You Don't Need Dice: Pt.1

Sometimes we take advice too literally.

(I was going to put a ‘literally/literary’ pun in there. -sniggers-).

One of the most regularly repeated tips when it comes to writing is ‘Read a lot and write a lot.’

This is, of course, excellent advice to any writer regardless of experience, background and raw talent. If you don’t read plenty of authors who use a range of different styles then you won’t be exposed to what’s possible. If you don’t read something that takes your breath away then it’s difficult to know when your work could do the same to others; you’ll have nothing to aspire to. Likewise, if you don’t read something that just plain sucks, then how will you understand what to avoid in your own prose?

Same goes for writing. You need the tools to write. You need to practice, just like you need to practice drawing, playing an instrument or kicking a football. You need to write to find out your vocabulary level, your ability to use tenses and the best way to apply grammar. (For the record, I really suck at grammar terms. I know the rules and the application for the most part, but I couldn’t tell you exactly what a Predicative Adjective or a Reciprocal Pronoun is precisely. Let’s just say I won’t be teaching creative writing at Oxford anytime soon.) You need to know if you can get the idea in your head down onto the page without losing any of the spark which got you excited in the first place. You must learn how much dialogue, description and introspection makes the best mix for you. All this comes from writing as much as you can.

But the endless supply of writing advice which is available on the internet and in magazines rarely specifies where you should practice these main two rules. Is it exclusively books? Fiction? How about websites? Do newspapers count? Blogs? Text messages?

How about games?

How about roleplaying games?

Ooh, got ya. See, here’s the bit where at least one person reading will say ‘Oh, Christ. This is where Ben confesses that his book is based on a Dungeons and Dragons campaign and it’s going to be terrible.’

But it isn’t. Queen of the World is an original idea in a world I created. Some of the character ideas I’ve used through the years have been put through a grinder and find themselves sprinkled amongst the manuscript, though. Bear with me while I tell you a little story.

Years ago, maybe around 1997-ish, my family got its first home computer. It was a gift for me, under the pretence of ‘a good idea for doing schoolwork’ which is probably what every young teenager tells their parents before getting one. However, I wasn’t allowed to have it in my room, so it went into the landing and became the family computer. I shared it with two elder brothers. Mainly we played games on it. Commandos, Championship Manager and Half-Life are the games which stick in my mind. But the main novelty was having access to the internet. This was before the days of having broadband attached to your phone line – remember kids, you’re lucky these days – and we had to use a 56k dial up which made a buzzing sound as it typed in the phone number to connect every time you turned it on. It was also before pre-pay packages, so internet time was limited. There was no Facebook or Twitter. No Reddit or Imgur. Livejournal hadn’t exploded yet, and neither had MySpace. Mainly there was Hotmail, ICQ and chat rooms. One of the biggest ones was Yahoo Chat.

Now Yahoo Chat, like many other chat rooms in those early days of the mainstream internet explosion, gave users the ability to create their own rooms. These could be public or private, and weren’t policed very heavily. Some of the names were pretty grim. In the Teen section – and I was a fourteen year old boy so I qualified – there were a lot of rooms dedicated to sex. Now despite what a lot of my friends reading this will immediately presume, I never went into these sex rooms. Mainly because I was terrified it was somehow traceable, and my parents would get an email from the phone company about how I’d racked up a £300 pound phone bill in HOT TEEN SEX CHAT 16-19s, a room created by b1gd1ckst3ve.

I also wasn’t interested in rooms about Anime / Manga, Premier League Football or Take That. I couldn’t care less about rooms dedicated to people from California, Melbourne or Glasgow (Although when I did visit the Glasgow room one time to see if they typed in their accent, I was confronted with an incredible number of uses of the word ‘Fuck’). But what I was interested in was a few rooms dedicated to roleplaying. I clicked in and had a look, using the entirely roleplay appropriate name of ‘TheRealKurtCocaine’. Yeah, I was a Nirvana fan and I thought the surname pun made me sound cool and rebellious. Nevermind.

What I found was a room of about twenty people roleplaying. When I say that, I mean using an entirely text-based platform to create their game. Roleplaying existed on forums but it was too slow, having to wait for people to come on and post huge reams of description and exposition just to say ‘My character waves and leaves the room’ because they weren’t going to be able to get back online for a week. But in this chat room it was reactive. A group of people were creating a story on the fly depending on the actions of others. There was a loose ‘Type something then wait for others to have their turn’ but it wasn’t rigid. Some wrote several times while others hung back, waiting to contribute when the time was right.

I sat there and watched for about an hour, captivated. I sipped my can of Sprite and didn’t dare ruin it. I’d never taken part in anything like this before so I was worried there would be a huge set of rules I’d have to follow, and trying to join in would get me hounded out of there and banned for life. My brothers had dabbled with roleplaying – we had a couple of D&D books and a Call of Cthulhu game manual in our house, as well as some Warhammer miniature and a big foamy sword for LARPing as evidence – but I’d never taken part personally. Besides, the internet had only been filtering into people’s homes for the last year or two, discounting corporate, enthusiast or government use. This was new. This was for me.

(Read 'Part Two' here.)