Character Work… In Character
A quick note to begin: for the next week, Ad Luna is £0.99 on the Kindle store . It’s one of my favourite books that I’ve written and I’d love for some more of you to (hopefully) enjoy reading it – so if you want to pick an copy up, now is the time.
A swift blog this morning, because I’m about to go off and do a lot of storytelling – which is convenient, in that it gives me something to talk about. All being well I’ll be in two very different universes today: first out on the Final Frontier in Star Trek Adventures, and then back to our Dungeons and Dragons campaign. In which I’ve just been informed that gunpowder does exist, and thus my daydreams of working some dramatic speeches from Sharpe into my dialogue have become that much more achievable.
Because there’s an awful lot to be said for storytelling in character rather than just about characters. I realise that I’m not necessarily typical in this regard, as I’ve done a reasonable amount of acting, as well as some stage writing, and, helpfully, improv work too – so I’m extremely comfortable doing that sort of thing. By which I mean that when I’m playing a game in character, I’m almost always in character. That doesn’t just mean putting on a silly voice (although let’s be honest, I always do). It’s remembering those motivations I scrawled down on my character sheet, approaching situations in the way that a First Officer or Sir Geoffrey du Babbage would do.
I know I’ve been doing it properly, especially with Geoffrey, because occasionally I’ll be going about my day-to-day business, maybe thinking about DnD, and Sir Geoffrey will have a really good idea about what to do in an upcoming session. And I don’t mean I had an idea about what Geof will do – I mean Geof had an idea. I didn’t consciously switch characters, but suddenly I was considering how I could convince my fictional friends to go along with this madcap plan of mine. (Geof did manage to persuade them, in the next session. But some demons appear to have showed up and made things rather more complicated than Geoffrey had hoped.) By being in character rather than thinking about it from an outside perspective, the ideas flowed far more smoothly.
Helpful in this instance is the fact that Sir Geoffrey is in many ways a highly caricatured version of myself – he’s not exactly a difficult character for me to inhabit, given that he was originally created for a very silly comedy sketch. But I’ve occasionally managed to pull this off with other characters of mine – with Tal and Lily, and with Dio from Ad Luna, and many of the rogue’s gallery of my many short stories and other works you’ve never seen.
Try it, if you’re writing. Don’t think about what your character is going to do. Think about what you’re going to do. Step into those shoes, be in your own world. I am faced with this problem: how am I going to get out of it? What am I going to say?
If nothing else, it’s a lot of fun.
