[PUBLIC POST] What's a non-writing skill useful for writing?

[ljwrites]

A lot of us spend time working on the practice and theory of fiction-writing. But are there skills that don't have to do directly with fiction writing that are nontheless helpful? I've heard of art being useful to writers, for instance, and a musician I know is guided by her musical skills and inspirations when writing. I know another writer who's also an actor, and have heard anecdotally of actors making good writers. Andrew Robinson, who played Garak in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, wrote the novel A Stitch in Time about his character's background that I found wonderfully moving and evocative, not to mention great world-building of Cardassia. I can see a direct connection there between the two skillsets since acting is about expressing characters, like much of writing is.

While I am not an actor, I found my experience playing and running roleplaying games highly useful for understanding characters and keeping track of storylines in my writing projects. Roleplaying has also given me a perspective of stories not as something that comes from me but from the characters' own motivations and interests. When it comes down to it I have to inhabit these characters and play them, an ethos that I apply to writing as well.

Are there non-writing skills or experiences that you find useful for writing? Have you observed others using different skillsets when writing?

Comments

[lookingforoctober]

I think all skills are useful for writing. Especially creative skills, but it also doesn't hurt to have a good grounding in some field or some activity or some anything if you end up wanting to write about it (or even if you don't, you may be able to translate the experience sideways somehow).

On the other hand, no skill translates exactly, and your comment about roleplaying reminds me that I pretty much consider roleplaying to be the opposite of fiction writing in a lot of ways. (Probably because I do quite a bit of both of them, so the differences start to stand out.) I do agree that it's good for developing certain writing skills (especially voice), but it frequently seems to me that the things you have to tell a collaborator are completely different from the things you have to tell a reader, so in that way roleplay writing comes out totally different. And often the amount of tension I want in a game is different from what I want in a story.

Of course, this might have a lot to do with the specific form of roleplaying I do, or what I want out of roleplaying as opposed to writing.

And it does make me think about writing a lot, when I'm roleplaying.

[inkdust]

I'm inclined to agree with you about written roleplay, but only from observation because I haven't done it myself. It seems like a different mode, and actually easy to form bad habits if translated to fiction. My experience with roleplay has just been around the table, without actual writing involved, and that, I think, brings good things to the page later.

[lookingforoctober]

Yeah, when I started to get into writing fiction more seriously, there was a lot I had to unlearn, and it was sort of bewildering to me, because it was all stuff that had worked quite well before.

But I think that it did eventually promote an awareness of what I'm doing that's good for both roleplaying and fiction writing, and that might have been hard to develop otherwise, without the contrast.

But yes, I've done tabletop too, and it is pretty different from the kind of written roleplaying I currently do, and have done predominantly. It's hard for me to say anything generally, because I never GMed and I really only played with one group, but there's a lot more emphasis on plot in tabletop, I think, and characters acting on the situation (as opposed to characters simply reacting to a situation).

[inkdust]

"Characters acting on the situation," that's a good way of putting it. And probably one reason I'm finding the experience helpful - I think it's more difficult for me to plot for acting in addition to reacting. My game has become more character-focused as we've developed them, but that process has also been unusual for me in the extent to which my development of the character has been prompted by plot events, rather than the other way around. And unusual tends to lead to good things in writing.

[ljwrites]

That's really interesting, I think the two sort of blended together for me without much thought about how they might be different. I also wrote a lot of fiction for current or past roleplaying campaigns where I'd novelize sessions, or write out what happened in the gaps between the sessions, develop character backgrounds and so forth. It was a way to build player interest and engagement, and maybe the way I was doing fiction and roleplaying concurrently helped knit them together in my mind.

I'm also amused that this thread has quickly become dominated by the subject of roleplaying. I do remember someone saying that roleplayers were by and large either tech nerds or would-be writers. XD

[lookingforoctober]

Well, like inkdust pointed out, there's a difference between taking something that isn't written to writing, and writing with different purposes. It sounds like maybe your roleplaying fiction had a similar purpose to just plain fiction, since it wasn't directly interactive or interactive during the writing process itself, if I understand correctly?

I suppose I could see that. At least for tabletop, with all the numbers for the tech inclined to use (and abuse).

[ljwrites]

*nod* That makes sense. The writing was very much standard fiction writing other than being a spin-off to a tabletop campaign. Looking back I was looking for an outlet to write fiction and not finding roleplaying quite enough to scratch the itch.