Fifteen years ago I was broke and unemployed, couch-surfing. Thirteen years ago I stopped looking for work, and started writing novels, eventually working my way up to four-figure monthly royalties, doing a little freelance narrative design on the side. Last year I made the choice to try and pivot to full-time work with a game studio during some of the harshest layoffs the games industry has ever seen.
Now, I’ve scored a full-time job as a Senior Writer, drawing a steady paycheck for the first time in over a decade.
The Journey to Full-Time Work
My senior writer position was earned largely on the back of the experience I’ve gained writing novels, designing narratives for games, and producing audio fiction over the last decade. It’s been a tough economy to forge ahead as a creative entrepreneur, with rapidly shifting markets and increasingly difficult discovery. Despite improving reviews with each project – book or game or podcast – fewer and fewer people were able to find my work as search algorithms increasingly diverted audiences away from independent media.
I stopped couch-surfing in 2012, around the time I started to hit four-figure monthly royalties, but by 2018 my earnings plateaued and I came to accept that if I wanted to continue to live, I’d need to find work. My income has always skimmed the poverty line, but before rent and grocery prices started to really skyrocket I could manage to get by through a punishing production schedule – which was fine by me, all I wanted to do was write. And if my efforts were bringing more money to me than someone else, it didn’t really feel like “work.”
Freelancing as a game writer and narrative designer helped me cover the income gap my projects were leaving, but there was never enough work, and by 2022 I realized I’d have to find something full-time. Most of my “working for other people” experience was in the games industry – and at the time that seemed like the best bet in terms of “getting people to pay me to write,” so I contacted a career coach, updated my resume, and started looking for work in earnest.
Then the layoffs began. Studios closed. Writers strikes broke out. The job market was flooded for what few positions were left.
When I finally found something long-term – not really employment so much as a long-term contract gig (it’s an important distinction for legal reasons), it was already 2024 – and just in time as my partner had recently lost her job. Fortunately I’ll be making enough – on top of my scant royalties and patreon income – to cover us.
At least until her unemployment runs out.
Adapting to my New Role
So. I’m a Senior Writer now. It’s a job that doesn’t involve much actual writing – I run a team of two junior writers, and it’s a mix of localization, higher-level story plotting, proofreading, and admin work. There’s a strong startup energy, and that means that directives and process changes on a weekly – if not daily – basis, but I’ve been at this for a while and I’m flexible enough to roll with whatever comes my way as the process refines itself.
The house style is, emphatically, not my own – particularly as we’re not creating original fiction, but rather adapting material written for foreign markets. Localization is a big part of what I do, but otherwise I’m very akin to what might be called a show runner elsewhere. It’ll be great on my CV if I have to look for work elsewhere once my contract is up.
The Importance of Staying Creative
The problem with it not being my style is that I’m at it eight hours a day. If it’s all I’m writing, it will become my style – so to keep my skills sharp I’ll need to pick up an after-hours side project.
So what am I going to do?
I only have two hours a day at most to invest, and I’ll be exhausted from work, but the trade-off is that for the first time in over a decade I’m not dependent on my work’s commercial success. I don’t need to consider if it’ll sell well enough in the short term so I can make rent and pay the bills. I can get weirder, take more chances, wait longer for a payout.
Unfortunately at a certain level of skill you’ve had so many ideas – the good ones, the ones you can turn into something worthwhile, that you realize you’d never work your way through them with twice the lifetime. This means having to make hard choices, and without the framework of marketability you lose a few metrics you can use to narrow things down.
Choosing the Right Side Project
In my case, my main constraint is time. I’ve got an hour or two a night to spend working on this, at the end of a workday that very well may have exhausted me. So it has to be a conceit that hits my interests and passions strong enough to keep me in a chair writing instead of watching television or playing video games or spending quality time with my family.
(Don’t worry. I’m budgeting my time for the family thing, too. Work life balance. What a concept.)
Additionally I’d prefer to choose something that positions me well for when this assignment is over. I might be able to get my contract renewed, but it’s not something entirely within my control – especially given the way the economy is going and the speed at which AI is replacing writers – so I always have to be looking ahead. What positions me best to move on.
A Serial: I could write a web serial. I’ve tried this before, to market my novels and pull readers towards my patreon, but the format isn’t something that pays off immediately… or potentially ever. It also requires a consistent level of output at the expense of other projects. But hey, two hours a night is fully enough to write and release two episodes of something per week, and a serial is great for ongoing engagement in a flexible way.
A Novel: I could write another novel – perhaps one I could use to query publishers and take the traditional publishing route. Back in 2012 the realities of the trad publishing timeline pushed me into self-publishing – I wasn’t positioned to wait a year or two even if I found acceptance. But hey, it’s an option now, and as far as the writing itself goes it’s a pretty pure form. Best of all, I know my workrate and can schedule accordingly. Two hours a night is ~1k to 2k words, meaning I could finish something by the end of my contract.
A Game: I can code, I can manage low-res pixel art, I can write branching (and linear) narratives, there’s no reason I can’t chip away at some kind of long term game project – anything from a digital gamebook, to interactive fiction, to a point n’ click adventure game or action RPG. My portfolio pieces to date are all short games whipped up in a week or a month, something more medium length would set me up for future job hunts – assuming the industry stops exploding. I could even scope something worthy of a commercial release.
A Script: I enjoy screenwriting, yet my portfolio doesn’t include any spec scripts. Curious.
Time to Make a Decision
So that’s it, that’s where I’m at, that’s what I’m trying to figure out – how to best position myself going forward, using my creative talents, while keeping my skills sharp. If I could I’d do all of it – but I only have the one lifetime to live, and a few hours a night in which to live it.
