Roleplay Helps and Hurts

I’ve mentioned this in places before, but we come from a roleplay background. I’m talking about text or forum roleplay. I’m sure many writers can relate. For those who aren’t familiar, roleplay is basically when you and your partner write a story together in turns. Each of you controls your half of the characters and the situation evolves as you go, dialogue line by line, action by action.

We actually became friends through a roleplay forum. Through several, actually, because what RPer worth their weight sticks with only one forum? (It’s an addiction, mmkay.) Our friendship grew along with our writing ability. Sixteen years later, and it’s still something we do together. We roleplay nearly every day. Now we’ve decided to start turning our many stories into novels. We’re on our first novel, and I’ve found that our roleplay background both helps and hurts us.

The Good

I have to say, I wouldn’t be the writer I am today without roleplay. When I first began at the youthful age of 17, I had never written fiction before. RP opened my eyes to how fun writing could be. I got hooked on creating new characters and figuring out how they’d react to their different situations.

• Roleplay truly trains you to get into your character’s head. When you have to focus on how your character reacts to things on a small scale, it hones in on their personality deeper than it might while writing them broadly in a chapter. You find yourself creating details about them, like little quirks or interests, that you may have never bothered to think about otherwise.
• Practice makes perfect. I can honestly say I wouldn’t be a skilled writer today if it wasn’t for those years and years of daily writing. I’m not exaggerating when I say we write over 60k words a month. We write enough to fill an entire novel, every single month. And every month, we’ve improved. I look back at my writing from ten or even five years ago, and I can see a huge difference. I can thank roleplay for that.
• So much novel fodder. Our first novel was drawn up completely from scratch (don’t ask me why we thought that was a good idea) but we have enough material from our RPs to give us novels for decades. We have entire worlds created, with generations of characters, and honestly it’s too many ideas to even choose from. We keep changing our mind about what books we want to do next. But the point is, the material is there. The stories are established. All we need to do is mold them into a novel format.
• Having a co-writer is awesome. I see so much talk in the writing community about how writing is lonely, how people struggle to find critique partners, or how they have trouble brainstorming on their own. We don’t have any of those problems. We always have someone there to bounce ideas off and help us work out the plot holes. It helps our writing too because we have different strengths. Where one of us is weak, the other is strong. It’s helped our writing immensely.

The Bad

While I have to thank roleplay, it’s caused obstacles for us too. We (wrongly) thought turning our stories into novels would be easy peasy. Because we’re so used to roleplaying as opposed to, say, writing short stories, we’ve hit some snags.

• Roleplay is repetitive. You have just a few paragraphs to justify whatever dialogue or action your character has that post. That leads to going over their motivations more than once. RP is heavy on a character’s thought process. It’s also heavy on details. You need to thoroughly describe the setting and whatever your character is doing, so that your writing partner can properly visualize it. You may even repeat something just to let your partner know you’re acknowledging it. This way of writing just does. not. work. in a novel. Our first draft was flooded with extra thoughts and details that just were not needed.
• It’s a different mindset. We’re used to writing only one character. Sometimes more, okay, but still not all of them. We’re not used to doing the entire back and forth of a conversation on our own. I’ve even trained my brain to recognize what’s an acceptable length for a post, so I found that I would reach that length while writing a chapter and then hit a wall. It was like my mind was telling me, stop, you’re making this post too long.
• It’s hard to write alone. I’ve been spoiled by having a constant writing partner. When I try to come up with a plot and characters entirely on my own, it falls flat. I’m dependent now on having that other person to brainstorm with.
• Roleplay isn’t sticking to one plot. Sometimes we just don’t feel like working on the book story. Sometimes we want to jump into a new RP instead. We typically spend about a month on one roleplay plot. Maybe six weeks if we’re really into it. RP gives you the freedom to bounce around. It’s been hard to stay focused on the plot of our book for months on end.

So, roleplay really has both helped and hurt us on this journey to finish our novel. Looking back, I wouldn’t change a thing. I feel the way it helps outweighs how it hurts. The bad things are all things we’re working on and overcoming. The repetitiveness is being trimmed in the editing process. As for our trouble sticking with it, we’ve compromised. We’ll do book work for several hours and then stop, freeing up the rest of the day for whatever roleplay plots have our interest.

If you’re a writer and have never roleplayed before, I definitely recommend it!

-A