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The Orenda Q9: Roleplaying and Writing in the First Person
Feel free to use this topic to talk about how you might roleplay this, if you are so inspired. I'd like to go a little beyond this, though, to talk about the similarity between writing and roleplaying.
Here we have a rather unusual situation in that this story is told to us by three different people, each in the first person. To give us all these different voices, Boyden had to put himself mentally into the headspace of each of these three people and attempt to tell their story in a unique voice. Isn't that a form of authorial roleplaying? Did he succeed in this? When you roleplay, how likely are you to make each character distinct? Is each character really different, or are they afterall, just aspects of YOU?
Comments
I agree it is unusual to have multiple first person viewpoints... more common to have them in what you might call pseudo first person, where you closely follow the focus character, and experience only what they can, but are using _he/she_ rather than _I_ - this is how Ursula LeGuin writes EarthSea, for example. But Boyden handles this well.
To my mind, the difference between writing and role-playing is that the author has to handle credible responses and character development for _all_ characters, primary secondary and background. Whereas in role-playing there are multiple players each with their own autonomy and agenda, as well as multiple characters managed by the GM. So there's more of a collaborative effort in role-playing (I think @Michael_S_Miller said something similar quite a long time ago).
There's a long-standing debate in author circles as to whether all characters are facets of the author or not... including murderers, addicts, and whatever other arcane personality adaptation you can think of! Certainly there's a case for saying that you have to draw on the murderous, or addictive, or whatever parts of oneself. In the same way, if you're inclined towards Jungian descriptions of the psyche, if I as a male am writing about a female character then I need to have some insight into my own anima.
But personally speaking (and others may well take a different position) I think an author... and no doubt a game player... can present a character unlike themselves on the basis of observation and experience of other people. We may well have a debate about this in connection with Five Decembers in a few weeks!
I'm with @RichardAbbott here in that authors have to create a host of distinct characters, regardless of the grammatical person they use to express those characters. That's one of the things that makes writing fiction hard. I don't think that characters are necessarily reflections on the author, other than the trite observation that people are complex and can have more than one opinion.
Making characters distinct is more of a problem when GMing, I think, as there are many characters to portray. I do that a lot, but I don't know how well I do it! It's something I mean to ask people about, but getting honest feedback is another problem in RPG circles.