Rehab for Roleplayers - Part 3

Welcome to Rehab for Roleplayers, a series of articles aimed at helping roleplayers more successfully make the transition into writing fiction.

Part 3 – Echolalia Jones and the Thesaurus of Doom

As we've seen, one of the most significant differences between RP and fiction is that RP is an interactive process. Aside from issues already discussed, there are several related aspects of  writing styles in RP that can become problematic when employed in the realm of fiction.

The bulk of RP occurs within the context of a 'gameworld' or a pre-set environment into which player's characters are inserted. This can be anything from a fully represented reality with pre-created 'rooms' that a character moves through, simulating a real-world environment, to a loose arrangement of locations created according to need in a chat-based free form RP.

There's also, in most RPG environments, a strong sense of community among the players. Whether a player is a joiner or a renegade, that 'society' among the players can and will affect how people write in the game. There will be certain standards and habits that over time become quite generic to any one place, and these stick in the mind to the point of second nature after a while (I know someone who once actually used the term 'ooc' before talking to someone in real life – RP junky much?).

As a good many roleplayers start out in a pre-set gameworld, I think it's worth looking at the way habitual interaction with an RP environment can affect writing in general.

So, below are some commonly problematic RP habits I've observed creeping into fiction written by roleplayers.

- Echolalia Jones

Repetition of detail is important in RP, especially in a MUD, where people can 'physically' come and go from the writing space, and reinforcement of character looks, current game action and so on help people entering play to figure out who is who and what's going on.

So, you often see a great deal of repetition in posts, constant reinforcement of details. And this repetition is also a means of a player developing a sense of individual identity for a character, as well as hopefully making them interesting to other players.

Therefore, you'll see a lot of people posting descriptions of hair and clothing, or mannerisms, or perceptions their character has, which make that character unique and engaging. This is standard RP behaviour, because that's often very necessary to the nature of the gaming environment.

But if you do that in fiction, you're going to annoy the hell out of your reader, who might resent being reminded in every third paragraph that Muffy McGee has blonde hair and green eyes, or that she is wearing *insert exhaustive list of currently worn items*. Readers of fiction do not need that sort of constant and emphatic reinforcement of what's already been said.

Think back to the last really good novel you read. I'll put money down on there being only a few scant mentions of what characters look like, scattered across the entire novel. There will be reminders of detail here and there but it will be subtle, and you, as a reader wouldn't have realised you were being reminded, because the phrasing and circumstance of the detail being repeated was cleverly disguised in different terms from the last time, and not too often. Hopefully.

I will bet you that, unless the novel is a very bad novel indeed, there will be no mentioning of characters' appearances in vivid detail every third paragraph. The author will not have assumed you have the memory of a guppy, nor that you are likely to read their book by flipping it to random pages and need to be told, therefore, what's going on and who is who, and what everyone looks like, again and again.

The next good novel you read, pay attention to how subtly the author reinforces character looks and scene details, and compare this to the last RP scene you played. The difference ought to be enormous.


- The Thesaurus of Doom

The RP or "gaming" environment is very often competitive in nature. There's a pile of reasons for that, but essentially it comes down to the word "game".

Even in free-form RP, where it's more about the writing than how many kills you can rack up, that competitive edge remains. Players just love, to bits, being thought of as 'elite', the best at whatever the game's point is.

If the RP is primarily concerned with words, you get a subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) atmosphere of competition going on, with words. Players will constantly strive toward gaining or maintaining a status of eliteness (whether they admit to it or not – honestly, people, who does not like being adored and venerated? I sure as heck do). So this potentially produces the following habits that can be problematic when writing fiction:

Over-verbosity

In the RP environment, where repetition of detail and writing 'style' is part of what makes your character stand out from all the other characters, it is not uncommon for people to take things to the extreme, especially if they are the competitive type and want to be elite.

So, you find people using a pile of big words. Now, I am a fifty-cent word kind of person, because I love words and therefore know a lot of them. Some of them are big, and I'm not afraid to employ them where necessary. However, some folks adopt the use of big and obscure words as a way of making themselves stand out. They'll use 'cerulean' where 'blue' would do, because there's fifty other characters with 'blue' eyes, and they're bored with 'blue', or want those eyes to be better than plain old 'blue'. And not only that, but they'll substitute a fifty-cent word for the dime variety wherever humanly possible, so their posts wind up sounding like they were written by an eccentric 19th C scholar of etymology.

Which is fine, in an RPG, where people don't have to play with you if your plus-ten Thesaurus of Doom irritates them. They can always find someone else to write with. Plenty fish, etc.

It really is not fine to do this in a novel, where the reader's paid money to read you, and is therefore a captive audience, and are probably going to complain long and loudly if you irritate them. In a novel, your job is to tell a story. You don't have to be 'elite'. Your job, as a writer, is to engage the reader. And sure, there are people whose target audience is well-read and word-wise. But there's catering to audience, and then there's being a smarty-pants who cares less about narrative fluency than showing off your awesome vocabulary. That's a recipe for annoying your readers right there.


Constant and peculiar use of descriptors


I've already discussed the issue of repetition – and won't reiterate too much on it here. But one thing I notice a great deal in the fiction of habitual roleplayers is the excessive and sometimes strange use of descriptors and modifiers, which are adjectives, describing words, or nouns and verbs used in place of them.

Take, for example, my good friend Hagorth the troll:

"Hagorth sighed and set off home, dragging his club behind him. His huge, hairy head was low as he trudged the path, his gaze fixed morosely on the ground. The wet rope of snot suspended from his warty nose now and then vanished up a nostril when he sniffled, only to drip loose again."

Hagorth is, obviously, not very happy. The descriptors in this example, which I've bolded, add little extra touches to the picture, but hopefully don't overwhelm it. Really, they aren't necessary – if I removed them all, you'd still see an unhappy character:

"Hagorth sighed and set off home, dragging his club behind him. His head was low as he trudged the path, his gaze fixed on the ground. The snot suspended from his nose now and then vanished up a nostril when he sniffled, only to drip loose again."

The descriptors are there not to give essential information, but to enhance it. Now, the first example might need those descriptors if Hagorth has not already been described in detail, in other passages. If he has been described, or trolls in general have been described as having 'huge, hairy' heads, etc., then the second passage is more than adequate, and the descriptors risk becoming those annoying reminders I was talking about previously.

Of course, stylistic preferences exist, and one author might enjoy using more descriptors than another author, who likes plain language and uses nouns and verbs rather than a lot of adjectives. But even so, there's a point where it goes beyond style and into personal indulgence, and lack of regard for the reader.

Now, just for fun, let's look at how bad things can get when RP habits take control of fiction:

"Hagorth the troll exhaled a heavy huff of breath and sadly embarked for home, dragging his colossal, blood-stained war-club studded with nails behind him. His momentous and hirsute head drooped with disappointment as he disconsolately trudged the path on his massive troll feet, which had ten-inch claws, his cerulean, piggishly squinted orbs fixed morosely on the boggy ground below him. The wet rope of sticky, emerald snot suspended from his large and bent, warty nose now and then vanished up a cavernous nasal aperture when he sniffled, only to drip loose again."

Now, imagine a novel in which every single paragraph was that over-modified. Feel free to wince at the thought, for I surely am.

Note the use of 'orbs' for eyes. The final issue covered in this section concerns peculiar descriptors, which can come about in an RP environment via sheer boredom with the use of the same ones over and over, or through a couple of the 'elite' players showing off their awesome (if somewhat haphazard) vocabularies and being copied by every other player until suddenly all fingers are "digits" or "appendages", all eyes are "orbs" or "hues", all feet are "booted", all youths are "teens", and so and so forth. Certain words do become in-game memes, even if they are ridiculous in any other context (I once had a character 'roll her orbs' at mine, so I had my charry pick up said 'orbs' and commence juggling with them, to the other player's immense lack of amusement).

It shouldn't need saying that that sort of substitution is not necessary in fiction, where your reader will be happy for eyes to be eyes, and fingers to be fingers, most of the time.

Also, the fact that Hagorth is a troll, and that trolls have ten-inch claws, and that his club has nails in it and blood-stains, not only could have been mentioned in passing at some earlier point in the story, but should have been, for the sake of narrative clarity.

In Part 4, I'll continue to explore various specific problems in both language and structure that may occur when roleplaying principles and habits are applied to fiction.