The Wizard of Storytelling, Ed Greenwood - Creator of the Forgotten Realms & DND

Ed Greenwood, the mastermind behind the iconic Forgotten Realms, shares his journey from childhood daydreams to becoming a Dungeons & Dragons legend. He reveals the magic formula: read everything, find your unique voice, and create like there's no tomorrow. Greenwood’s wisdom goes beyond writing; it’s about finding a career that lights you up, surrounding yourself with people who support your quirks, and aiming for a legacy that’s more about impact than income. Whether you're just starting out or switching gears, Greenwood’s story is a reminder to pursue your passions with relentless creativity and heart. Listen to his story and choose the action that resonates the most with you today!

Action Principles 

Pick one to do this week: 

1. Learn from those you admire. Study their work to build a more profound basis for creativity. ACTION: Choose your favorite format and learn something new from someone you admire.
2. Be prolific. Creating a lot of content opens more doors. ACTION: Schedule regular time to create content without worrying about perfection.
3. Have a clear vision. Make that vision the result of engaging all five senses, not just sight. ACTION: Review your vision and ask yourself if you’re using all five senses to develop it more clearly.
4. Keep up the momentum. To keep the creative process rolling, start the next creative task immediately after completing the previous one. ACTION: Schedule a 5-minute block after all existing creative tasks dedicated to starting “the next one.”

Guest Resources

Follow Ed Greenwood on X, username @TheEdVerse, or on Discord by joining the server, Greenwood’s Grotto.

Suggested LinkedIn Learning Courses

Time Management Fundamentals

Dave Crenshaw develops productive leaders in Fortune 500 companies, universities, and organizations of every size. He has appeared in Time magazine, USA Today, FastCompany, and the BBC News. His courses on LinkedIn Learning have been viewed tens of millions of times. His five books have been published in eight languages, the most popular of which is The Myth of Multitasking—a time management bestseller. As an author, speaker, and online instructor, Dave has transformed the lives and careers of hundreds of thousands around the world. DaveCrenshaw.com

Transcript

Ed Greenwood: 0:00

Eventually, when they were looking for a new setting for the game, for the second edition, Jeff Grubb cold called me at the public library, I was working up in Canada, and said, Do you have a complete, detailed world at home, or do you make it up as you go along? And I said, yes, and yes,

Dave Crenshaw: 0:17

yeah. He said, Okay, in this episode, you'll get to know Ed Greenwood, The Wizard of storytelling, and you'll hear the story of how a world he created in his mind when he was six years old became the foundation for the beloved game Dungeons and Dragons. I'm Dave Crenshaw, and this is my success Show. Welcome back, friends, to the Dave Crenshaw Success Show. This is where I speak to some of the most successful people I've met in my life's journey. And I'm looking for universal principles of success to help both you and my family. If you're not familiar with me, I'm a best selling author. I speak around the world of Fortune 500 companies, and I've taught millions of people how to be successful through my online courses, particularly my time management course on LinkedIn. Learning with this show, I wanted to create something a little different, something lasting, to help my family succeed, and I thought you'd enjoy learning along with them, and speaking of my family, today is kind of special, because today's guest is extra special, and I knew that my daughters would want to get to know them. So my daughters are here with me right now in studio in Salt Lake City. Ella, can you lean in and say hello, hello, hello, Ella. How old are you? 1515? And Ella is a prolific writer. She's already written a novel, and she's on her way to creating the second so you were extra curious to learn about our guest today, right? And my other daughter, Darcy, is here. Darcy, lean into the microphone, say hello, hi, and Darcy. How old are you? I'm 11. Yeah. And Darcy also is a great writer. You've been writing stories about a mischievous cat and your your teachers allowed you to share those stories. So both of them wanted to be here because today's guest is special as a writer, as a world builder, man of writers who are around today. He is one of the most influential ones, even if you haven't heard of him, the world he created is used by millions of other people to tell their own stories and characters, cities, histories, entire histories of fantasy worlds were created by this gentleman, and they're used in major motion Pictures, in some of the world's most popular video games. So I'll get right to him. Ed Greenwood is a Canadian fantasy writer and the mastermind behind the creation of the Forgotten Realms game world. While he started writing about the Forgotten Realms as a child, his career began in 1979 writing articles about the realms for Dragon magazine. Eventually, he sold the rights to TSR, the creators of Dungeons and Dragons, in 1986 today, he continues to write Forgotten Realms novels, as well as numerous articles and DND game supplement books. When not immersed in his writing, Ed can be found attending conventions and living in his farmhouse in Ontario, Canada. Ed, it is truly an honor to have you on the show today. Thank you so much for being here.

Ed Greenwood: 3:32

Thank you for having me. Great to be here.

Dave Crenshaw: 3:35

Yeah, I've interviewed lots of different people with lots of different career paths, because that's sort of the goal here is to show that there's a variety of ways to achieve success. And I've interviewed CEOs of corporations, entrepreneurs, some sports figures. No one Ed has generated as much excitement about the upcoming interview as you. In fact, just last night, I told my brother in law, who's in his mid 40s, and he freaked out and was like, You're interviewing him. I'm in the dungeons and dragons now, and he like, sent me pictures and stuff like that. So it's really fun to have this, this interview with you. So I appreciate your generosity of time

Ed Greenwood: 4:16

My pleasure. No problem at all. Yeah,

Dave Crenshaw: 4:19

I'm sure you get that, because what you've created is beloved by millions of people. We even saw the fruits of your creativity recently on the big screen, right with the Dungeons and Dragons movie, which, by the way, I saw your video about the things they got wrong in that movie, and I loved that video for you to sort of expand on the things that are in that and in the background world of it. Okay, so what I do in this Ed is I start from the very beginning, and what I want to do is go from the beginning of where you had your creative mind took off and started creating this world. And that was very, very early for you,

Ed Greenwood: 4:57

correct? Yes, yeah, yeah. I was a lonely kid. My mom died when I was six. My dad threw himself into his work. So I was raised largely by two grandmothers and a maiden aunt, taking it in shifts, and my release was to read every book in my father's den. And my father, like most people who collected books, he built his own bookshelves, and he crammed them in by height to get the most books in. Wow. There was one bookshelf that had the robe by Lloyd Douglas, a religious novel, next to a first edition Lord of the Rings in hardcover, next to the high white forest by Ralph Allen, which is a novel about the Battle of the Bulge. And I was just reading along the shelves, and there were lots of pulp. Give one to a friend in uniform, paperbacks falling apart. So I read everything, and I started writing because I'd read something. And I pound up the stairs to my dad, who usually had, like, eminent guests, five star generals and stuff in the room. And I'd say, Dad, Dad, this one was great. Where's the next one? Oh, son, that author died in 1938 if you want another story, you're going to have to write it yourself. Okay? And I go pounding back down the stairs. And my aunt Claire grew up on a farm in Ontario, and she went through two world wars in the Depression. You didn't buy paper. You got your groceries in brown paper bags. You brought them home, you took out your kitchen knife, which was a machete, you slipped them down both sides, and then you ironed them the same iron you'd use on the clothes. You ironed the brown paper bag out flat, and so aunt Claire had set up a card table with brown so I just started writing.

Dave Crenshaw: 6:51

So you had I'm imagining this. I'm imagining little ed on these pieces of paper. You had limited room to write. So what was that initial writing like? Clearly, you were inspired by Lord of the Rings as part of that, right? So what were like the first books, or the first illustrations, or whatever it was, what did those look like?

Ed Greenwood: 7:15

Well, first of all, I'm copying the style of writers I admire, whether it's Lord Dunsany or Robert E Howard doing Conan or Edgar Rice Burroughs or EE doc Smith doing Wild's face opera. I'm copying the style of the writer you know. So you get their vocabulary, their phrasings, the famous introduction to Conan, no, oh Prince, that are the days before Atlantis sank beneath the waves. So you'd learn that voice. And that's how I was learning because when I when dad said, Oh, you'll have to write it yourself. And I went piling down the stairs, I was trying to write the next thing that happened to those favorite characters, and I knew I wasn't the real author and all that stuff, but I wanted to sound like the real author, or when I read it to myself, there was no payback. I wanted it to sound like I found. In fact, I got in trouble in public school because in English class, we were asked to write a story, a short story, in the style of a writer we liked, and the teacher thought I plagiarized it from a real PG Woodhouse story, and sent me down to the principal's office, and I'm sitting on the hard wooden bench, and my teacher comes down and goes into the room to tell the vice principal why I'm there, and comes back out, and the principal comes in, and he says, Where did you get this? And I said, I wrote it. And he says, Come on, where did you get this? And it turned out he was a woodhouse fan, and he thought I'd found a new Woodhouse story. And when he found out I'd written it, he said, Can I keep this? And I said, Well, yeah, but I want a copy. And in those days there were no photocopiers. Sure, I'm old, you know? And he said, Yes. And you know, when you can fool somebody, if your writing's good enough to somebody thinks, oh, this might actually be the writer. Then, hey, I made it. But I wasn't trying to make it. I was trying to entertain myself. That's all I was trying to do.

Dave Crenshaw: 9:25

So that brings up a in my mind, a philosophical question, and my daughters want to be writers. My son does, actually, as well. He can't be here. But the thought or the question that I have is, what is the value of developing your own personal creativity by learning to mimic the style of others, right? Because I think there's this risk of, oh, well, you're not learning to have your own voice, but I think there's still something productive there for developing your own voice by doing that.

Ed Greenwood: 9:56

Oh sure, if you were just trying to copy. One thing, let's say you're an Elvis Presley fan. Okay, and let's say you're trying to sing everything, just like Elvis. So so close to Elvis, that if somebody closes their eyes and doesn't see it's you, they might think it's Elvis. Okay, there's, there's a danger there in that all you're doing is becoming a replacement Elvis, and that's all I was trying to do when I was writing for me. Because I was writing entertain myself, I wasn't trying to get my own voice, but because there were lots of writers I liked and was interested in, that meant there was a lot of voices I was copying, not just one. And the other thing is, you see what works and doesn't work, and you you learn to cut things out when you need to cut them out. And the other thing I would say to all writers, it's not about you, it's about the story you're telling. And some stories need a different voice than other stories. If I am talking to you now, I can use my facial expressions. I can use the intonations and inflections of my voice. I can scare you by tricks that I can't use when it's just curly ink on a page and your brain is bringing that all to life. But again, I would have a different voice if I was trying to scare you, a different voice if I was trying to tell a tender love story. You know the different voices?

Dave Crenshaw: 11:32

Yeah. Well, I think the key here is, is I'm trying to summarize it because I'm a non fiction writer. I like, I like summarizing, like you said, I'm giving instructions to people, and so the instruction that I'm hearing is add a bunch of tools to your belt by reading all these different styles and even trying to write in those styles, it gives you more things that you can pull from, more opportunities. And not only that, but you're also trying on styles and say, what what works for me. What do I want to be like?

Ed Greenwood: 12:03

Oh, well, let me give a concrete example that everybody could face in life. Either I have to give a toast to the bride at a wedding I've never given one before, or somebody I know in my family has died, and I have to give the eulogy at the funeral. What do I say? Where do I start? And you go to the library, and there's a book there called toast to the bride, and you pull it out, and you read 82 different toast to the bride, and you either swipe one or you think, I like that. I should mention that she gardens without the Oh, I like that. So you're just using the work of the people who come before you. Same thing with a eulogy. You don't always have to reinvent the wheel. The wheel actually works pretty well, so just use them. Yeah,

Dave Crenshaw: 12:56

that's a great point. Okay, let's go back to your story here for a moment. How did you transition from starting young writing these stories to actually begin writing articles for Dragon magazine about the Forgotten Realms. I

Ed Greenwood: 13:12

was writing stuff just for me to entertain myself. And my father would go down to his den in the evenings when we were all in bed because we had to be in school the next day. And he would go to his den just to pull down books he wanted to pull and they were either for work or they were pleasure reading. And he'd see my stuff, my written stuff, all lying all over the table, and he'd read it. We started taking it into work. And you know, his fellow workers, who were all middle aged and older men, would read it and go, Hey, that's pretty good, Bob. So that was, that was my audience. And when I started reading Dragon, there was a column in the magazine called Dragon's bestry, which was a revival of something called featured creature, and it was a new monster for the game. And at the bottom it said, anything printed on these pages is as official as anything in the monster manual. And you will get paid 2525 so I started writing, and I would send it off, and they would send me money. It was great. And I wrote the first one, leaving aside all the article stuff for a minute. I just wrote my first monster and the cursed. And then they printed it. I said, Wow, that was easy. And the second monster, the crawling claw, I mailed it off, and 16 days later, my printed copy of Dragon came back in the mail to me with my article and oh, wow, that's rewarding. I said they're desperate, so I sat down and wrote like eight monsters and sent them all off, and they took them all and then Kim Mohan, who's the Assistant Editor and. Said, Are you coming to Gen Con this year? And I said, I am now. So I hopped on a Greyhound bus, and I was just a little kid, and found my way to Gen Con. And he took me out into the park and said, How would you like to be a contributing editor? And I said, What does it pay? And he said, That's the contributing part. But he wanted somebody he could because he was a journalist, and he wanted somebody could write to order. So that's how it started.

Dave Crenshaw: 15:34

So you're talking about monsters. Are you told about how you're writing about monsters? Yet Forgotten Realms is much, much deeper than that. I mean, this is where we get things that people might be familiar with, like baldrgate or Neverwinter or these kinds of worlds. So where did you transition from writing just about monsters to really creating this massive, rich world that you were drawing stories from? Well,

Ed Greenwood: 16:04

that was there from the beginning, because the way I imagined things is by picturing them in my head. And the Forgotten Realms actually started when I was in kindergarten. Wow. Kindergarten, my day, they thought children needed to relax as well as run around. So we would run around in the in the and make lots of noise. And then they had this quiet time where they had flat mats on the floor. They turned off all the lights. I had to lie too. Yeah, okay, okay, yeah. We, we'd lie on our backs and be quiet for a few minutes. And the the object was not to fall asleep, you know, but I would always daydream. And once, when I I'm daydreaming of a forest at night, and it's like a picture, Christmas postcard. Snow is gently falling, steadily gently falling, and we're in a glade in the forest, so all the trees are covered with white, fuzzy snow, and white fluffy snow is coming down. And there is a woman, middle aged, gorgeous. She has silver hair, and I don't mean like mine white, old people's hair, I mean like the metal, silver, long, silver hair, and she's sitting on the ground right beside a tiny campfire that she has obviously laid and lit, and she's playing an Irish harp. And all through the trees, you can see the eyes of creatures at the forest who've gathered to listen to her. And then out of the trees comes another woman who looks rather like the first one, also long silver hair. This woman is wearing full coat of plate armor, and over it, she's got a fur cloak because it's winter and she's coming also attracted by the music to be with this other woman who looks very like her. I didn't know who these women were. I didn't know what this setting was, but I wanted to know more about it. So that was the realms. That's where it started. And then

Dave Crenshaw: 18:12

you had to fill in all the rest of it around that. Here's this moment that we see in the forest. Well, where did this woman come from? Where did she come from? Why is the forest full of eyes? Right? Yeah.

Ed Greenwood: 18:23

And then you just build because you're in school and learning, okay, water runs downhill. Got it? The mouth of the river will have a delta if there are people living along there. The port at the mouth of the river controls everything else, because the all the trade flows through it. So that's where that'll grow. Like New York grew, it'll be large and rich, like Chicago grew. You start putting all that stuff you're being taught in school, and you just make the world real.

Dave Crenshaw: 18:51

I want to highlight something you're saying there. In fact, this is a conversation that Ella and I had recently, because we were talking about higher education and the value of going to college and that sort of thing. And I think this is relevant to anyone listening to it, which is even if you study things that aren't directly related to what it is that you want to do, it gives you a richness of background. And for instance, like you said, if you didn't learn what a Delta was, and you didn't learn what that kind of rainfall was, you wouldn't be able to incorporate it. But having that study, and I think in much in your case, it's so much reading, but also paying attention in school that lends value and richness to the writing that you're you're creating. Yeah,

Ed Greenwood: 19:29

and if you can travel, if you have the money, the time and the personal security, like you can travel safely, see the world, because seeing people living somewhere else differently than you are and to them, it's normal. Just seeing how people are different all across, how the world, the topography, the landscape, is different, how the weather is different, how people think about different things. And yeah, going to college. I think everyone should go to college. College, you get to see other people who came from different backgrounds, and you have to work with them. And that's the same if you were, if you say, graduate from college and get a job at a large corporation, you may end up working with people from as far away from the planet as you can get from you, and then your life is richer. So

Dave Crenshaw: 20:20

you're creating this world in your mind, and then you're you're lending itself to the writing that you're doing, and that was starting to be used now, there was a moment, wasn't there, where you actually were a dungeon master for Dungeons and Dragons using that world. Am I? Am I? Is my research Correct? That that's sort of how you made that connection with TSR, is that you were actually using Forgotten Realms and people liked it. People saw it. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Well,

Ed Greenwood: 20:50

what I was really doing was using the Forgotten Realms as examples in my dragon articles, because although it may not look like it now, because we're talking to each other, and I've been doing this for years. I am one of the shyest people in the world. When I was a little kid, I couldn't look people in the face. I would blush if somebody made eye contact with me. And you know, my father said, Son, you're trapped on the planet with billions of people. They're not going away. You're going to have to learn to deal. Okay, that's great. Yeah. And then then he, the whole family, was in the church choir. So even though I'm the only one in the in my generation the family, who does not have perfect pitch, I was a good mimic. So my father just said, Stand beside me, sing exactly what I'm singing. And therefore I could fake reading music and so on by just copying my dad. And therefore I got out in the pub, got out in public. I was staring at a congregation of people every day. I had to make polite small talk, I had to sing in front of them, that sort of thing. But when it came to I'm still shy, so when I'm writing dragon articles, I do not want to write in as the author. Hi, my name's Ed Greenwood. I thought a new way of rolling dice that none of you schmucks have ever thought of before. So here's my newer That, to me, is incredibly arrogant, forward. And the other thing is, in Forgotten Realms, like any setting, you want to be able to hint the Dungeon Master without saying something as an absolute, the strongest man in the world, the most beautiful man in the world. You don't want to speak in absolutes. You want to give hints. And in those days, everybody in the hobby who could read dragon magazine, so players, as well as dungeon masters. So if you say, in the ruined castle, there are four orcs in room three, and their hit points are blah, blah, blah, and they're guarding this treasure, the players know it. But if you use an unreliable narrator, like the Wizard el Minster, and he says, It's rumored there are orcs in those ruins, but I don't credit it myself, you've planted the idea without saying the absolutes. So because I wanted to use the realms as an example in my dragon articles, I mentioned it over and over again in articles about different things for the game, and eventually, when they were looking for a new setting for the game for the second edition. Jeff Grubb, who was a staff designer at TSR, he'd written a white paper, a proposal for unified game world for the second edition of the game, and that went to upper management. They liked it. They rewarded him find the world. That was his reward. So he cold, called me at the public library I was working up at up in Canada, and said, Do you have a complete, detailed world at home, or do you make it up as you go along? And I said, yes, and yes, yeah. He said, Okay. And he goes, write down this phone number, phone it after five o'clock. The man who answers will be my boss. He wants to talk to you. And what, what they were actually doing was they wanted to buy the realms, but they wanted it to happen, not on a company phone, not on company time. So if our conversation went pear shaped, it just never happened as it happened. I said, Sure, and he says, Don't you want to know how much we'll offer you? Nope, just publish it. That's cool, because I was thinking I would get color maps, because my own color maps, I had to color them with pencil crayons. So all the C's had these strokes in them, and I want, no, I want a nice printed map.

Dave Crenshaw: 24:51

So that's interesting. So okay, so I have to ask this question, because I think other people might be curious about it. But. What you sold it for in today's terms is not much. Is there any regret on your part, or any feeling like this didn't turn out the way it should have?

Ed Greenwood: 25:12

No, you see, okay. I was born in the 50s. I grew up in the 60s. I'm a child of the 60s. What it really meant for the 60s is try everything and then do what you want to do with your life. And if you do what you want to do with your life, you win. And some of us want to write about made up worlds,

Dave Crenshaw: 25:33

and that's sort of the the setup that that I gave to this episode, which is sometimes success is not about the money, and in terms of leaving a legacy and leaving a rich world with stories that people are telling. Millions of people are using this, and now we're seeing movies and more. And you created with starting with that, that visual image of when you were five or six years old, you've now created something that entertains and enriches the lives of millions of people around the world. That, to me, is success. That's That's fantastic, that's amazing. Fact that was, that was the reason why I reached out to you, because one day I thought about it, and this seriously was the process. Ed, I was thinking about Dungeons and Dragons. I think has got to I picked up boulders gate three, and I was looking at it, and I was like, Who created this right? Who built this world and and then I saw you, and I'm like, Oh, I've got to have him on because of that amazing experience. Okay, so let's transition now to the books, and this is and I want to talk to you a little bit about that. I'm going to let the girls ask some questions. Sure, you have been prolific. How many books have you written? How many books have you contributed to so far?

Ed Greenwood: 26:56

Okay, I've lost count, but there was a time when we were going through them all for CV purposes, and it was 523 back then. In terms of one hander novels, we're up around 78 that's

Dave Crenshaw: 27:13

crazy, not crazy in a bad way. I'm just saying that's remarkable. And again, that's what I tell you've heard me say this, right? I'm talking to my daughters right now. If you're listening on audio, if you're going to be a writer, you must be prolific. You must love it so much that it has to come out, and all you want to do is write. And by the way, Ella has already completed one novel. She's not quite 15 yet, and she's working on the second one. In that spirit of things, what does writing feel like to you? Is it joy? Is it compulsion? Is it somewhere in between? What drives you to write that much?

Ed Greenwood: 27:55

Oh, boy, it's just what I do. And that is what it is to be human. By the way, when we were little kids, we were always taught humans are the only tool makers. Nope. Birds use tools. Apes use tools. Humans are the only people who tell stories to each other to make their young people understand the world. I'm going to tell you a story. Don't go on the forest alone, because here's what happened, blah, blah, blah to somebody. He ended up inside the bear. You know, that sort of stuff. You know that we tell stories to each other to understand the world. So I just tell stories all the time. I feel satisfaction when my writing achieves what I wanted to do. In my mind, I feel the satisfaction of finishing a job, and it it is useful, and it's well done. And I feel an excitement in the middle of the writing process of, okay, so how would so and so react? And then you put together your characters the way you think they are, and you just imagine inside their heads, this is what so and so would say, This is what so and so would do. And then you throw them together and watch what happens. There's

Dave Crenshaw: 29:03

an element that I'm seeing from you. And by the way, whether or not you're into dungeons and dragons, I highly recommend everyone, at least for a few minutes, go on YouTube, look up Ed Greenwood's channel and look at some of the recent stuff that he's been doing, where he describes the world, where he's answering questions or describing the backstory of things, and it's so fascinating to see how immersed you are. We're watching a person who is walking through a world that exists, and you're describing things that in your mind are 100% true, and it's just fascinating to see how immersed you are in the vision of things. My question is, there's an element of acting going on here, where you are speaking in the voice of a character, you're taking on the personage of them. Is that part of your writing? Process too. Are you, for example, having conversations with yourself as you're putting words to the paper,

Ed Greenwood: 30:06

not out loud, usually, but there are occasions when I will write dialog for someone, and I go, Hmm, and I read aloud the dialog. And then I say, the princess would never say that, and then I rewrite the dialog. Now, the difficulty that comes in here is, if you're not used to acting, you get self conscious, and particularly where there's a gender swap involved. So I'm a guy with a low voice, and you tend to go all Monty Python. So if I'm, if I'm the elf princess, and I'm going, prithee, my lord, gusta thou, how I trow, and you'll go, oh my goodness, because it is not like, what? What if the princess is trying to say something very touching or moving, or she's in love with this troll, and she's trying to say you can't make that work, yeah, because the element of hilarity. So that's when it's best to step back out of that. But all of these characters are just existing in your head, and the trick is to make them come alive in somebody else's head, when they're just looking at those curved squiggles of ink on the page, and their brain is imagining all that, which is why it's very hard to imagine a monster that isn't made up of bits and pieces of real creatures or fantasy monsters you've already seen. But the main thing is, and this is where, if I'm talking to people about writing, take all writing advice with a handful of salt, because we're all different. We all do it differently.

Dave Crenshaw: 31:49

Okay, so one last question from me, and I'm going to turn it over to the girls. You were married for many years. I know your wife passed away not too long ago. My condolences for that. It seemed, from the limited information that I could see, that you two were very close, and that she had a profound influence in your life and in your career. Could you just talk a little bit about what that relationship was like? She

Ed Greenwood: 32:19

was the love of my life. We were together for 43 years. She died three years ago, and for the last 656, years of her life, she was bedridden, and I was her nurse. But yeah, we shared our lives together for 43 years, and it was great. And we did. We did our bucket list together. We wanted to drive across Canada together, which is a huge country, from C to C, and we did it. Cost us a transmission. We limped back in our caravan with me buying tranny fluid at every single gas station and pouring it in, because if I didn't, the car just stopped, that sort of stuff. And and we traveled Europe. My game writing took me to conventions all over the world, and we shared all those things, and it was great. And you know, if you can find a partner who is a friend that you can depend on if something goes wrong, they can stand toe to toe with you, and they will. They won't run away or saying that I'm having a bad day. They'll stand up for you. That's the most precious thing in the world. Thank

Dave Crenshaw: 33:24

you for sharing that. Ed, I know that's probably not a question you get asked often. To me, this is about all of it, right? It's about having multifaceted success. The fact that you were together for 43 years is, in our day, truly remarkable and wonderful, and to me, admirable. So thank you for sharing that.

Ed Greenwood: 33:44

Thank you. Thanks for asking. Nobody ever asked about Jenny. No, yeah,

Dave Crenshaw: 33:49

okay, so I'm going to turn it over to Ella first. Ella, what is a question that you have for Ed,

Unknown: 33:57

have you ever had stories that you've written that you haven't published, that you just didn't like, and then just never did anything further. Like there are there other stories, oh yeah,

Ed Greenwood: 34:09

there are tons of unfinished things, and there are tons of things I started writing for somebody and they died, or their magazine went under, or their game went under. And so the story is now in effect, orphaned. And if I found out about that early on, I stopped work on if I didn't, it's sitting finished. And if I think that story goes with that project, I won't try and reuse it. I won't go into it and take stuff out of it for another project. I'll leave it as is, because I would always rather write something new, like a magpie. The shiny new catches my eye. So yeah, I go and write something new. So yeah, there's, there's tons of stuff lying around. The problem is, in all of this is finding it. Yeah, I have three shipping containers parked in my yard. I live on a farm full of books, papers in boxes piled to the ceiling.

Dave Crenshaw: 35:10

So have you not made an effort to scan that, codify that, put it into like, a database or an app like that?

Ed Greenwood: 35:17

Yeah, I have made effort. And actually some realms fans, my long term friends, have come up here and spent a week going through one of the sea cans, and they scan some stuff, took some stuff away with my blessings, so that some stuff will get preserved and and carried on. But yeah, there's no time that's uh okay. And by the way, everybody listening here, whether you're young or old, or what field of endeavor you're in, the most precious thing in life is time. So no, I haven't codified because I don't have time. I'd rather do something new. I'd rather create more in the time I have left.

Dave Crenshaw: 36:00

All right, Darcy, do you have a question you want to ask it?

Darci Crenshaw: 36:03

So this first one, it's kind of just like a random question, if you were like a creature or like a dragon or something, what type of creature, or what type of dragon would you be, and what color would you be?

Ed Greenwood: 36:18

In DND terms, I'd probably be a gold Dragon for the shape shifting, so I could pass as human. So if I wanted to go to a nice restaurant or go to a bookstore in the evening, I could just blend in. I'd like to be a dragon that's strong enough I don't have to worry about personal safety, because nobody will challenge me, nobody will fight me, because I basically don't want to fight, and I do want to learn. So I'd like to be a dragon with good eyesight, and I'd like to be able to shape shift down any human size and read my way through candlekeep.

Darci Crenshaw: 36:54

And my second question is, when you are writing a story, how do you find the way to really feel what your character's feeling like? What do you do to become kind of a part of that character?

Ed Greenwood: 37:08

You just have to work on imagining and part of that comes from when you're young, your first two decades of life, experience things now you have to temper this with common sense. And my father used to say, well, try it. You know, if you're going to wake up in a graveyard at dawn, try it again. You temper all these things with what is this sensible and legal to do? But you can experience things, and then makes your writing more vivid. So that's one thing to put yourself in your character's way. Always think, and here's a good way for planning. If you're the sort of person who plots and plans a story, what does character X want in life? Does he want money? Does he want power? Okay, but what does character X want in this scene? Well,

Dave Crenshaw: 38:09

this is really valuable advice. Thank you so much for taking your time to share it with us. Now, there's something that we do in every episode, as a productivity guy, as a leadership guy, I'm interested in helping people take action. So we've heard wonderful stories about you and examples from your career. I want to encourage people listening this to actually do something about it, so something they can do today or this week. So what I'm going to do is, based on your story and what you've shared with us, I'm going to call out three possible actions that someone can take this week to make your success story a part of their success story. And then what I'd like you to do, Ed is chime in at the end and provide one additional action item that you would recommend. Sound good?

Ed Greenwood: 38:56

Yeah,

Dave Crenshaw: 38:57

all right, the first one, I'm going to start right at the beginning with your dad having all those books in the house and giving you that wealth of a library to pull from and get excited about. So the first action is reading and studying the work or even the lives of people you admire gives you the richer basis to create whatever it is that you want to create. So I would encourage you to take the time to study and read and listen to these examples, because that will just start to create this wealth of knowledge in your background. I think about one book that I read was about Abraham Lincoln, and I learned so much from his life, and then I took bits and pieces of that and said, I want to make that part of my life. That's the power of reading, that reading unlocks. The second one is sort of related to this, but it's not about what you're getting from other people. It's about what you're putting into the world, which is, be prolific, right? You've heard me say this, Darcy and Ella, right? We have to create a lot. My career is built on creating a lot. I've got over 35 courses on LinkedIn, learning. Ed's got dozens, hundreds of all these books that he's created. And being prolific opens so many doors. And I'll just add this to if you're don't feel like you can be prolific in something, that might be a sign you're pursuing something you're not passionate about. So double check and say, am I willing to do the work to write all these things? And then the last one, it kind of goes the comment that you said before. But I'm going to combine the essence of Ed Greenwood here in this advice, which is, have a vision and make that vision the result of all five senses, not just what you see, but what you hear, what you taste, what you smell, all of these things together, and the more you can build that vision, the more successful you'll become. Whether that's your vision for yourself in the future and seeing yourself do that, or it's a vision that you're painting with your marketing. There are so many places where you can use all five senses and create that vision. So if there's something you're working on right now where vision is part of it. Ask about it in terms of all five senses. Ed, what would you suggest is a possible action item for people?

Ed Greenwood: 41:29

Okay, yeah, I'm going to say this twofold. It's both sides of the same coin. Okay, so the first thing is, it's pretty overwhelming to say I'm going to write a fantasy trilogy, and they're all going to be this thick, and they're all going to hit the New York Times bestseller list, and they're going to be a long series of movies. That's a big project. Why don't you just write one scene? Because the novel is made up of a bunch of scenes. You can actually write them separately and then move them around on the table and put them in different orders, and then write what is in between, and end up with a book that way. So write one scene, because it's small enough you won't bog down. Allow yourself what we used to call back in TSR days, the dance of done this, which is that moment of satisfaction you say, I did it. I finished it. Now, here's the trick. Don't go to bed or move on to something else once you finish the chapter, because when you stare at the blank computer screen or the blank page to start the next site, it's going to be much harder to start from a standing stop. So finish the chapter, or finish the scene, or finish the thing, and then start the next one. Get four or five pages, four or five lines into it. Now, when you come to it the next week, you can say, Oh, those lines are garbage, and you can rewrite them and throw them away, but it's easier to start when you've got them on the page. If you do a clean break and finish, you get the dance of doneness. But then your mind says, Good, I'm done that. That's out of the way. What's the next thing I have to do? Fool yourself get started on the next one and then leave it hanging.

Dave Crenshaw: 43:17

Oh man. As a productivity guy, Ed,

Unknown: 43:20

I love that.

Dave Crenshaw: 43:23

I mean that is, that's such a great principle for for tasks or projects that you're working on, set yourself up. That's how I'm thinking about is set yourself up for when you go back to the work you've already got just a little bit of a nudge. Gosh, I was just doing that with, with a course that I was creating, and I would not I was doing that Ed without thinking about that principle. So that's fantastic. Thank you. Thank you so much. I feel like we could talk to you for hours. I know that you just have a wealth of wisdom, and unfortunately, you have other things to do, but I know that we've been enriched from spending this time with you. So my pleasure, if people want to follow you and keep getting information from you, where should they go?

Ed Greenwood: 44:06

You can hit me up on Twitter. I'm at the edverse.

Unknown: 44:10

E, H, E, E, D, V, E, R, S E, yeah,

Ed Greenwood: 44:14

that's it. And if you're on Discord, I have a server called Greenwood's grotto, and I answer questions there, and all the other people who are into the realms and so on, hang out and chat with each other. So if you're trying to find out something about the realms, you can just ask, and somebody will go, Oh, that was covered in this issue of Dragon. Okay, so if you're into the realms, we all hang out there, and I have a Patreon that you can sign up for and get you know little things about the realms, but that's if you're really into the realms. You can also just hit me on YouTube, watch my channel and see all those videos. And yeah, I'd like to talk to you again when, when Ella is ready to publish that book. Let's talk. Oh, wow, because you were in. Golden Age, because here's the thing, you can self publish on Amazon, and none of us could before we were stuck with the Big Five in New York as the gatekeepers. But you may want to get a literary agent and go through all the hoops, and it all depends, but think about it. Well, that's

Dave Crenshaw: 45:16

a very generous offer.

Unknown: 45:18

Thank you for that, Ed,

Ed Greenwood: 45:20

no problem. You

Dave Crenshaw: 45:21

want to say goodbye,

Unknown: 45:24

bye, bye

Dave Crenshaw: 45:25

and goodbye. Everyone listening. Thank you for listening. Remember, it's not so much about what you heard or how you felt, it's about what you do. So do something today, do something this week, and you'll make Ed Greenwood's success story a part of your success story. Thanks for listening.

Darci Crenshaw: 45:44

You've been listening to the Dave Crenshaw Success Show, hosted by my dad, Dave Crenshaw, and produced by invaluable incorporated research and assistant production by Victoria bidez, Sound Editing by Nick Wright, voiceover by me, Darci Crenshaw, and the music is by Ryan Brady via Pon five licensing, please subscribe to the Dave Crenshaw success show on Apple podcasts Spotify, wherever you like to get your podcasts. If you have a suggestion for someone my dad might like to interview, please send it to guests at Dave crenshaw.com and please don't forget to leave us a five star review. See you next time you.