McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft
How to not suck at writing.
paulWTAMU:
I just wound up deleting a handful (10-15) short stories and a few dozen rather bad poems off my hard drive. I don't want to publish, I don't care if anyone reads what I write, but I like to write as sort of mental exercise. And by God, my stuff is weaksauce, particularly my short stories. I can play with visuals pretty well (usually for grotesque effects) but I can't come up with a way to write a decent character. How do I get inside someone else's head to write them? I'm not even trying to write something wonderful, just something decent...*head meet desk*
svb1972:
Try doing some online text based roleplaying?
I admit that I've been roleplaying for so long, that getting into someone elses head is pretty straight forward.
paulWTAMU:
I've done PnP RPGs intermittently for a while, typically old World of Darkness. It's what made me want to start writing :) The same things been an issue for me there too...I can play malks and gangrels and some of the minor clans...but ask me to be a toreador or ventrue or any social clan and I'm lost.
TokenRed:
First off, hi I'm new! I've been lurking around these forums for a while, and they seem like fun.
Secondly, I think characters are just a matter of practice. To me it sounds like you're doing all the right things. I find it a lot easier if I write in first person perspective - you pretty much just get in the head of one person. (I'm kind of lazy, so for me this is great :D)
If your characters all have some kind of reasoning behind their actions and their personality quirks, then they should be believable.
I'd say you're probably being too hard on yourself. It's always easy to be uber critical of your own stuff.
Mickey Finn:
MUSH.
In a MUSH, it's like tabletop meets improvisational theater. You play your character while other people play thiers, in a room, text-based. So it's like a writing exercise for exactly what you're talking about!
The most popular themes out there are, I think, Amber, Potter, and White Wolf.
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