Three Ways to Improve your Creative Writing and Role-Playing
Written by James on Tuesday, August 18, 2009 at 5:00 am
To be fair, there are more than three way a person can improve both writing and role-playing. There’s being creative, consistent, concise, captivating, communal, or concrete. Heck, we could write whole books about how to be a great role-player and still leave oceans of awesomeness untouched.
But let’s start simple. Here are three ways to be a good role-player that win you friends and fans no matter where you game.
All Hail King Clarity!
Make sense – and doing so isn’t as easy as it sounds.
Writers like to sound smart, especially creative writers. It’s a common fault, probably grounded in self-consciousness of baring our creative souls to the rest of the world.
We want to impress people with our writing. We want respect. And so we sacrifice meaning in favor of showing off how smart we are, forgetting to draw attention to what we actually want to convey.
Never forget that the basic purpose of writing is to transmit information. That sounds about as exciting as watching amoebas mate, but the spiffiest dialogue and the wittiest descriptions in the world aren’t worth a sack of wet feathers if they’re no more than the sugar coating on content that adds to the story.
Be Colloquial and Talk Local
Even English majors have to go through everything they write with a Pretentiousness Filter. If word choice confuses meaning better than it transmits it, it’s time to put away the diploma and get back to work.
We’re not writing thesis papers here, kids. We’re telling stories. And the best stories are the ones that use words people understand.
Your goal in role-playing should never be to impress other players with expansive vocabulary and fancy words. Blow them away instead with clarity of contribution to each scene, in every single post you write.
Dare to be Eccentric
The one thing that great writers knows is that rules are meant to be broken.
Don’t be afraid to set yourself apart. Be flamboyant! Write with flair that makes people wonder about your sanity. Use pizzazz and sparkle and forget about grammar and syntax.
Never forget the all-important rule of writing, though: transmission of information—the telling of the story.
If you’re going to break the rules, do so in a way that shows you did it on purpose. Nobody wants to read a post where every grammatical error is one that could have been fixed by a little bit of editing.
Grammar rules are there to keep communication as clear as possible. If you break those rules boldly and with good reason for impact, readers can’t help but be delighted—if not by your cleverness, then at least by your daring.
Don’t let your creativity overwhelm your good sense, but if you can tell a story in a way that’s refreshing and new, you’ll win admiration and inspire fellow players to add ingenuity to their story.
And what could be cooler than that?
Want Some of That?
Writing and role-playing skills develop so long as you’re willing to put in the effort to use them. Each one builds on the one that came before it. Start with the foundation (your story, remember?) and work your way up from there.
So keep writing! Focus on telling your story and remember that everything else is just icing on the cake.
I’d say the best place to break the rules of grammar and even spelling is in character speech. Dropping a letter or two and mis-spelling some words can convey accent.
“Yer ‘avin’ a larf!”
Just don’t go overboard. I don’t know how many pages I can fill with illegible text from Bram Stoker’s Dracula. So many paragraphs of speech exist where the author has written it out entirely phonetically. Ugh.
Marc´s last blog ..Where’s (the) Wally?
Ooh, I’d be careful with accents, myself. In fact at ER, we discourage players from writing with them, because written-out accents confuse clarity and only writers with good experience can pull off a well-written accent.
We’ve seen some really bad ones in our time. Like you say, illegible.
But tha’ said, when th’ lad gets it right, he does a bonny wee job o’ it, does he no?
James Chartrand – Men with Pens´s last blog ..Your Clutter is Killing Your Customers
I totally agree. I tend to avoid them for a number of reasons:
1) Inconsistency. I’m terrible for maintaining an accent
2) Cultural differences. A British accent can be difficult to “read” for an American. Not to mention different words such as pavement, lift, spanner, lad, lassie and so forth.
Little touches here and there can work well, like Cooper dropping letters, or Race speaking French.
That’s funny, Marc, because I both agree that accents are better left out and disagree. The novel that comes first to mind is “Their Eyes Were Watching God.” It’s written so phonetically–throughout, so in dialogue and narration– that every “I” is spelled “Ah” and every “like” is “lak.” While at first I had to read aloud to understand what people were saying, after a while it got so that I had practically learned a new alphabet. It was cool, and it did wonders for setting the mood and characterization that makes the novel so powerful.
Not so good with RPing, though, eh?
I like grammar “mistakes.” The dropped consonants and garbled words in dialogue. But at the same time, breaking rules has its place in narration too. Consider that I’ve broken at least two grammar rules in the last three sentences–a fragment and a sentence beginning with “but.” Those are particular rules that have become uber lax, but they do so much for the tone and mood of writing.
In summary, never underestimate the power of narration.
This is another post I can add to my favorites list.
I am still working on the clarity, and I think I am starting to improve with that. I will always continue to work at it.
I don’t even mess with the accent stuff, I barely can speak my own language, so I will just stick to what I know with that one.
And, I don’t have a problem with the not writing with an extensive vocabulary and such since I don’t have a huge vocabulary… But I do feel that I am using the same words over and over so much because I don’t have that larger vocabulary.
It could be just me but I feel that it makes my posts sound like a broken record when read aloud.
What are some thoughts on that?
Tracy (spiritwolf32)´s last blog ..
Can’t say I’ve noticed to be honest Tracy.
The only suggestions I have are to read more and to use your word processor’s thesaurus.
Marc´s last blog ..Where’s (the) Wally?
Thanks Marc.
As I said, it could just be me. I’m my own worst critic and I see things wrong all the time with my writing.
In my case, it isn’t only in the words, it’s in Ashley’s actions and body language too. That could be one reason I see it as repeating the same stuff.
Tracy (spiritwolf32)´s last blog ..