Getting Into Character: How Early 2000s Online Roleplaying Helped My Writing Evolve

Every new writer of fiction starts with their own set of naïve ideas and assumptions about the craft of writing.

When I first started attempting to write my own stories, in my early teens, one of mine was that creating strong characters would come naturally to me. I thought that it was as simple as drawing inspiration from the people around me and adding in a dash or two of my own personality and preferences. What more did it take to create a lovable and infinitely fascinating imaginary person?

I was unpleasantly surprised to discover that I was wrong. The connections I felt to characters had always been one of my favorite things about the experience of reading fiction. Yet in my own writing, my characters were so… unsurprising. Often, they were simply alternate versions of myself, only more attractive and intelligent. Even if I gave them slightly different traits—two siblings instead of one, or red hair instead of brown—they were still essentially just another version of me. And honestly, writing about myself was pretty boring.

Plus, nothing ever happened to them (this was also like me). They simply existed, observing the world around them. I crafted sentence after sentence and waited for a story to come, as if plots would just materialize from out of nowhere.

When I was writing, I never felt the sense of urgency that I experienced while I was reading. I didn’t care what happened to my characters—maybe because I knew nothing ever would—and I didn’t think about them when I wasn’t at my desk. I rarely finished any of my writing projects unless it was a school assignment.

Looking back now, I wonder if I would have even continued trying to write fiction if not for online roleplaying forums.

The Neopets “Neoboards” were my first exposure to the world of internet writing RPGs. 

If you’re not a millennial who spent a lot of time online in your early teens, you might not be aware that Neopets, the virtual pet site for nineties internet kids, had a forum section dubbed the Neoboards. Along with sections for “General Discussion,” and “Art,” where people mostly focused on topics like Neopoints or magical Neopet-transforming paintbrushes, there was a board called “Role Playing.” 

For a creatively inclined teen, the Neoboards were a safe place to experiment with writing. It worked like this:

To participate in a Neopets roleplay, you first had to pick a character. Maybe you’ve always liked Neville Longbottom. So you join a Harry Potter roleplaying thread and decide to “play” Neville. Then, based on the setting and circumstances defined by the person who started the roleplay, you write a paragraph in from Neville’s point of view. Next, someone else takes a turn, now writing from the perspective of their character. This continues until everyone has shared a paragraph or two. Eventually, it’s your turn again, by which time your character can react to the actions taken by the other characters.

The Neoboards could be intimidating, and even elitist. “Advanced” roleplays were open to only the most experienced writers. Out-of-character comments had to be defined by using double parentheses or the acronym “OOO.” Controlling another person’s character without their permission was called “power-playing.” If you used poor grammar or your character seemed like too much of a “Mary Sue,” you would be shamelessly ridiculed.

Still, I found these rules much easier to understand than the rules of middle school. On the Neoboards, it didn’t matter that I was awkward or that I didn’t have shiny hair – all I had to do was write a decent sentence.

It was there that I first met C, a girl who roleplayed as the teenage version of Sirius Black, Harry Potter’s wrongfully convicted godfather. C’s writing was like nothing I’d ever seen before in a roleplay. She wrote dazzlingly beautiful posts about longing and loss, and her depiction of Sirius was a tortured, sensitive soul, which fit perfectly with my awkward, painfully insecure Remus Lupin. 

In the Harry Potter books, Remus Lupin is a werewolf, a condition he’s forced to hide for fear of discrimination. It’s the type of metaphor you might expect from J.K. Rowling—clever, if a little on the nose—but since Remus Lupin isn’t one of the most important characters in the books, there are areas of his background that weren’t mentioned. This gave me plenty of room to enrich his characterization. Soon, I was spending much of my free time refining “my” Remus. What was it like, growing up with that condition? Was he lonely, or did he have friends as a child? And (since I was, after all, a teenager)… how could he ever fall in love?

Remus Lupin and Sirius Black were one of the most popular fanfiction pairings in the early aughts, before Remus Lupin’s relationship with Nymphadora Tonks was established near the end of the series. Even now, I’m not convinced that the Lupin/Tonks pairing wasn’t thrown in just to thwart Lupin/Sirius fans. Given what we now know about J.K. Rowling’s bigotry, who would be surprised?

At the time, though, J.K. Rowling didn’t even have a Twitter account, and we were still blissfully ignorant, secure in the belief that our favorite book series stood for everything that was good and kind.

C and I spent nearly two years sending back and forth lengthy, painstakingly crafted pieces of prose in which our characters did little but silently pine for one another while having impenetrable, vaguely cyclical conversations. The writing was often interspersed with heart wrenching lyrics from our favorite indie bands.

Each time C sent over a new post, I would read and reread it, sometimes even printing it out to take it to school with me so that I could work on my reply while I pretended to be taking notes.

The more I roleplayed as Remus, the more I felt that I knew him. I invented complex family histories, phobias, quirks. I was surprised to find that I was good at this; that this kind of writing could even be fun. Never before had I lived inside the mind of a fictional character like this. And it was incredible. To be able to exist as someone else; to have total control over the events that happened to them—could anything be better for a teen who felt like her own life wasn’t quite lining up with what she’d hoped for?

I began to notice characters in a new way—how they could contradict themselves, how they could do things that went against their own needs. How flaws could make them interesting, and how they could express their wants and desires without actually speaking them aloud.

I learned how describing the setting could change the mood of a scene, and how a fleeting memory could bring something new to light.

And for the first time, I studied the magic of words: how to make a sentence sing, how to bring a moment to life in a paragraph. 

Even after the later Harry Potter books were published, and it became quite clear that Remus and Sirius were never going to be a couple in “canon,” C and I continued to build our own world around the characters. By that point, I was fully invested in the “ship,” and I began to realize that these more adult, angst-ridden depictions of the characters could be more satisfying than the original books—better, even.

Recently, I unearthed the roleplays I exchanged with C, expecting mostly to be embarrassed and amused. Instead, it all came back to me. The unflinching poignancy in the way the characters longed for one another, the rush of excitement I felt when one of them came a step closer to expressing their true feelings. It was messy and authentic in a way that I hadn’t realized I’d been missing.

It never mattered that none of it was real—or that even JK Rowling didn’t support our “ship,” as we called it. Through words, we made them real. Through words, we made them ours.

The solitude of writing can be wonderful and liberating, but it can also be crushingly lonely. It takes an incredible amount of willpower to finish any writing project, especially when there is a good chance that no one else will ever read it.

The only way around this is to find a writing community, or at the very least, know at least one or two other writers who are willing to read your work.

Roleplaying gave me my first writing community. It allowed me to collaborate with other writers, to experiment with new ideas. Most importantly, it helped me get over the fear of sharing my writing.

One of the most intoxicating things about roleplaying was the fact that someone was actually reading what I wrote. Not only that, but someone was waiting for it. In order for the plot to move forward, I had to keep participating in the roleplay. I had to write.

This is what I still miss about roleplaying: Having other people who were as invested as I was. Creating connections through a shared passion for storytelling.

Eventually the roleplaying died down, but I kept my relationships with other roleplayers alive through instant messenger chats on AIM. Sometimes we shared our writing, and other times we just chatted about our lives.

Although I was never quite sure whether I could consider them to be “real” friendships, the people that I talked to regularly online meant a lot to me. We celebrated when one of us did well on a test, and we complained about our parents. We shared our hopes and dreams for college and beyond. 

In a way, it was better that we didn’t know each other in real life. Our online selves were real to us, too. In fact, I often felt like my online self was more real than my “IRL” self that interacted with friends at school. After a grueling test or hours of studying, the only thing I wanted to do was be home on my computer, talking to C and my other online roleplaying friends.

I used to be embarrassed by my years of roleplaying, but now I realize now that I was lucky. Roleplaying gave me a space to explore character and a circle of trusted writing partners who cared just as much about the story we were crafting together as I did.

Now, when I work on a new scene in my novel, I sometimes find myself framing it as a roleplay. Each character has their own agenda, their own perspective. If my character does this, how will this other person react? Will my next move propel the scene forward, or stall it? Like roleplaying, writing fiction is about creativity. But it’s also about waiting, listening carefully, and paying close attention to what the characters are telling you—even when they don’t say it out loud.