Writing

A good way of learning and improving your writing skills is to go back and re-read your old PBEM posts. On a PBEM game where the story always flows forward at a steady pace, where posts comes in from your fellow players every day, it can be difficult to find the time to reflect over how you are doing.

Describing the surroundings to the reader is more than just putting words on it. To describe something as "beautiful" is not enough to get the reader understand how beautiful something really is.

It can perhaps get the reader to understand that the character feels something is beautiful, but it does not convey that feeling over to the reader.

Word like "beautiful" or "scary" perhaps describes the scene in broad, general, terms, but in order to write better the player needs to show the reader what it is that has these properties.

A character that is not primarily and actively played by a player is called an NPC. Even though they are not the primary character of a player, they can be quite important to the story and to the game.

Mistakes happen! Sooner or later in the game, there are going to be posts that contains errors or creates other problems. As a player (and, for that matter, as a GM) it is important to stay on top of things and manage these problems instead of letting them ruin the game.

As most Internet users are aware, it is harder to convey what you mean in written text such in a PBEM game than when using live, spoken words. Since Play By Email is a form of text based communication, there is a chance the other players will misunderstand your intentions if you are not careful. Keep this in mind when writing your posts.

How do you speak? What words do you use? Ask yourself these questions and take note of how they change depending on the situation.

If you think about how you speak in different situations you will notice you probably use different words and ways of talking depending on whom you talk to. I am sure you do not speak to your parents the same way you speak to your friends! You probably don’t use the same words in church or in class as you do when watching football with your friends.

In traditional story writing there are certain phases in the story. For example, you begin by creating an interesting introduction, a hook to get people to continue to read. When you are writing a post for your PBEM (Play By Email) game, it does not have to follow the same pattern.A post is something very different. Think of it as more like one chapter of the book or story. Perhaps not even a chapter but only a page. It is one part of something bigger. Because of this, you can often not use the same plan as if you were writing everything by yourself.