I love "bleed". I get a serious thrill from the way my character's emotions affect me, negative and positive. I like when my characters are tortured or pissed off or giddy with joy. And I like being able to vicariously do things that I can't do in real life, my personality bleeding through into the characters I create. I'm not like my characters. I tend to play characters that are 90-95% jerk when I'd consider myself only at most 50% jerk in reality. But I love them and I love being them nonetheless.
But there are very solid dangers to bleed addressed in the article. It can mess with real people's real emotions in real ways, especially if handled badly.
What I hate about the permeability of that line between writer and character is that when things go really bad (or really good for that matter) in real life, I cannot keep my RL issues entirely outside of my characters. It's not possible. And it ruins things. Brutally. It's not so much that my characters experience my emotions (though that happens sometimes, it's usually coincidental) but that my state of mind is no longer conducive to creating or participating in story. At all. And I see everything I enjoyed about roleplay drifting away, because I'm just not in a place where I can enjoy it, let alone apply skill to it as a craft. I've had so many amazing characters that I've loved so dearly destroyed by thoroughly unrelated RL circumstances and issues that bleed into what I'm capable of and how I manage my fictions, usually by causing me to become hesitant, straight up abandoning various situations, or making choices that in retrospect were not awesome.
In my experience, escapism may be a coping mechanism for depression, but I can only enjoy RP (or writing at all) on any level when I'm feeling confident and well. I "lose control" of my fiction in the sense that I can't maintain it at a basic structural level. At that point, my fictions degrade until eventual abandonment. It's still my choices that get me where I am, so I'm still in control in that sense. It just doesn't feel much like control because there's such a sense of loss attached to recalling what once was.
I'm not sure what I'm getting at other than bleed can be both amazing and horrible, and in my opinion should be both cherished (by those who find value in it) and, obviously, handled with care.
But there are very solid dangers to bleed addressed in the article. It can mess with real people's real emotions in real ways, especially if handled badly.
What I hate about the permeability of that line between writer and character is that when things go really bad (or really good for that matter) in real life, I cannot keep my RL issues entirely outside of my characters. It's not possible. And it ruins things. Brutally. It's not so much that my characters experience my emotions (though that happens sometimes, it's usually coincidental) but that my state of mind is no longer conducive to creating or participating in story. At all. And I see everything I enjoyed about roleplay drifting away, because I'm just not in a place where I can enjoy it, let alone apply skill to it as a craft. I've had so many amazing characters that I've loved so dearly destroyed by thoroughly unrelated RL circumstances and issues that bleed into what I'm capable of and how I manage my fictions, usually by causing me to become hesitant, straight up abandoning various situations, or making choices that in retrospect were not awesome.
(03-04-2015, 03:07 PM)Warren Castille Wrote: The writer might suddenly fall into a depression because of something in real life, but the fiction is completely in control of the writer
In my experience, escapism may be a coping mechanism for depression, but I can only enjoy RP (or writing at all) on any level when I'm feeling confident and well. I "lose control" of my fiction in the sense that I can't maintain it at a basic structural level. At that point, my fictions degrade until eventual abandonment. It's still my choices that get me where I am, so I'm still in control in that sense. It just doesn't feel much like control because there's such a sense of loss attached to recalling what once was.
I'm not sure what I'm getting at other than bleed can be both amazing and horrible, and in my opinion should be both cherished (by those who find value in it) and, obviously, handled with care.
![[Image: g9ASfFg.jpg]](http://i.imgur.com/g9ASfFg.jpg)
