GUEST COLUMNIST: What the hell is a Real Writer and how do I become one?
This week, we're hearing from BFFL Ari, who published their first Substack newsletter this week, Hyperfixated. You can subscribe here to stay in the loop on when they publish next!
I Write Thousands of Words Every Day and Have Nothing To Show for It!
I have a funny relationship with writing. Technically, I’ve been writing nonstop since I was in elementary school. I remember one of my crowning achievements in the fifth grade was a multipage story titled Snow Day; I do not remember any fine details of the story, though I remember it was roughly a self-insert survival story with an ensemble cast of all my closest friends at the time. That story is, like most of my writing, lost in the ether with the passage of time.
Writing is very important to me. I’d classify it as one of my longest, most enduring hobbies even though I have nothing to show for it. Sure, I have academic papers stashed away in a Google Drive somewhere, but nothing that my brain qualifies as real writing.
Most creative hobbies are kind of that way, aren’t they? Whether you are painting, composing, sculpting, cross-stitching, knitting, filming, photographing–you get it–there is always the desire to produce something for someone to consume. I want someone to look at my writing and tell me I’ve come up with something crazy, beautiful, or mindblowing. I want my writing to be able to mean something to someone, even if it is different from what my writing means to me.
Like most people, I have a desire to be seen and understood.
Other than one article I wrote for the Anchorage Press during the pandemic and the other newsletter I put out in January of this year, I’ve not shared any of my writing. That isn’t to say I haven’t been writing. Oh, I’ve been writing. I think year-to-date I’ve written upwards of 50,000 words. Maybe even 100,000 words. No, I do not have a secret novel project in the works–in my wildest fucking dreams, perhaps. I’ve never been disciplined enough to sit down and crank out a novel.
Substack
Hell, I am barely disciplined enough to keep up with a newsletter I had wanted to do weekly.
I’ve done the majority of my writing in the confines of my very own niche little hobby.
Wow, Ari with a niche hobby? How innovative! Never before seen! I know, I know. I take pride in how painfully different I must be at all times.
When you think of roleplaying what do you think of? Dungeons and Dragons? Other tabletop RPGs? Video games? Kinky sex? Well, I guess just bundle all of that up and you’ve got my niche hobby right there (I am only halfway joking).
Really, though, what I do is roleplaying. It is long-form written roleplay. Typically it is done on forums, which I know we all thought were defunct, but they are alive and breathing in their corners of the internet. The way I’ve been describing it to all of the laypeople in my life is that it is basically a collaborative writing project. I have a pretty tight-knit group of friends I write with and only every-so-often do I breach the confines of my group out into the general population of writers.
I’ve been doing this since I was a small child. I started writing on Animal Crossing forums and Neopets as a curious ten year old with enough smarts to weasel around the panopticon of parental internet supervision (SORRY MOM, I KNOW YOU ARE READING THIS). My foray into the world of forums as I know it was being led offsite on the Neopet forums and the rest was history.
Out of respect to my fellow #roleplaywarriors, I won’t be airing out the forum hosts and all that. Roleplaying online is a hobby that goes back probably to the dawn of the internet. People have stories and want to share them, they want to connect with people who want to help them, and out of it some really beautiful things can be born. I’ve now written robots, princes and princesses, mages, knights, werewolves, and just about anything you can imagine.
Roleplay can also be exactly what you make it. People roleplay everywhere. If you rub your eyes and know what to look for it becomes obvious. “Parody accounts” on Twitter who roleplay as their favorite video game character; private Grand Theft Auto servers where everyone stays in character; people huddled in different Discord servers; or even people in MMORPGs like Final Fantasy 14 who will have entire guilds dedicated to staying in character.
For what it’s worth, I know a lot of roleplay that is done online has a bit of a shroud of lewdness around it. Reading this, you may be thinking that all stories written are exclusively smut-based and for people to get off to. Which, I am not going to tell you that people aren’t doing–they DEFINITELY are and frequently–but it isn’t the bulk of roleplaying. The communities that I am a part of are usually deep into telling a story in tandem. We come up with elaborate worlds, elaborate and often toxic relationships between characters, or sometimes magic systems that are intricate compounds of all the fiction we’ve consumed.
Don’t get me wrong, sometimes there is smut involved there, but it isn’t the backbone of what is being written.
The roleplaying friendships I’ve forged over the years are pretty iron-clad for the most part. I have friends I’ve written with for a decade, since we were both in high school and obsessed with the same things, and I’ve formed deep out-of-character friendships with these people. I’ve even met them in real life, which is like the number one internet no-no, but I haven’t been murdered yet.
Roleplay is beautiful to me because I don’t have to come up with the whole story. That I get to laugh and cry and be torn apart by plots that I write with other people. There is something so fun when you are extremely giddy about finally writing out something you have only discussed during out-of-character plotting.
I can remember so many sleepless summer nights as a teenager, sequestered away in the top bunk of the old bunkbed I slept in, my laptop burning my thighs through the comforter. It would be a game of trying to stay quiet while also typing out posts rapidly, listening to music softly on my laptop, and messaging my writing partner strings of intelligible excitement over AIM (for the uninitiated, AOL instant messenger. It was the primary form of communication in combination with Skype when I was writing in high school).
Sometimes, it is still like that. Largely, all my friends now have jobs and lives that we didn’t have as teenagers. It is more of an intentional effort to write but it is one that I enjoy immensely.
Pitfalls are inevitable, though. There are things that I don’t get from roleplay that I would likely get with other forms of writing: a sense of accomplishment or validation from groups of people. Imposter syndrome is something that has haunted me my whole life and my hobbies are no exception. It is easy for me to feel as if it is fraudulent to call myself a writer without anything to show for it, especially when I have so many talented friends who actually do things that feel more tangible to me.
But that may be a reflection of a deeper issue I have with being able to see my own talents or skills, even when they are present and people have reassured me of such.
This was a very self-indulgent newsletter but I made this newsletter to be a bit self-indulgent and if you are still reading at this point, it’s a bonus for me. Roleplay has been sort of a private hobby for me, as it is for many, and I felt like writing about it today. While it has been private, I can tell you that I have made lifelong friends out of the hobby and have no plans on stopping.
I’ll keep you guys posted when I begin to feel like a writer.