How to get your muse back
Just about everyone in the RPC has been to the point where they have lost all inspiration and muse for their character and usually abandon ship or reboot in an attempt to get that flame back. I know I’ve been there on many, many, many occasions, but I feel that, as Rpers that immerse ourselves into the minds of characters, we forget what we’re actually doing: writing narratives in which our characters interact with others. We are authors, and the same way that media you consume can become bland, repetitious or soul crushingly boring, so can the act of rping. Muses end up in ruts, plots die and we lose sight of what makes a character a character. So at the risk of sounding like I know what I’m doing, I’m going to give a little helpful advise as the title states: how to get that flame back based off of my own experience as an rper.
At the risk of sounding like a drowned out writing professor, a lot of who aren’t in any actual literary field forget a very basic thing in our writing: character motivations. Sometimes we pick up muses just because they’re the #fave and or #problematic fave, make a blog, stay on it for a week to a month and then hop off. When creating a blog, or re-sparking a blog you already have, you only need to ask yourself three questions: What? Why? How?
What: what is my characters motivations? What do they want?
Why: why does my character want that? Why is my character like this?
How: How is my character going to get that? How are they being deterred?
Again, this is coming from someone who’s abandoned about a million blogs, has never taken a writing class outside of high-school and main motivations for this post is a four hour binge of a youtube media critic. Take everything with a grain of salt. Of course, you can use the simplified version three step program above and do what you will with it, but if you need a little extra help, I’ve got a word vomit.
I’ll be using two of my own Rp blogs in two various states of existence, a rival Barry from D/P/PLT @aspearbarry and a many-a-time rehashed portrayal of Grimsley from Black/White/2 @casaunova, for the purpose of this post.
Without further ado, here’s the line break