I try to use gaming, especially play by post, as a way to exercise my writing chops and to learn new techniques to write. It doesn't always take at first but it's god practice. What techniques or methods do you use to help create a more full writing/gaming experience here and what do you use to help evolve your technique?

I had problems trying to come up with original characters. So I came up with this:

https://drive.google.com/open?...FfjlD0lLF27C2cMRhbgY

My biggest problem is descriptive prose.  I used to write a LOT, I had friends recruit me as admin for their MUSHes because they lovd my writing for room descriptions and such.  Then I got started TAing playwriting classes--in playwriting, dscriptions are generally minimal, except for details that are critical to the story.  All the focus is in dialogue...and I lost that habit, of describing locations.

If I was a GM, I'd probably have more reason to get descriptions worked into my writing...but as it is, most of what I write here is stilldialogue (but I am having to describe physical details of character actions, so there is some focus on visual details).  This does help me develop different 'voices' for different characters (although the characters in my two most active games are very similar in many regards, so they don't wind up sounding too different, most of the time.)

I've always loved writing. I still have entire notebooks from my childhood that are positively inundated with half-formed ideas and stories. As I've gotten older, I found that gaming DOES help develop certain skills. Some of my earliest stories amounted to little more than, "These two guys walked into a room and found the other guy dead." Now, I can lay the entire scene out with detail to really suck the reader in because I've played/GMed games where a description of the room and the condition that it's in is of paramount importance.

Of course, playing BattleTech for thirty years, I've gotten paranoid about having a good "lay of the land" because I don't want to walk into a box canyon and have a lance of Grasshoppers start pulling DFAs! I'm also in the process of world-building a couple of new games, one is science fiction and the other is a fantasy. Stretching those muscles in any capacity is definitely a good thing.

The biggest problem with using role-playing as a means of practicing writing is that, in some ways, narrative fiction and role-playing are polar opposites.

One of the most common critiques new writers get on their work from publishers, agents, editors, is a lack of a strong, well-drawn, central story with strong, well-drawn characters that create a driving narrative. A lot of new writers have a great idea and they have the main character sort of meander through it. This is especially prevalent with sc-fi and fantasy, where writers are so entranced with their created universe that they forget to make a story to hurtle through it at breakneck speed.

GM'ing an RPG will let you practice description, story, structure, dialogue, world-building, mood, tone, atmosphere, and all kinds of other awesome stuff, but the things you won't do (can't do, in fact, if your game is to be successful) is create strong central characters that drive a strong central story.

In fact, to be a good GM, you have to avoid creating central characters, and you have to avoid driving the narrative. You can push, prod, lure, bait, switch, wheedle, your PC's to go one way or another, but in the end it must be their choice. So you gain experience doing almost everything except for the one thing that is, arguably, the most important thing (certainly in the top five most important things).

And playing a PC in an RPG just doesn't have sufficient skill overlap to be really useful.

So, for sure, use RPG's to flex those skills. But don't use them as a replacement, or else you'll find that your brain gets really good at generating all these scenarios, worlds, ideas, but you won't be any good at filling them with compelling characters and driving a story through them.

I was a gamer long before I was an author (at least professionally), and there are a lot of story structure issues that just don't translate well from pbp to narrative fiction. This has led to a few of my biggest peeves as a GM, namely, the over-sharing of information and the misunderstanding of show vs tell.

If you want to sharpen your writing skills through play-by-post gaming, I would suggest you try the following, to avoid picking up bad habits.

Show, don't tell. Describe what your character is doing and how, not what they're thinking or feeling. This is excellent practice at learning to write well, because instead of just telling us about the character and their internal world, you have to learn how to pass along that information through description, dialog, and action.

Writing is about controlling the flow of information to the reader and only revealing what you want them to know. This carries over to gaming by making sure you only tell the other players what they can know.

Why this is important is that, in general, you only have one viewpoint character in any given scene. Therefore you need to write all other characters in that scene through the eyes of the viewpoint character. So the best practice is to write as if the other PCs are the viewpoint character, and your character is not.

That seems backwards at first, but the other PCs and GM are your readers. Your audience. You're writing for them.

Reverse it.

I've also worked on incorporating literary techniques I picked up while writing to the games I run. Now, you have to give the PCs agency, so it's almost more like a TV show's writer's room - collaborative - and you can't control what they're going to do.

But you can structure your game's plot in a similar way. Act 1: Establish the setting, the rules, what "normal" is for your PCs. Act 2: Disrupt that normal and make them respond to the disruption. Act 3: Let them work towards fixing the disruption or finding a new normal.

Even more important, though, is the idea of character arcs. As a player you can build your character with some kind of flaw to overcome. This isn't an external hook (MY SISTER WAS KIDNAPPED) but rather some internal lie that your character believes. (ONLY I CAN PROTECT MY POOR SISTER)

Then throughout the course of the game, look for events that impact this lie. Things that either confirm or refute it. Slowly evolve your character away from this flaw towards some sort of opposite truth (ITS NOT MY JOB TO SAVE EVERYONE).

As GM, you can play with this by identifying the flaws each PC believes, and giving them the opportunity to overcome said flaws. You don't force them... they have free will... but you provide them with evidence that this firmly held lie is, indeed, a harmful lie.

If they reject the lie, that's a positive character arc. Vader saves Luke from the Emperor.

If they cling to it stubbornly, that's a negative character arc. Gatsby dies alone.

In reply to Tortuga (msg # 6):

Seconded in its entirety.

Also, I want to add that Tortuga is a very, very good fiction writer and everything he has to say on the topic should be taken very seriously.

I generally agree with everything Tortuga said, but this in particular:



That's one of my main pet peeves as a player, only made worse by a few players that have, over the years, been actively abusive in their internal monologues in a manner that the other players can't react to.  It's long been a standing thing in my games that anything you write is clear to the other players, either through your expressions or other means.

On the other hand, this is a unique niche for solo gaming.  In a solo game, I tend to write in a very different point of view (more akin to that of the main character in a novel).  As the GM in such a game, you also have a little more leeway for dealing directly with the PC's internal workings, too.

Gaming could help you become a better author, especially play by post gaming where you're typing a heck of a lot.  But we're not really writing stories here.  There's no acts, no denouement.  There can be, but there usually isn't, for brevity.  Of necessity, we're writing short fiction.  And in most game there isn't any real interaction -- there can't be.  We're all just writing a bunch of well connected monologues, a series of soliloquy's.

I mean, you can't really interrupt me in the middle of my post, you know?  And if I want to wait for your input on a subject, I have to literally wait.  It could be hours, it could be days, before you respond and the "conversation" can continue.

Sure, you can quote my post and respond to every sentence, but that's usually the hallmark of someone who's being far too argumentative, who isn't taking the gist of what I say and respond to that but rather nitpicks all along the way.  While that might be the right way to win a debate, it's not really a good way to learn how to write better.

Similarly, in our backstories, it's hard to get full-length stories.  There's a lot of summing up and strategic time skips are involved.  Now, I'm not saying that such narrative tools can't be employed in a "real" story.  In the original Star Wars movie (episode 4), when stormtroopers were first shown on screen, they were just there.  We didn't know where they came from or what sort of humanoids might be in the suits.  But consider how long the Star Wars movie actually was and then consider how it could be condensed.  It's tough to write a good short story, and it's kind of a different beast from writing a good long-story, but long stories (novels, etc.), are pretty much all people buy these days.

Tl;dr Absolutely, writing stories here can definitely help, but it won't help nearly as much as taking a class or two and getting some really good editors who will tell you what you did wrong, point out narrative flaws, and help you see how to improve your stories.

While this isn't the best format to learn how to write a story per se, it can be very useful for exercising and polishing the skills needed for writing a story. I've been in writers' groups, and edited stories from high school students and up, and lack of skill in using the written word does more to demolish readability than not having a story to tell.

Practice correct punctuation here -- make it a habit, not an afterthought. Learn to use paragraphs. If you're not good at spelling, learn to pay attention to that red underlining. Sure, those will come out in a thorough line-edit, but if you habitually ignore such things, you'll miss a lot of them on a line-edit, too, just because you're used to not seeing those mistakes. And if you leave those mistakes in something you submit, it's cause for an editor to summarily ditch your work. They have a flood of submissions, so they go for the ones that require less work to read. Plus, someone who is sloppy with the basics is likely sloppy in other places, too.

Practice describing actions and movement; it's amazing how often that doesn't come out of the writer's head to the page, which means it's not there to be read. Being clear that time has passed is another issue, but that's rarely going to be something you can work on here.

Practice varied sentence structure. Short, simple sentences help convey fast action, while longer, more complex sentences can slow action down. At the same time, writing with nothing but short sentences makes for choppy reading and can get irritating very quickly. Long sentences can become run-on if you're not paying attention. For the most part, you want variation for smooth reading. And if you're not using complete sentences, make sure it's on purpose.

Just some ideas on what can be worked on in this format. :)

I think that there's often an irrational aversion to shorter posts. Shorter posts aren't bad writing. Concise writing is good. Giving the other players the opportunity to react to what you're doing is good.

Longer is not better, especially if "longer" means "stuffed with purple prose, superfluous description, and a series of actions nobody can interrupt or react to." Overly florid writing is bad writing. Taking other players agency away by not letting them respond to what you're doing is bad playing.

I ask that the players in my game limit posts to 1-3 paragraphs and avoid giving long speeches. There's nothing wrong with a one-line post if it's well written. Especially considering eye-fatigue tied to reading on the internet.

PRO TIP: If you write huge long posts most people are just going to skim anyway, so be concise. Be elegant. Include what detail you need to make the post "work" and nothing more. Knowing what not to include is just as important as any other skill.

In some of my books I end up cutting as much as 30% of what I've written by the time I'm done. Most of the hard work is done while revising. It might be helpful to incorporate revisions into your post. Here's what I suggest:

1. Write your post.
2. Wait a while. Five minutes. Ten. An hour. Whatever. Longer is better.
3. Reread it. Cut out wasted words. Tweak your grammar. Fix errors. You probably have some better ideas now, incorporate them.
4. Read it out loud. Fix it if it sounds awkward.
5. Post it.

This is probably too much effort if you're not trying to improve your writing, so if you're more casual about it maybe just give your post a quick second readthrough after you've written it.

Good advice above, but I'd make a couple of caveats. 'Show, don't tell' is generally a useful rule of thumb in writing, but I find that game players can often fail to pick up on the subtleties. Maybe it's because in a game they're too used to having everything laid out for them. Sometimes they don't even pick up clues when you tell - you need to SHOUT them! :)

Revision is good, but only before someone has replied. The worst thing for continuity is cutting out something that another player has already replied to.

Yeah; revise before you hit post. Less confusing that way.

And if you must revise after you post, give everyone a heads-up about it in the OOC thread, so someone doesn't write a response six or seven posts later without realizing that what they read before has been changed and their response may no longer be applicable.

But try not to revise after you post.  It's just easier that way (unless it's spelling or punctuation...stuff that doesn't change the content of your post.  If you look at it after you post and find a glaring error that makes you crazy, go ahead and tweak it.)

I really like Tortuga's suggestion to wait before posting.  Some of my best game posts have been composed at an earlier time, and instead of hitting Post Message, I waited and came back after an hour or so.  It's remarkable how a post can change.

If you do that, be sure to use Chrome or some other browser that will save what you type so if you type something in the address bar or otherwise navigate away without thinking, you can go back to it.

"But there's a popup when you try to leave."  Well, if you were just trying to watch the latest Dr. Who episodes and were in the habit of just clicking "let me leave the page", then you might just click right through it without thinking.

I write my posts in notepad first, then copy/paste into RPoL. Safer that way.