Everything I draw ends up wearing a bow-tie

Anonymous asked: Forgive my memory if I'm wrong, but you used to rp right? Do you still rp? I used to rp and I used to love it so much and I'm still trying to rp but the fun of it has disappeared but I /want/ to enjoy it again. I just wanted to know if maybe you grew out of it? So maybe I could tell myself it's okay to just let go of it or something? I'm sorry for dropping such an odd question of little relevance on you just like that. I hope you have a good day!

whoops got a lil’ TL:DR lemme just put a readmore here-

Sure did, still boggled at how much I used to write for it every day! Thing is while I don’t do it any more I don’t think I actually ‘grew out of it’, I just changed how I did it. 

I think some kinds of creativity overlap, or bleed into each other and evolve into other states. Writing takes a particular kind of energy, and you only have so much of that to go around; my RP days might be over, but at the same time everything I do now is its own kind of RP! My method of writing is basically taking characters that I’m very familiar with, putting them into a situation, and seeing how they react- which is essentially the core of RP. In the case of TPoH and TPatJ etc. these are my own characters, in the case of doodle comics they are externally created characters, but the fundamental exercise is basically the same. When I say RP taught me to write better than school did I really mean it, because it taught me to be flexible and spontaneously creative with the possibilities presented to me. It taught me not to be overly controlling, to allow the character’s ‘voice’ to control their actions rather than using them like a dead chess piece to exact their ‘part’, and consequently taught me a way of writing that allows me to avoid becoming frustrated when things don’t go to plan. It also really drove home the ‘respect the characters’ aspect of writing; these are people, with stories and memories and feelings. They are real to themselves and you should embrace and respect that just as you would any person you meet, and perhaps even more-so as you are representing them as the writer. You are responsible for the ‘truth’ of this character: try to be worthy of that. The moment you treat a character like an object instead of a person your writing collapses. 

School was great in its own way and taught me to read a whole bunch, but we didn’t actually have many creative writing classes, and those that we did were somewhat formulaic and kind of ignored this more emotionally grounded way of story telling, which is… basically how I write everything I write! So, yeah, even if there was an initial twinge of guilt I found I was able to ‘let go’ of RP writing, because it was just one step in a journey which is still going, and keeping your foot in one place out of loyalty alone can stop you going forward. Even if you aren’t going on to write other stories, that creativity won’t leave you. RP writing is fun and I made a huge number of excellent friends thanks to it, but it was better to accept it had had its time as a stage of my creative existence and have its memory as a source of energy rather than having it turn into a chore. I’m sure the same applies to you, and you will have your affection for the times you had and the education than it provided you for the rest of your life!