Rehab for Roleplayers - Part 2

Welcome to Rehab for Role-players, a series of articles aimed at helping role-players more successfully make the transition into writing fiction.


Part Two – If It Walks Like RP and Quacks Like RP, Then It Is Probably Not a Novel.


As I have already discussed in other parts of this series, fiction and roleplay are two very different things.

Here, I'll be discussing those differences as a means of illustrating why the bulk of roleplay-style writing is not conducive to selling your work to an editor as fiction, nor in many cases providing an enjoyable reading experience for anyone unfamiliar with your personal RP.

Primarily, this segment of the series is dedicated to examining the structure and the purpose of each, and comparing the two.

I feel it's important to make clear at this point that I am not suggesting that concepts, plots and characters originating from RP cannot make the leap to fiction.

Indeed, several very popular series of books have been born from RPG's such as WarHammer and World of Warcraft, not to mention countless books inspired by D&D, including the highly successful Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms series. Also, Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time novels.

Nor am I saying that RP needs to be more like fiction, nor that one needs excellent writing skills to be a successful roleplayer.

What I am saying is that if you love certain elements of your roleplay enough to want to turn them into novels or short stories, then you will need to stop writing and thinking like a roleplayer, drop some your RP-writing habits and learn to write fiction which has a chance of being accepted for publication and being of interest to the public at large.

Knowing the difference is, then, quite important.


Structure and Purpose

Much of the writing in roleplay is structured around the fact that it is a shared experience. Likewise, the majority of players create characters to inhabit a pre-existing world, whether that world is original in design or based on a book or film, or even a real-world place.

While RP story arcs may have a definite beginning and ending, most RP worlds do not and so are, in effect, "Never-ending Stories" which evolve and grow player-written histories of their own. Roleplayers can and very often do RP very effectively without having a plot arc in mind at all, preferring to rely on character interactions as a means of developing a story to play.

Fiction writers, very generally speaking, create their own worlds and must provide the reader with a backstory to the action taking place within the novel. Writing isn't usually about writers 'taking turns' to add to the story, and most authors will tell you that having a solid plot and knowing how the book ends from the very beginning is essential to successful novel-writing.

Rules, Etiquette and Objectives

Roleplay situations usually involve rules of play. This may range from complex sets of rules such as those which exist in dice-throwing games like D&D, to the loose player etiquette-agreements of free-form roleplay. Whatever the case, roleplay involves dealing with the wishes, expectations and ideas of other people , and so with that comes a mind-set that is tuned to the thrills and spills of interactive writing.

For example, two of the most common rules of player etiquette in rp are:

"Don't powerplay (assume the right to control/kill/place/auto-move other people's characters without their agreement)."

and,

"Don't meta-play (mix ic and ooc/use your character as a glove-puppet for yourself/be a Mary-Sue/let your own motives and wishes as a player affect what your character does/experiences in the game)."

On the other hand:

When writing a novel or story, an author is very often on their own. There's nobody to set the rules or bounce ideas off, or cater to. The author is responsible for creating the entire fictional world, even if it's based in historical reality, as well as responsible for all the characters, and the plot.  

This is not to say that there are not "rules" or "general guidelines" for writing fiction, but these are not the same as RP rules, and exist for a different purpose. Editors (generally speaking) expect novels to have a beginning, a middle and an end, have an engaging and original plot with interesting and believable characters, and for the characters to experience some kind of conflict within the course of the plot to which readers can relate. But more than that, they expect a book to be written to a certain level of skill, and for the writing to adhere to those uses of language which are generally agreed to make for a good novel.

Other Issues Worth Considering

Two of the biggest problems I've observed to occur for roleplayers branching into fiction is that they a/ find it difficult to write without constant interaction with another person, and b/ start out with a roleplayer's mind, which is to say, a set of cool characters but no real concept of how the story will develop, let alone end.

An author of fiction should become used to writing on their own. For those who've spent years participating in roleplay or "interactive fiction", this can prove much more difficult than it sounds.

You, the fiction author, are a God.

You are the admin, and the player. Nobody else is going to contribute, or set limits for you.

This can be a very daunting thing and is, in my experience, the cause of many a permanently blank page. Get used to writing alone. Do it a lot.

Aside from this being simply good writing practise for fiction, the other thing to consider is the rocky road you risk taking in converting the creations of others to your own uses.

Other roleplayers might not take so kindly to your using their intellectual property in your novelisation of a shared RP. Unless you are very, very confident that you will always have permission to freely use others' characters as you see fit, or have an iron-clad legal document that allows you to do so, it might pay to consider taking loose ideas rather than direct transcriptions of RP as your base material for fiction.

An author of fiction also ought to be able to think of a plot from beginning to end before attempting to write a draft. It may help to begin with using very short fiction to stretch your fiction-muscles, gradually taking on longer and more complex plots.

Try throwing away or deleting or simply hiding from all eyes anything which does not wind up having a conclusive, satisfying ending. Do not post it anywhere as a 'vignette' or a 'chapter'. Do not show your friends.

Strive toward sitting down with a blank page and thinking of endings first and then writing toward them. Then, once you have a complete draft, show off all you like.


A Note On Over-Attachment

I think here is a good place to examine one of the biggest problems an RP writer aspiring to fiction can face: over-attachment to characters.

Roleplayers, in this regard, tend to fall into two camps. Basically, there are those who will happily kill off a character for the sake of a story, and those who won't.

Players in the first category are going to find the world of fiction far easier than those in the latter. Of course, authors become very attached to their creations, too, but there is generally a greater degree of removal for a novelist, because a novelist understands that sooner or later the novel must come to an end, and in a way that is not only satisfying for themselves, but satisfying and entertaining for the unknown reader out there who will hopefully be buying and reading the book.

Over-attachment to characters means a greater risk of them becoming the sort of lame Mary-Sue caricature every roleplayer is warned against creating. You know, the one who is always at the center of attention, no matter what else is going on, for the entire duration of every event. The one who never loses, and always looks great. The one who loses so epically and tragically that no other character seems to have any importance in the greater scope of things. You know the type.

You don't want those characters running rampant in your fiction. Readers who are not you, and who are over the mental age of 12 tend to hate these sort of characters and mock them. Trust me, they do. So don't do it. Be prepared to kill your darlings, or at least give them realistic limits and problems, if the plot needs that to happen in order to remain interesting and believable to your reader.

If you want to make existing RP characters into a novel, you may need to consider sacrificing their existing back story, and/or changing huge chunks of existing RP history in order to leave behind the shared environment of the roleplay which spawned them.



This concludes Part Two. In Part Three – "Echolalia Jones and the Thesaurus of Doom", we'll be looking closely at several common elements of style which tend to appear in roleplay writing and which may make for good RP, but don't necessarily translate well to fiction.