Kurt Vonnegut Teaches Roleplaying
Well, not quite. Kurt Vonnegut is an amazing fiction writer, a legend of our time. He gives a set of eight rules for writing fiction, which are excellent suggestions for roleplayers.
Kurt Vonnegut's eight rules for writing fiction, and how they relate to roleplayers like you and me:
1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
When someone completely new to your roleplay stumbles across your post, and they decide out of the kindness of their heart to read the post, make it feel worthwhile. Your post should have meaning and definite causality, and the reader should feel engaged in the story. If they leave your work of fiction feeling that they've wasted their time, you need to go back over the basics and start focusing on functional writing.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
For the casual reader, it is hard to get behind a story that doesn't have a protagonist. As a game master or storyteller, player characters are often the protagonists, but there are many flexible ways of giving the reader someone they can root for. This carries the reader through the story, as the interest in what happens to the protagonist is naturally stronger than the interest in what happens to the antagonist.
Of course, this doesn't limit you to clearly defined good and bad, either. Get creative with your definitions of protagonism - sometimes, a well-written villian can be a very effective protagonist. Write your fiction and design your game so that there is a three-dimensional character that is interesting, and who the reader is bound to support, whether it be the sadism in hoping that a villian's plan will cause mass effect, or that the good guys stop his plan.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
Desire is what drives a character; if a character has no desire, they can not take action. Conflicting desires creates character interaction, and conflict is what drives a story. Without a conflict, your story has no substance.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things -- reveal character or advance the action.
Write, write, and write some more -- then delete. If you find a sentence in your post that doesn't either increase the depth to a character or advance the action of the story, it is a waste of space. I am personally a fan of "the miniskirt writing theory", where the idea is to keep your work like a miniskirt: short enough to keep your attention, but still long enough to cover the subject. Roleplayers often gorge their posts on information that is irrelevant to the action and the character, and it amounts to a massive waste of time and energy to all parties. If you write 10,000 word posts in your play-by-post game, make sure that every single line of that post is filling out a character in some fashion, or is advancing the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
What is the goal of your post? Define the outcome of the circumstance, then go back and write in the pomp that is due. This will not only aide you in getting your thoughts out on paper much more hastily, but will also create a greater focus in your writing.
6. Be a sadist. Now matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them -- in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
We are all defined by the banners we wave amidst our darkest hour. Your characters need to experience pain and sacrifice to demonstrate their true colors and motives -- as characters that are not subjected to the dregs of err and disaster will come off as flat and unrealistic. Your goal is to create concrete characters so believable that the reader has no choice but to be enthralled by their well-cut facets and rough edges. Subjecting your characters to the horrors of negative events gives you a chance to get to the very core of their personality.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
Your story has a reader, and you have a song to sing. Do not attempt to write your story to please many people -- your posts will be spread far too thin, and will not have substance to them. They need to be distinguished and pointed: aim to please one person, and as you continue writing, continue aiming to please that one person. Success will replicate itself.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.
Information is engaging, and much like any other media, you only have a moment or two to gather attention. Take the earliest possible opportunity to engage your reader with information, it will create a commitment and dedication to the remainder of the post. People like to be well-informed, even if the characters are not.
Applying these sorts of concepts to your roleplay will vastly improve the quality of your writing. I recommend going back over previous works of yours, looking at their composition, and use Kurt's rules as a rubric to score your own posts. It is a great exercise to even re-write the posts, and then compare the new versions to the old: you will be pleased with the improvement.
Have any thoughts or comments? Suggestions? Please, by all means reply and let me know what you think! Feel free to share your experiences relating to any of these rules. If you have any different interpretations on how they relate to roleplay, or even if you disagree with them, tell us!
