by Allegria Andretti

Created on: June 08, 2009   Last Updated: June 10, 2009

When I joined an online community last year with over four hundred active members, I often wondered why the best writers on the site, around about ten people, seemed to be found frequenting the same areas and got to know each other more than they got to know anyone else. Whilst the community had several writing projects, they were all submitted anonymously, so they hadn't met each other there. Then I received an invitation to The Storyforge, the online roleplay website created by one of the members.

I was astounded. Some people see roleplaying as just a light hearted gaming activity, but once you join in you realize that most of the people on it are extremely dedicated writers. The site I mentioned above, The Storyforge, is an extremely good example of this. There are about fourteen active members on average, who have created over two hundred characters and written over forty thousand posts in just over a year. The posts are no small size either - one thread contained over 50,000 words, and there are hundreds of threads. For so few people to write so many posts in just over a year, there must have been tremendous effort involved.

It must be said, however, that this type of roleplaying is very different to the type many people take part in. Some people roleplay on their own, or in a group, but post things like a 'diary' of their characters - this is shown by the vast number of roleplay character profiles on myspace, facebook, livejournal etc. They craft a character, and imagine their characters lives, and that is a fantastic way to develop your creations.

This method is a little different, and in my opinion helps writers to develop even more. The posts in a thread should be able to read like a story, without anything jarring the flow. Since each post is written about a different character, it helps the writer develop the character's voice, what they'd do. You should be able to recognize who's moving before reading their name or looking at their avatar.

Having a number of different characters helps you learn how to balance your characters in a story more easily. Many aspiring novelists fall into the trap of having one extremely well drawn character, and then a host of very weak minor characters who have no defining voice and no personality. Role play allows you to work on multiple characters at once, and helps you build up all their personalities equally.

There's also the fact that if you roleplay to the extent that I mentioned above, your writing will improve anyway. If, on a rare occasion, everyone is online at once, there is little waiting time for a reply to your last post, and you may end up posting many, many times in one night. If you wrote twenty posts of three hundred words each in one night, that's a total of six thousand words a night. With that amount of practice, your writing is bound to improve in no time.

The last point I would like to mention is the other people you are roleplaying with. If you can improve the state of your writing by reading books that are well written, the same applies even more for roleplaying with people who are good writers. Being in that sort of environment will encourage you to improve, both consciously and subconsciously. Most people are also willing to offer advice or review a piece of work, and will work with you to help you to improve. No matter what style of writing you normally choose to work at, roleplaying can help you improve generally, and is something I would recommend to all authors.

Learn more about this author, Allegria Andretti.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.