I cannot sleep tonight and my twitter conversations today with @maryknews , @Shvartacus and @six6jiang have my brain revved up and thinking about game writing. So I'm gonna start a thread of my own.

Here's what game writers can learn from every(!) other writing discipline!

Background: I have dabbled in nearly everything. I have taken classes in screenwriting, had a one act play I wrote performed, written short fiction and fan fiction since I was 5, am a published academic, I wrote a song for a game, and poetry... and more. All of it is useful.

Short stories: Scope. 90% of production problems in games come from 'We bit off more than we can chew and now we need to either crunch like hell or take out things."

Short fiction teaches you to punch in a small space. To satisfy someone in 5 pages, not 500.

The impulse of so many writers is to include every idea they can think of into projects with reckless abandon.

Write short stories. Give yourself a time limit. Give yourself restraint. See how much meaning and layers you can pack in as little space as possible.

Fan fiction: writing for another IP.

Unless you become a creative director or do the terrifying leap of running your own indie studio, you will spend your entire career executing someone else's vision. That's the job.

Fan fiction is the single best way to practice that skill.

Now, I would not include fanfic in a portfolio, per se, but it allows you to study a world, the most important characters in the world, and practice writing them so convincingly, it becomes Canon text.

Game writers often sacrifice personal writing style so that >>

their work blends seamlessly with the world, brand, aesthetic, and the writing that has come before it.

Fanfic writing teaches you to become a literary chameleon. And also to check your ego at the door.

It reminds you that the work is Not About You.

Long-form forum role play: Characterization. Nothing teaches you how to write a single, fleshed out, nuanced character like good old fashioned forum RP.

This is another medium, like fanfic, that I think many people will scoff that I even call them their own medium.

Those people are wrong. Very, very wrong. There are just as many rules, syntax, style guides, etc in the umbrella of online roleplay as their is in the ASA style guide. We will talk more about other RP forms in a bit, but for now:

RP is a legitimate medium of writing and lit.

Now. Back to forum RP.

Some people insist on defining their forum rp by the length of posts. "Single para", "multi para", etc come up a lot. (Para = paragraph). I think this is wrong.

The true genius of forum roleplay is that it lets you explore a character's inner monologue.

As with many types of RP, you end up doing scenes with your character and other characters in which you are doing mundane, boring things. And these moments are where you truly understand who you are writing.

Because of online roleplay, whenever I come up with a new character, before I ask anything else, I ask: are they late to dinner? What is the most innocent way to piss them off?

I ask hyper specific questions that tell me more about someone than their name.

Chat/MMO roleplay: okay I promise I won't espouse the virtues of roleplay forever, but while all of that is fresh, mmo/chst roleplay includes new constraints:

Character limits and stronger collaboration.

The fact is, people playing games may love the story, but they get antsy. They want to keep hitting buttons, keep doing things, even if all its doing is advancing the next line of dialogue.

Most dialogue lines in games are shorter than a tweet. That's so little space.

I am a huge advocate of MMO roleplay because you have 400 characters max to emote what your character is doing, feed other people ways to interact with you, AND make your dialog good.

Also, you better not take longer than 2 to 3 minutes, or people don't stick around.

Chat roleplay teaches you to stop being a perfectionist, to write the most engaging three sentences you possibly can, and then get ready to do it about 100 more times over the course of three hours.

It teaches you to relinquish control and scene planning and plotting and let two characters interact and see what story they want to tell. It is a weird hybrid of creative writing, acting, and improvisation that does not get enough credit for what it is.

If you wanna become a lean, mean, writing machine that can pump out thousands of words in one night without second guessing every word, roleplay in an MMO every night until you can just vomit compelling words in your sleep.

Tabletop Games, as both players and DMs, teach entirely different skillsets.

All forms of RP, but especially TTRPG, teach you collaboration with peers.

Running a game teaches you worldbuilding skills, along with understanding player interaction in a world.

Again, unless you are a single indie in a tiny indie game, you will almost never be the only writer in the room. You will be constantly working in rooms with other writers. You will have to build worlds, characters, and stories together.

Which means, you need to learn when your ideas don't fit the collective goal of the project. You need to know how few hills you have to die on, and make them count. You need to think about what other people bring to a story and how to best incorporate their strengths.

While I haven't watched much, critical role does a great job of showing how talented creatives take their turns in the spotlight. How they bend and mold together so that they tell a coherent, fun story instead of clashing against one another.

Most importantly, because roleplay is sk deeply personal, it teaches you to be kind to your collaborators in ways that solitary writing cannot teach you. By letting your coworkers add vulnerable touches to The Work, they feel validated and the project is better for it.

And on the other side of the table, as the DM, there's a very valuable game writing lesson.

Games are interactive. You are making a toy and giving it to a child.

That child might ignore the detailed little gizmos that make your toy awesome and play with the box.

Assume at every step that your players are going to want to play with the box.

Do not resent them for playing with the box. This is their experience first. Instead ask yourself WHY they are playing with the box.

Was the toy too complicated to understand? Too easy to solve?

When they play with the box, they are giving you information.

Maybe your world isn't fleshed out enough. Maybe the plot isn't engaging. Maybe the random detail you gave them seemed extra juicy and they thought they were going the right direction.

DMing teaches you to critique your work first, not the readers/player.

Nothing is the player's fault.

Okay back to more traditional mediums, please RP somehow, it's good for you.

Academic papers and argumentative essays: oh boy am I glad we got here. I spent my undergrad writing one of the first studies on sexism in the game industry, which later got published. I habe so many things here. So buckle up.

First and foremost: Structure.

I grew up on chat and MMO rp kostly. Which is great to learn how to fly by your pants. Not so much if you want to know where you're going.

In academia, every single word of your 5000 word paper must know where you're going, and deliver you there

At my current job, I think narrative structure is actually one of my strong suits. I feel really confident in my ability to chart the emotional arc of the plot, lay out character arcs on top of that, and ensure that the peaks and valleys all line up at core plot points.

I got all of that from writing papers.

A good academic paper does not waste a single word. It tell you what its doing every moment, and lays it out cleanly.

It is so easy to track the structure of a good paper, you do not need to read all of it.

When writing my grant proposal for research, i binged 23 papers in 12 hours. I was able to do this because I knew which paragraphs contained the information I was looking for and which did not.

They were clear. They were direct.

And the whole time, they reinforced the thesis.

I think creative writers really undervalue the ability to concisely and clearly argue a thesis. When you think about it, every story has a thesis. A message it drives home every moment. Game writers should know how every word, every bark, every dialogue reinforces that message.

Another phenomenal skill you get from academic writing is an editing feedback loop.

It took five years and 6 drafts for my study on sexism to get published.

One might argue that's almost too obtuse, but that's another tangent.

If roleplay taught me how to write a lot and fast, academia taught me how to refine. It taught me how to take a torrential downpour of words I could write and irrigate the rain to nurture my ideas.

It teaches you that the first draft is the easiest, but often the least clear.

It is really hard to confront when your story, idea, etc, is not making sense to other people. It is hard to cut words you fell in love with because thy are getting in the way of your argument.

But you must do so. Mercilessly.

You still here? Dang. Well, I'm not done yet, so keep me company.

Playwriting: this gives you direct experience working with voice and motion capture actors that you will likely need if you ever work on a game with a sizeable budget.

In playwriting, you learn how to convey just enough about a mood and character to give the actors ideas...

But! If you give too much, if you step on their toes and try to tell them how to do their job for them in the text, then you have problems.

Its important to remember when you write a text that will be performed that you are not the only person who has a say over this. Remember, death of the ego. Just because a performer doesn't exactly sound like the voice in your head doesn't mean their performance isn't good enough

You have to always manage if your feedback is in the collective good of the work, or a selfish desire to control.

Its a hard fight that I think every creative experiences. Working with actors and plays and staging helps show you what true, liberating collaboration looks like.

Screenplay: there's a lot here and it is not my forte, so I hope people with more experience add their thoughts in the threads.

First and foremost, lots of game studios use screenplay format for their work. None I have worked at have done so, but many do, so learn it.

I think like academic writing, this also helps reinforce structure. Save The Cat is a foundational text for a reason.

Keep in mind, it is not the end all be all. There are many alternatives to the three act structure and the hero's journey.

However, what studying those does teach you is how to recognize patterns and tropes in media and how they can be used as storytelling tools instead of bad things to always avoid.

Every time I watch something, I always recognize the Dark Night of the Soul. Always.

In addition to patterna dn trope education, screenplay writing is good because so many video games still use cinematic language and shorthand to tell a story.

There may come a day where game narrative has developed past the point where we need to use cinematic...

Storytelling methods to create engaging interactive narratives. But until then, we have this century long tradition of how to convey emotion and information visually, and its a language everyone with a screen understands.

Use whatever tools you got. Screenplay is a big toolbox

Poetry and songwriting: how to write as emotionally evoking text as possible.

I think poetry gets a bad rep sometimes for being pretentious and hard to understand. I think that completely misses the value of it.

Poetry tries to name emotions and feelings that our normal words and sentence structure alone cannot. So many important, relatable, purely human feelings have been explored in poetry in ways we simply cannot in other mediums.

Where academia and screenpkah provide a rigid structure, poetry breaks as many rules as it creates, in my limited experience. Where other things need to be clear as crystal in every word, poetry challenges you to read it a second, third, fourth time.

I think spending some time with poetry opens your senses as a writer to all the emotions and evocations of character that on the surface feel too outlandish. Too dramatic. But that's okay. You
don't need to put the raw unfiltered experiment in the final draft.

But what it does let you do is it elts you see a character's truth. It lets you feel the power of that truth. And its a lot easier to carry that in a character when you KNOW it.

Songwriting for me is like, all of this, but with the added layer of music, which I admittedly know very very little about. Its a personal dream of mine to write a musical one day but first I should learn how to music at least a little.

But I think with writing lyrics, its really similar. It's about capturing emotions too powerful, too raw to keep to a normal sentence. A normal sentence isn't enough. It NEEDS to be sung.

Alright cool cats and insomniacs, thats all I can think of right now.

The big thing I wanted to hit home here is that writers of any medium have a tremendous privilege. While not all of our skills directly translate to one another, a ton of ideas and praxis easily move from...

One medium to the next. So write everything. You never know what your poetry bender or NaNoWriMo book will teach you about your mainstay craft. Be a sponge. Learn everything.

Also legitimize hobbyist forms of writing that train us for these jobs, they are valid art too.

I still want to wrote for comics and write a musical and finish a novel and a whole bunch of things so if you want a plucky rookie on your bench who will bring a lot of experience and gumption to the table, you know where to find me!