The Fable of the Idea Guy

I regret to inform you that in order to be a writer, you will need to actually write stuff

Everyone has the capability to come up with cool stories. I truly believe this. Yes, some people are more creative, insightful, or subversive than others, but every person on this earth has lived through interesting moments and has the ability to string ideas together in a way that at least one other person will find compelling.

We live our lives in stories—each day has a beginning and an end. Every film, game, book, television show, and article is tied up in a bow, whether it be nice or unforgivably sloppy. Marketing is told to us in stories. Sports matches are absolutely stories (and often fascinating ones). Our own lives are stories.

Things people say to me

As a writer in the games space, people often ask me questions. The first one tends to be, “That’s a real job?” which always makes me smile. The second is often, “How do I break into the game industry?” which I don’t generally know how to answer. I kinda oops-ed into this, and I know more pathways people have taken than I know the names of stars in the sky (this is impressive because I like astronomy).

But the question, or, well, sometimes it comes in the form of a statement, I see most often is, “I have a cool idea for a game". This is followed by, “How do I make it?” or “How do I convince [insert AAA company of your choice here] to make it?” or sometimes just a quirky smile as they wait for me to respond.

Now, I know the person saying this is excited. Having an idea is awesome! It’s raw potential. It’s personal. It’s thrilling. It’s a part of your soul you want to unleash upon the world and share. When people say this to me, what they’re hoping I will say is that I’ve never heard such a brilliant idea before, and I’ll get a team of 1,000 people and a £1b budget on this right away, complete with a lifetime contract for them and a £500k annual salary.

It would be very, very cool if that’s how things worked. And it can work that way, sometimes. An elevator pitch should never be underestimated, and you should practice your pitch as often as you can.

Your ideas matter, and we should treat them like they matter

Though I’ve gone through periods where I was a salty, snarky-ass bastard who poo-pooed people’s ideas out of exhaustion and spite (thorough apologies to anyone who met me during those times, I was burnt out and sad)… I now love hearing ideas. I adore the way a person’s face lights up when they get to share creative concepts that are truly, uniquely them. It’s one of the best things in the universe and if I can do my bit to amplify that joy, even for a moment, I’m gonna amplify the shit out of it.

Look, if I could wave a magic wand and grant you a studio to do your bidding… I want to say I would do it, but running a studio is incredibly difficult and I’m not sure you actually want that burden without a few decades of industry experience under your belt… but yeah, yeah, I’d want to! If conditions were better and the industry wasn’t the way it was, and I had mystical creative finance powers, I would do that for people. But the industry is a mess and much to my own chagrin, I don’t seem to be a sorceress.

Trying to build a AAA game for an established, surefire IP is incredibly difficult in our current environment. Games like that now cost hundreds of millions if not over one billion dollars to make amidst an industry rife with studio closures, layoffs, venture capitol, and an overall unsettling feeling that something is shifting and we just can’t quite figure out what. Not to mention AAA games take at least two years, and sometimes as much as a decade to make. Want to know why you see so few original IP coming out of AAA now? It’s a bananas financial investment. We all sorta knew that, and then Concord happened this summer, solidifying everyone’s thoughts.

So, no. You can’t waltz in to a AAA game studio board meeting as a person who has never written a thing in their life, pitch your game concept with no slide deck or user research, and be made a creative director. I’ve been doing this for well over a decade now and I’m still incredibly far away from being a person who could do that. The chances of them taking a chance on you are so close to zero it’s painful. I’m sorry. I don’t mean to ruin your dreams here. But it just isn’t gonna happen.

That doesn’t mean your game can’t get made. What it does mean is that if you want your game to get made, you are going to need to make it.

Write the damn thing down

The first step of that is writing down your idea. That idea causing sunbeams to come out of your face— you gotta put it into words. It cannot stay in your head. You need to turn your idea into a tangible (or digital) thing that can be shared with others and iterated upon. This is scary. It’s the culmination of what I’ve talked about in my last two posts, dirty underwear and ancient armour.

In order to be a writer, you need to, well, write.

You don’t have to go it alone, but you will probably have to initiate things

Yes, you can hire people to help get it out of your head, or use structured journals, AI tools and things like that to assist you in developing it. If you have the money, time, resources, and connections, use them. Do what you’ve gotta do. But if you ever want your idea to be more than an idea, the first bunch of steps to make it need to be taken by you. If you have connections, you can put together a team.

Whether this means writing something out for your own personal joy, using the idea for a jam, a side passion project, or even starting your own studio eventually… that’s entirely up to you, and dependent upon the resources you have at your disposal.

First, you write that damn idea down.

A note on privilege and access

Before we go any further, I want to acknowledge that all of this is much, much easier if you have time, influence, money, health, access, and other privileges. It’s lovely that I’ve said, “write things down," but if you’re a single parent of four kids working three jobs, sleeping two hours a night, battling health issues, and facing food uncertainty, I’m aware that’s really fucking hard if not impossible.

There’s a painful amount of privilege wrapped in the ability to find time and energy to be artistic. It’s gross. We need a better, more equitable world. There are charities in the games space that provide bursaries, free conferences, classes, conventions, etc and I will at some point put together a post about them to share. I’m a huge advocate of trying to make art and working in the arts more equitable and I am not, I repeat, am not shaming anyone who does not have the resources to write with this post. Do what you can do.

Funny enough, out of the dozens, if not hundreds of people who have come to me hoping to be the “idea guy” (or gal, or nonbinary pal)… they have, unilaterally, not been particularly marginalised humans. The overwhelming majority of them have been people who do have access to the resources needed to be able to write down or create their ideas, at least in some way. Perhaps they haven’t realised how blessed and lucky they are to have what they do have, which is why they’ve assumed or hoped someone else would do the work for them. I don’t know. This wasn’t intended to transform into a diatribe on privilege, but it felt irresponsible not to mention it.

You’ll spend most of your time making the ideas of others

Realistically, even if you end up working in the games industry, or in film or television, you will spend most of your time working on the ideas of other people. This isn’t a bad thing— I love interpreting IP and designing for games that have a level of creative leadership above me. Collaboration is my jam. connect me with a passionate artist or designer, or a gaggle of them, and my productivity and quality of work soars.

Even then, you must do the damn work. You gotta write. You have to show up frequently and be creative.

Consistency is a bitch and I’ve not always been good at it

I’ve gone through periods of my professional life (read: the aforementioned burnout) where I got stuck. It was bad. I was not particularly professional for a bit. I was almost physically unable to write and make stuff due to the mental blockage I was carrying. Mine came from deep feelings of self-hatred, regret, inadequacy, and impostor syndrome (fun stuff!), but writer’s block and its ilk can come from anywhere. There are infinite reasons you might feel scared or stuck. Everyone gets it from time to time, and it occasionally sticks around for years.

The sign of a true professional is working through that stuck-ness. You need to keep creating something, turning that world into word. You need to climb out of that hole and make something. Anything.

It took some soul-searching, therapy, and quite a lot of love and support, but I got out of my hole. Don’t get me wrong… it’s still there, haunting my rearview mirror… a warning, an omen, or an inspiration depending on the day. It’s a source of both pride and shame.

Again, you gotta take those ideas and make them into something

Whether you are in a hole or have never built anything before, the difference between a person who is a writer and a person who is not a writer is that the writer writes. That’s it. Professional writers? We write a lot, or on demand. We take breaks, sure, and we have off-days, and we may go through burnout or writer’s block… but we write. We show up (eventually) (hopefully sooner rather than later). We don’t wait for inspiration, we search it out and write through it. We take our ideas and create shitty first drafts, then go from there.

I will encourage you until the end of the world— I really will. That spark of creation behind your eyes is precious, and anyone who tries to snuff it out is a dick. I don’t care if you’re the most or least privileged person in the world… the fact that you believe in your creative conviction enough to come up with something and share it is beautiful and should be protected.

Make all the stuff

But there’s not much anyone can do to help you get a job as a game writer until you start writing for games. Go to game jams. Write fan fiction. Make mods. Put together summaries, outlines, bark sheets. Take classes, read books, and then use what you have learned to transform your ideas into reality. Put together a portfolio

Plus, you need to ask yourself… is the idea you’re soft-pitching really a game? If it’s totally linear and not based around player agency and game mechanics, it probably isn’t. You might have a novel, a short story, or a screenplay on your hands. This is great news, frankly, because though the paths to getting those made are also fraught with nonsense and full of horrors… there’s a lot more you can personally control in those pipelines. Maybe you’ve accidentally created a new TTRPG setting. That’s a fun path.

Again, in order to know what your idea could be, it needs to be developed.

Get your ideas out of your head. They make you look beautiful, but they’re too powerful to stay in there. And they’re taking up real estate that could be inhabited by your next phenomenal idea.

If you want to be an idea guy, you’re going to need more than one idea.

Now, go write x