How To Start Your Novel

One of the things I love to do is help other passionate writers succeed. Recently, I was given the opportunity to share some of my own hard-earned knowledge on the topic of "How to Start Your Novel" or other storytelling project. If you're interested in learning more about this topic, if you're struggling to get started on your own Great…

A Narrative Designer’s Approach to NPCs

As a Narrative Designer, you often create and develop non-player characters (NPCs) that help drive the story you’re telling. This is your supporting cast, the characters that bring the world to life around your player character or main character. What I’ll talk about below comes from my experience creating NPCs for various story lengths (short to epic) and various media,…

7 Tips for Narrative Designer Hopefuls

If you're eyeballing the games industry as a destination for your career, and the "writer" or "narrative designer" job seems right up your alley, then you should know what preparations you can make in advance to better position yourself for success. I hope you find these tips helpful, and I look forward to hearing your feedback, thoughts, and success stories.…

8 Questions that Improve Your Game’s Narrative

Creating narrative for a video game has similar challenging, frustrating, and fun elements as those you encounter when putting together a jigsaw puzzle. Both tasks require critical thinking and the ability to see the big picture as well as the details.

How to Format a Short Story for Submission

Technology in the publishing industry has changed dramatically in the past twenty years, and yet, I see many submission guidelines out there that haven't changed with it. Old-fashioned typesetting is extinct for all practical purposes, and digital publishing (for the Kindle, for example) imposes requirements that publishing in paper doesn't. To compete and be at the top of your game,…

The New Renaissance – Kickstarter and the Cloud Patron Movement

By Angel Leigh McCoy Government funding for the arts has been wasting away. An article in the Seattle Times (3/27/11) warns of the movement to cut funding in Washington State. As Governor Gregoire’s spokeswoman said, “She absolutely sees the importance of publicly funded art, but it's hard to fund art when at the same time you're eliminating people off of…