Becoming Breadthrog: Role-playing games, metacognition and the creative writer

All fiction writers work with characters, and many deploy metaphors to describe this relationship: characters may be tools, friends or voices in the writer’s head. These are vivid images but unsuitable for understanding a past writer’s thought process or advising a future writer. This article takes a practical and cognitive approach to the writer-character relationship. We consider a writer’s approach to character as a form of problem-solving and use metacognitive science to understand why a writer chooses a particular level of immersion within a character and how they instinctively or strategically move between different cognitive and emotional frames. While literary and creative writing studies lack the precise language to describe these levels of immersion, a useful parallel exists in game studies. We draw on the sociology of role-playing games to understand and describe the relationship between the creator and the fictional character. Combining insights from game studies and metacognitive psychology, we propose a three-level model of the creative writer’s cognitive relationship with their fictional characters, ranging from full immersion to critical distance. Our model serves two purposes: its specific language can illuminate further studies of character writing and shape targeted interventions to assist creative writers struggling with questions of character.