Why Breaking Into Game Writing Starts Before You Ever Apply
I didn’t start in gaming.
I started in stories about people.
In narrative work. In consulting. In workshops where leaders tried to make sense of complexity through storytelling. In spaces where meaning wasn’t decorative — it was necessary for clarity, decision-making, and survival in organizational systems.
And in narrative medicine, I learned something that quietly reshaped everything I understood about storytelling:
People don’t experience life as clean structure.
They experience it as narrative fragments — emotional, incomplete, evolving.
At first, I didn’t think this had anything to do with games.
But now I see it differently.
Because before you ever write for games, you are already writing from a story system you carry with you.
The Invisible Portfolio
Most people think they don’t have experience for game writing jobs because they haven’t worked in the industry.
But narrative design does not begin in studios.
It begins in how you:
- interpret human behavior
- structure meaning from complexity
- translate emotion into language
- hold attention across time
In my case, this came through working with leaders, students, and clients — helping them turn lived experience into structured narrative.
That is not separate from game design.
That is foundational to it.
Because games are not just stories you read.
They are stories you enter.
And understanding how people enter meaning begins long before you write your first quest line.
It begins with how you see people in real life.
