Role playing

I thoroughly enjoy a little practice called roleplaying. Chances are, it's not what you're thinking of. Let's be honest, when you hear those words, you either think of RPGs or the bedroom. That's not what I mean. There's a third kind of roleplaying which I take part in, and it centers around writing. What a shock, am I right? The idea is that two people are telling a story together. But what makes it interesting is that each person is in charge of a particular character or set of characters. The story is thus told as a back and forth motion between these characters, seeing how they interact and what they manage to together.

What makes this cool to me is that it's a challenge you can't get by writing alone. Don't get me wrong, writing alone is hard. I know that perfectly well, which is why I'm here writing this blog in the first place. But we've been over that already. The challenge that comes from roleplaying is that you are only responsible for your part. You may have an idea of how a scene is going to go, or even how the entire story will go, but that is entirely dependent on what your partner writes in response. You may, as I often do, have it in your head that the two main characters will fall in love. But the other writer may decide that their character hates yours, and there's nothing you can do about that, and suddenly all your plans are out the window and all you can do is react and go with the new flow of the story.

It's an experience you really can't get writing on your own. Now, that's not to say that as a solo author, you always know what's going to happen in your story and that you are in complete control. I know better than that. A story can take an unexpected twist at any time, and there's nothing you can do about that. But in a group, as it is with a roleplay, that applies to every single author participating. Suddenly one twist can become twenty. It makes it a very dynamic setting.

But you're also not fighting the people you are writing with. It's still cooperative. You can choose to talk about the story outside of the writing, to plan together what will happen, or to just let the story go as it does. But you're not trying to outdo each other. You're not trying to throw off each other. You're just trying to tell a story. You're learning who your characters are, and seeing where they go together.

And that's the part that I like the most. My writing is very character focused. I write few characters, and I explore them to my heart's content. And roleplaying is heavily focused on that. It helps me think about what I like about characters, how I like to write them, what kind of characters interest me. All at the same time, I'm being challenged to write a character that someone else can interact with and enjoy. That's the exact kind of thing you want as an author. You want your readers to think of your characters as people they can talk to, that they can understand, and who they want to see progress. And roleplaying is just that, but for multiple authors.

I realize I'm doing a lot more non-fiction than fiction in my actually writings here. It's just kind of what's coming out of me. But I'm still writing, which is the important part. We'll see if I can pump out some fiction tomorrow, just to dig my toes back into it, but I'm not gonna promise anything about that. Just that there will be words.