Star Wars Roleplay

Inspiration Thursday

Have you roleplayed? Yes? Fantastic, you know how fun it can be. No? Take a seat; Aunt L.V.’s gonna take you through the story of this magical world.

Explaining Roleplay

Roleplay (RP) is a post-by-post website where multiple authors contribute within an existing universe. As an writer, you develop a single character (or many), and when you post, you only write a response for your character’s point of view. You go back and forth with one or more authors on a singular topic, creating a story together until it reaches its natural conclusion. Some people write their characters for many years, which gives your creations a lot of development.

The important asks of this is building singular creations, growing them through writing with others and writing from a single point of view. Writing in a specific POV has been an incredible help for me as a writer, as later in time I was able to write multiple characters in a single topic, without mixing the two characters between my posts. Even today, when writing Just One, I don’t focus on one POV, but instead switch between my characters, helping me better understand them.

Coming from a Roleplay Background

I stumbled into the RP world by accident when I was a teenager. My writing style wasn’t great then, but I didn’t write with people who pushed me to go beyond. This developed over the years by meeting new people and building my characters. It was about breaking out of my shell and letting others read my stories in real time.

As a teenager, I dropped a few stories I had begun out of fear that other people would hate my work. Sometimes, I look back on some of them, remembering the content I wrote and thinking maybe I was wrong. Perhaps that odd girl Amanda with emerging powers might have been liked, and I was too stuck to realize…

Why Roleplaying was Good for Me

Roleplaying helped me open up to others. Suddenly, you get honest feedback from real people about how you write. They tell you about the overall style and point out your grammar mistakes or little issues along the way, helping you grow as a writer. I have written in different universes, to name a few – Charmed, C.W.’s Arrow, Firefly, Dystopian, and Star Trek, to name a few. I have owned my own roleplay sites (not very successfully) and administrated others (that went really well).

Star Wars was my most immense roleplay love, and most characters built over the past two decades belong in that sandbox. Within the Character Introduction segment on Wednesday, I will give you some insight into some of them.

Discovering Graphics Design

Another aspect of what roleplaying has given me is my love for graphics design and video editing. When I started writing, I noticed many people had a beautiful visual representation of their characters, and I was captivated by the possibilities. I had already dabbled with Photoshop at the time, but it hadn’t been with a purpose.

It was only through roleplay and observing threads from other artists that I truly learned so much. The same thing happened with video editing. When others started creating videos for their websites, characters and couples, I wanted to do that, too. And I did. Over my time roleplaying, I have made multiple videos.

My writing today…

When I write my stories now, I write hundreds of pages of a story that nobody sees until I feel ready for them to read. I’ll go through multiple drafts of the Just One stories until it feels right to share it with my beta readers (this is where I am now; a few select humans are reading the first book, and I’m waiting to hear back from them). That wasn’t a joke, by the way, about the hundreds of pages. I currently have three books of Just One written in different draft versions and snippets from a few others planned…

Katrine, the leading lady of my short story “The Wolf’s Heir: Katrine’s Awakening”, was built as a roleplay character within the Star Wars universe.

There are many reasons why I look back on my roleplaying years fondly. It helped me grow as a writer in ways I couldn’t begin to imagine at first. In recent years, as I devoted myself to working on Just One and even blogging, I couldn’t go back the way I used to. It was as if another phase of my life had begun, and while I still keep in touch with a lot of my roleplaying partners (and one of them is even my beta reader), at the present time, I’m not sure I would come back to it.

Hey, that was a bit of an Inspiration Thursday blog post. Diving into a segment of my writing history was pretty fun, which brings us to today. Next week, I’ll be writing about Roswell, the original TV show that was the story that inspired Just One.

Thanks for reading, and leave your comments. Tell me about your own roleplaying experiences. Where did you write? How many characters did you have?

~Love, L.V.