Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Love of the Last Tycoon

For me, writing stories is an exercise in crawling into fictional skins. I inhabit each character for a little while at a time, jumping from host to host like Azazel in Fallen. (Hey, no judgment! I was an obssessed Denzel Washington fan, okay?)

Unlike a case of total possession, though, I usually have to do some business with my host. There's some back-and-forth, some negotiation on what the character will do next. Sometimes characters just flat-out refuse to do what I want them to do, and sometimes they'll do what I want but in unexpected ways, and with unexpected results. It's a big part of the reason why writing is often a surprising process, even when I've planned everything, or so I thought, in advance.

I'm not alone, either. According to the paper "Narrative Empathy" by Suzanne Keen (in the collection A Cognitive Theory of Narrative Acts), 92% of novelists surveyed had the experience of characters they've written seeming to have a life and will of their own.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, I (and 92% of novelists) fail at having complete control of imaginary characters. Writers are a pretty pathetic bunch when you think about it, when they can't get even figments of their own imagination obey them.

Still, maybe that's the way it should be; after all, the most interesting stories come from the choices characters make and the ways they interact with each other. The more the characters come to life, the more vivid, dynamic, and unexpected the story is likely to be.

This is where my experience in roleplaying, and particularly gamemastering, shaped my writing a lot. One review that was particularly insightful in this regard was one by CrazyDyslexicNerd (not calling names, that's the actual handle) which said:

How do you keep track of all the different plots going on at once? Seriously, I swear most everyone one has their own agenda! Making it very realistic.

The comment warmed the cockles of my cold black heart, seeing how it's pretty much the way I work. I mean I don't write separate timelines for all the characters or anything, but each character is distinct in my head and has her own desires, methods, and limits. Then I let them loose in a conflict situation and off they go in a series of Brownian Motions, crashing into each other and each careening in different directions, only to crash into others, and so forth.

When I GM, I let the player characters be the first movers, creating new collisions through their choices. I'm terrible at writing game scenarios and no longer try because it's too much trouble to shoo the players to the appointed path; I just set up the world and non-player characters, make sure the player characters have reason to engage with them, and improvise from there by roleplaying the NPCs, jumping in and out of characters.

When I write I run the characters' multiple collision simulation, as it were, in my head and put it down in an outline. Then I write much like I roleplay NPCs, except this time I play all the characters. Who is this person? What does he want? What does he say? What's his plan?

In the process, more often than not, situations and characters head in ways I did not anticipate at the planning stage, or I discover things about the characters or background I hadn't realized before. I compensate accordingly, sometimes at the scene level, sometimes altering the outline itself.

The whole thing can start feeling schizophrenic after a while. When I'm Zuko, I'm so sure I'm right and I'm filled with righteous anger at anyone who disagrees. Then I'm Azula and I see how thoughtless and self-righteous Zuko is, how dangerous and self-serving his course of action. And then I get to Ozai and I watch my children threatening to tear up the Nation I have worked so hard to stabilize these past years. They are my children, yes, but they are a Prince and Princess of the Fire Nation first and foremost and immaturity is no excuse once they have chosen to enter the game. And then I'm Iroh, Mai, then Jee across an expanse of ocean, and...

I think writing and roleplaying, more than anything else, gave me a way to recognize different and often conflicting truths. Being different people, if only in made-up ways, taught me to hold these truths side by side and to see how much richer life is when I can see more than one perspective.

It's probably no accident, again from "Literary Empathy," that writers as a group score unusually high on empathy. This isn't the same thing as being good people individually, as Keen is quick to point out, and there's no way to be sure if the people who become writers are predisposed to empathy or whether writing increases empathy. I personally think it's a little of both in a feedback loop.

Of all the ways roleplaying can inform writing, I think the most important is to spend some time in the shoes of each character, especially the least likeable or less interesting ones. Robert McKee put the same thing in different words when he exhorted his readers in Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting to "fall in love with all your characters." (Emphasis mine.) This includes villains, and in fact he especially emphasizes giving villains their due.

Each character has a reason to get up in the morning or to wish she really didn't have to. All characters have motivations and lives of their own. It's the job of the writer as their creator, or maybe their temporary abductor in the case of fanfic, to figure them out. That's what makes for a richer story, and roleplaying was my path to start figuring that out.

This post was inspired by a discussion with loopy777 on gamemastering and writing. Thanks Loopy!