4 Ways Online Roleplay Can Make You a Better Writer

Roleplay goes beyond tabletops! With online roleplaying on the rise, it’s a good thing that today we have Wrimo Morgan Lane to share four ways we can use roleplay forums to help us grow as writers.

I’m going to be honest with you: I spend way more time roleplaying on the NaNo forums than I do writing my personal projects. It comes more easily to me, probably in part because I’m sharing the burden of inspiration instead of providing all the forward momentum on the project—and I mean, an alternate universe scenario billing my main character as an angsty undead monster isn’t something I have going in my book. It’s addictive and sometimes distracting. Even so, the collaborative storytelling element of roleplay can help a writer hone their craft.

1. Roleplay trains you to be flexible. 

In my experience, stories tend to shift away from their initial conceit during the writing process. We often struggle with this part of editing as “darling” scenes become extraneous, or a character simply refuses to behave the way we want them to. Due to the collaborative nature of roleplay, however, the story is ever evolving into a shape that no one person envisioned. Did your character’s ally accept the mega-lich’s offer of immortality while they were gearing up for a straightforward battle? The other participants’ choices will force you to routinely adjust your plans, which can make it easier to run with new ideas in your own work.

2. Throwing your characters into wild scenarios helps you get to know them better. 

When I first constructed the main character of my book, it was to fill an unimportant role—one of my villains needed a political leader to boss around, I made him up on the spot, and that was that. It wasn’t until I decided to play around with their relationship in a forum thread featuring an enormous magical bookstore that he came into his own. In enduring bizarre magical effects, he showed me how he dealt with adversity. In interacting with the other characters, he began to find his voice. When the story ended, he came out the other side as a fussy but well-intentioned person hoping to make a change in the world, which to me was prime main character material. Ever since then I have used roleplay as a testing ground for new characters.

3. You get the opportunity to learn from other writers. 

Writing a story with other people creates a strong sense of community. We become invested in other people’s ideas and characters as they interact with our own, and oftentimes we learn from each other’s strengths. For example, my writing style tends to be dryer, which in some circumstances doesn’t work as well for drawing a reader in. When I roleplay with someone who is better at portraying emotional scenes or describing scenery in a way that doesn’t feel like slogging through purple prose, I can analyze what about the delivery worked for me. Once I recognize techniques that make an appropriate impact, I can experiment with them in my own writing.

4. You’re writing! 

One of the most important things for a writer to do is, well, write. Like playing an instrument, you have to consistently practice if you want to improve your word-smithing. Roleplay provides a fun way to keep your pen sharp. It also doesn’t hurt that if you stop consistently posting in a roleplay, you’ll likely have other writers checking in and holding you accountable for vanishing. After all, it’s a shared story, and whether you’re writing with one other person or a group, your input will enrich the experience for everyone.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some roleplays I need to reply to.

Morgan Lane is a hobbyist writer with two published short stories under her belt and aspirations to get a book of her own in print someday. Currently she is working on a low-fantasy novel that explores neurodivergent experiences and toxic relationships in a tense, haunting narrative. Morgan lives in Florida with her partner, a dog, a cat, and seven arachnids. You can contact her and read more of her work at morganlanewrites.com.

Top photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash.