If you're doing any kind of RP or storytelling on Discovery Freelancer you probably aren't very good at it. To be honest, there are very few people in the world who are good at it. But it's a fun exercise. It would be even more fun if you knew that you got better at it while doing it. So, in order to raise the level of quality of stuff posted in the Stories and Biographies, Comms and in game, I prepared this short list of tips that helped me improve my writing and perhaps they can help you improve yours.

These are ordered from the easiest to implement to some that require more practice or work. It's up to you how much work you want to put into developing your craft, but note that the ability for storytelling is a very useful skill not only in Discovery but in real life as well.

This is intended primarily for avid and aspiring forumlancers, but some tips are more generally useful in the game as well.

1. Write in English
Discovery is in English and you should also write in English. This means that you should spellcheck and grammar check your writing if you are not a native speaker. This also means that you should not import grammatical rules from your native language if you are not a native English speaker. If you're German, this means that you do not capitalise improper nouns. If you're French, this means you do not put spaces in front of punctuation marks, and so on. These things might look natural in a foreign language to you, but if you want your RP to be readable, it has to adhere to English rules of style.

Also, if you're writing dialogues, make sure to understand how dialogue punctuation works in English. This is much less important in game, where the dialogues are written directly and any actions are in helper text surrounded usually by asterisks, than the forums.

2. Continuity of tenses
When you write your own stories or participate in RP with multiple people, it makes it a lot easier to read if everyone is writing in the same tense. The default mode for storytelling is writing in past tense (because you are telling a story, that is, narrating events that happened). Another popular way is to write in present tense, because it makes the story more dynamic.

Here is an example paragraph in present tense narrative, and then in past tense. Note the underlined verbs that change their forms (present to past, past to past perfect).



3. Show don't tell
The very point of roleplaying is to get a feel for how your character would behave in certain situations. This is why it is unnecessary to write a long-winded exposition about who your character is, what is his or her background or things like that. It is nice to do it in the beginning, perhaps to set a scene for the story. However, in most other cases it is better to focus on what your character says, thinks, feels and does. Even the smallest minutiae can help you get more in the zone of making your character more believable. And if you're writing blind (i.e. without sending your fragments to people to confirm before posting), it can help the other people participating in a story to get a better feel on how they can progress.

At the same time, you must remember to stay relevant to what you're leading towards. A great flaw of RP in Discovery is that before publishing it is quite hard to edit it and remove the irrelevant bits. Because of that, you have to learn to be relevant from the very beginning.

4. Read more
In Discovery, you write fiction. To write good fiction, you need to read good fiction. There is a lot of content online that you can digest and learn from. When you're reading a story, don't just look at the content but also the form. Note the ways the author makes his points and progresses the stories. Write down good combinations of words and curate fine turns of phrase. Avoid stock phrases and pop-culture, they make stories feel less like its own universe and more like a poor calque of reality. Originality is overrated: most plots were invented a thousand years before any one of us was born, if you read more you will find some that fit Discovery and you might be able to spring off into an interesting character arc. And if you read a lot, don't shy away from hiding things that you read in your work: inside jokes to yourself, obscure literary references, images you saw in a dream, something that happened in your childhood - even if no one catches them, they add texture and depth.

On top of reading other people's work, read your own work. Read it aloud and feel how words taste in your mouth, see how you can improve them. We might not be poets here, but the way words sound is very important even if we don't read them aloud. Storytelling is not just unrolling semantics, it should have a hint of poetry in it as well.

5. Pace the narrative
The point of every sentence in a literary work is to lead the reader to the next sentence. The way this is achieved is through tension, which is unrealised desire. The speed at which this desire is realised is called pacing. Pacing is important because it makes the story feel less stale and more dynamic, and is achieved by carefully structuring your sentences. The shorter the sentence, the faster we feel the action is progressing. So when you are writing about a calm situation, a conversation between friends, the sentences will be longer and more runny. If the situation is tense, words and sentences are short. They hit like quick punches, one after another. When things are supposed to be slow, pay attention to smallest detail, when they are fast, skip it.

6. Vary your structure
This is something that is qutie difficult to do and naturally comes with practice. When you're writing about something that is fairly similar, perhaps a description of a room or a sequence of actions that your character does, you should remember not to repeat the same sentence structure too much. Instead, try to use different structures to pace it better and make it more interesting.

Here is an example of a paragraph that uses the same structure, and then one that varies it.



7. Conceal the why
Aristotle, when defining the basics of analytical thinking in 4th century BC identified four causes of why anything exists, the most important one of which is the "final" cause, relating to why it exists. Playing around with the final cause makes for good reading because understanding something well really amounts to understanding its final cause. Thus, when you're writing, you might want to first be more explicit with the reasons for your character's behaviour, but gradually tone it down so that the reader can make this discovery on his own. This makes it so that not only you get to understand your character and its motivations, but also your readers.

8. Write more
Write more. Write every day, at least a single sentence. Experiment with form and learn to avoid clichés so that your writing is fresh and every new story is an adventure.

I hope this was useful and if you have any feedback or further tips, feel free to leave them below.