Greetings, to any new readers who have wandered by due to seeing my cover posted other places around the interwebs (special thanks to Tez Miller!) I’ll note briefly that comments are Under Construction, as both I and my volunteer tech guy have full time jobs in other things. Fingers-crossed, so far as I’ve tested, you can now log in and comment using your Facebook Account, and my next project is to put in a login for OpenID (which includes your Google, Yahoo, Blogger, and WordPress accounts)
On to the real subject of the post! My role-playing friends linked me this article about how several favorite authors got their start on an online text-based RP. I’m actually still in one myself (it once was a MUCK, but now it uses MOO code, so you’ll notice I’ll use the general umbrella MU* when talking about the breed here). The article got me thinking about how the skills I learned in the MU* do and don’t transfer to my fiction.
First off, MU*s still exist! They’re not a big portion of the online gaming population, but the article makes it seems as if we’ve all died. We have not! There’s nothing like being able to play using cooperative writing, as opposed to playing in a graphics environment. It can be good for the reasons mentioned–sheer practice wordcount, and inability to revise to death, though in my experience it’s less about striving to match shining examples, and more striving to be good enough to sit at the cool kids’ table at lunch, when you’re starting out and your RP skills are wobbly and new. 😉
I think it’s worth metaphorizing the fact that it’s not the same skills, though. Quite. MU* RP is a pick-up soccer game with your friends, and a novel is a grueling marathon. They both give you exercise and get you into shape, and soccer helps keep you in shape in a fun way, but if all you do is soccer, you might not finish the marathon. You have to train in a certain way for that, and generalized being in shape only goes so far. Plus, soccer comes and goes based on who can make it out that weekend, and who has to go to their kids’ dance recital, and you have to keep training on your personal schedule always, no matter what other people are doing, if you expect to make it to the marathon.
There are also some nuances of bad habits you can pick up in MU* RP that you have to avoid in novels. For instance, if you’re doing something without coded stats (or on a game without them entirely, as mine is) you can’t just autohit. In your pose of what your character is doing, you can’t say:
John crushes Susan in a passionate embrace and kisses her hungrily.
Because Susan’s reaction might be:
Susan steps out of reach and glowers at John.
In which case the embrace and kiss never actually happened. So you learn to write things like:
John steps closer to embrace Susan.
Because that gives Susan latitude to have any reaction she wants without seeming to contradict something that has already been written. And of course, that’s the exact opposite of what you usually want to do in writing fiction. Getting tangled up with “John started to think about moving toward kissing her” is slow and dragging and loses the reader, whereas “John kissed her” draws the reader along better.
That, and it’s not always a good thing to be known as a writer in MU* circles. Everyone knows a RPing writer or two who is like a border collie–very friendly and well-intentioned, but they get excited and suddenly they’re herding everyone by mistake. Oops. After all, they’re used to sending their protagonist toward a goal, and in RP, you have to remember that every character’s goals are equal. It’s not anything a writer would do consciously, but…woof! Just a little to the left! Woof! Fortunately once you’re aware, it’s easy enough to consciously counteract.
Leave a Reply