Turning a Player Character into A Novel Protagonist

Main Character Syndrome. 

This is an affliction that affects many people in our lives, and more than a few table top role players. Too often we think we’re the main character in a story that we’re just in the ensemble for, or worse, we’re really just a background character, an NPC, and it's not about us. 

There are a lot of people who have this issue, and I’m sure you thought of one or two right now. Hell, I know I’m guilty of it. Not because I feel an urge to be in the spotlight, not at all. My problem is I think I know better and feel a driving need to be in control of a situation. It’s happened so frequently with me as a player that I’ve actually taken to turning off my mic during games just to avoid my commentary or urge to direct where the story is going from slipping into the airwaves. 

The action isn’t malicious in any way, and I’m working hard to fix it, but as I work to grow and wait to see results, I take the steps to avoid the craving I have for grabbing the wheel away from the person driving. I like to think of it as an attempt at personal evolution that’s ongoing. 

But what about characters in a novel? How do you take characters who are part of an ensemble and shine the spotlight on them? Especially when they’re originally from a game where they’re not supposed to have the spotlight for too long? A session or two may focus on a character, or a short arc, but even then I’d be writing whole books around them. 

If you’ve been reading, which I hope you have, you have probably noticed my writing style focuses on one character at a time, only switching perspectives when the chapter shifts. Normally, what I’ll do is I’ll sit down with Nicole’s notes printed out, choose a few sessions (usually five or six) and start breaking them down into chapters, looking for key moments and cliffhangers where switching the perspective makes the most sense. This doesn’t always work perfectly. 

Some books end in the middle of a session, and other times I can’t seem to figure out which character would make the best narrator for this part of the scene and just end up choosing the person who’s had the least screen time so far. Originally I tried to go in an order, never deviating from the cycle, but that was not going to work long term. While I love K.A. Applegate and the Animorphs series, I wasn’t able to properly mimic that narration style like she did in her books. 

So the question then became how can I make each of them the protagonist without making any of them the protagonist? It became difficult as some players are more gregarious than others, openly engaging while others may choose to sit back and analyze the situation. Others were quiet in conversations, maybe throwing a quip in here and there, but letting the others lead the social encounters while they shined more in combat. I didn’t want one character to only have the limelight in one situation, so I did what I thought best at the time. 

I made shit up. 

A lot of times, Nicole is able to capture the conversations exactly as they happened. It’s actually kind of fun seeing a transcript of what my villains say when I let them take hold of my voice and just embody them for a while. Once, recently, I put on ambient music only I could hear in my headphones, stared at a spot on my wall as I envisioned the setting around their characters, and just became the villain they were speaking to. I don’t even remember what he said to them, but by the end, each of them felt the weight of the situation surrounding them, and for the most part, gave the villain the proper fear and respect he deserved. 

Except Smithers. 

He was dropping the nickname that if said villain ever heard it, he’d turn Smithers inside out. 

One thing I just cannot wait for is the opportunity to go back and read my own words, really see what he said to them with the full context of the situation. Maybe it will get some cleaning up and embellishment, but considering the reaction, I don’t think it needs any. 

Other times, however, we get a conversation that’s like pulling teeth. The players know what they need to know, they don’t provide the exposition necessary for a reader to fully understand what’s going on, or at least they don’t provide it in character, and it leaves the dialogue feeling stale. Not George Lucas level of bad dialogue, but still not great. 

This actually presents me with a profound opportunity. When the dialogue is bad or non-existent, I can go in and not just zhuzh it up, but I get the opportunity to zhuzh up the character who hasn’t gotten the chance to really be highlighted recently. 

One of the reasons I chose not to start writing the books until a few months after playing was that I wanted to learn the characters. Not just their personalities, but their mannerisms and speech patterns. Some were easy to mimic, not because they were one dimensional or anything, but because they spoke up so often. 

Others I struggled with. I would often send blurbs of what I wrote for them asking: “Is this something they would say?” or “Would they phrase it this way?” Not long after starting this pattern the corrections I got were replaced by affirmatives. Once those became the only answers I got, I stopped asking and just started embodying them, much like I did with that villain. I just had to slip into them and let their minds move my fingers across the keys. 

I got into a pattern for writing each of them. When embodying Timm, I didn’t look back at my notes too much, or do much research. Timm isn’t stupid, far from it, he just trusts his intuitions, so I did as well. If I got something wrong, I could catch it later and correct it if it was a glaring mistake, or it could be chalked up to Timm’s careless obliviousness. 

When writing for Morgan, I put on my anxiety hat. It’s usually close at hand. I would try to embody the emotional aspects of observation: how are the people around me feeling? What’s the energy in the room? Do I trust how I’m feeling about what’s going on, or do I put my walls up to shut them out… Or can there even be a winner in this fight for her soul?

Smithers was probably by far the easiest for me. I knew the source material Matthew was pulling from and actually worked closest with him on developing Smithers’ personality and back story. He was my straight man, after all, the only character who knew what they were heading into before the story began. Besides that, a crazy old man with a gun isn’t really that hard to embody. The biggest trick was getting into the mindset of a confusingly progressive crazy old man with a gun. 

Luis was difficult at first. Matt was often the quietest at the table. Not because he was shy or anything, far from it. His voice was just so deep and quiet that sometimes I couldn’t register what he was saying. He was also the only one of us who wasn’t involved in the podcast, so his mic wasn’t the best. Once the boy got a better mic and we started hearing his comments, we were blown away. He’s sharp as a whip, picks his moments, and then delivers devastating one liners. The notes helped substantially for getting his hidden dialogue, and once I had that, Luis’ stoic but sharp personality was easy to bring to bear. 

The hardest person for me to embody was Lee. He was substantially different from the person who played him. J.J. had a wild sense of humor, explosive laughter, and expressive facial cues that Lee did not share. Lee was J.J.’s opposite in just about every way. Calm, composed, and calculating, while still devout in a way to his god, building a sense of welcoming through quiet respect that his player did not embody as a person. Trying to rectify the person at the table with me against the character he was playing was a mental hurdle that took me more rewrites than I care to note. 

In the end, creating a sense of ‘main character syndrome’ on characters who weren’t playing the main character was a bit of a challenge until I was able to mimic the way my friends played their characters. It took me playing the role as them before I could really take their characters to that next level. Roleplay, while a great tool in groups, can sometimes be just as beneficial alone. Sit with the character, think of a situation, and run yourself through the scenario with them rather than as them. Talk to them like they’re your friend. You’d be amazed how much they probably are already.