for improv, and it helps you get out of your head. It helps you stop self-editing. You can make a lot of fun, exciting things happen on the page that'll make a reader sit up, make an agent maybe want to talk to you on the phone, maybe help you sell your book.
Outside of that, I would say that every writer should play Baldur’s Gate 3, because it's like some of the greatest storytelling of all time. It's a great time.
Soft Hobbies: I agree! Thank you so much. This was really fun.
Don’t forget to check out Craft with Kat:
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Thanks for thinking of me for this!
I love that it's cool to be nerdy now. (My inner child: "better late than never" haha)