What aspect of the job would be surprising for people looking in from the outside?
I think people think of writers, they think that they are just writing text and text and text. When you look at the game writer though, they’re lots of circles, squares and diagrams. Because we do a lot of text anomy. A lot of the work we do is basically just trying to simplify and create a understanding of the world for people by creating words, vocabulary, and the text anomy that goes with this world.
What type of personalities does it take to succeed as a Narrative Designer or a Game Writer?
The most important thing is that you need to be a good communicator. You need to like to share and talk to other people. You need to start communicating with another person to create something. When you do a video game, especially if you are a game writer, you are probably the best communicator on the project. It’s very important to reassure everyone on the project that you’re not going to work in the corner and write something without helping everyone agree about what you’re going to write. The art department, game design department, the programmers, the writers, the narrative department, all these people need to align and come together and tell the same story. so the writer’s most important job is to make sure what you’re proposing cross spans (to all the departments).
The second most important thing is being able to synthesise your story to very few words. Why do I say that? Because for writers we can talk all day, but if you are working with the producer, programmer or the budget executive, they want to know the story, but they want to know it very quickly, because they are very succinct. So you may have had to write the whole big story, and then your job is to put it down into a little paragraph. The better you become at that, the better writer you will be.
What would you recommend for education, books, or other learning to start down the Creative Writer career path?
These are some of my book recommendations: The Invisible Art by Scott McCloud, The Anatomy of Story by John Truby, Writing Better Lyrics by Pat Pattison, Save the Cat by Blake Snyder and Morphology of the Folktale by Vladimir Propp.
Any Book on Philosophy, Sociology or Religion – they all help build better more believable worlds. The enemy is never a person, but a flawed philosophy that needs to evolve!
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