Writer

Spent all of my Tuesday on Taxes.

Whenever sending anything to the Government or Corporations, the "title" I put down varies. If it's a manual prompt, I'll sometimes write "Youtuber" which I'm not a big fan of, but automatic prompts often have "Influencer" which I'm not a big fan of.

Thankfully, I've never had to put that one down, because every automatic prompt has a backup selection.

Writer.

Thing is, I've never felt like a writer.

It is primarily what I do.

The bulk of my time making a video is spent writing rather than editing.

It's also what I'm doing right now, for the first time in my life attempting the cliché of sitting in a cafe with an overpriced extra-large coffee typing on an overpriced tablet.

Isn't that what a writer does?

That or they recite eighteenth century Scandinavian poets drilled into them by a 100k scholarship. Give quotes for a friend's book they're paid to praise in advance? Use a manual typewriter to complete a 200 page script in a Friday?

That last one is my main source of insecurity.

I write, but I don't consider myself a writer because I cannot do it on the spot.

To me, or some part of me, a writer is like a Magician or a Comedian. You tell someone you're a Comedian, and they say "Oh really? Tell us a joke." Tell someone you're a writer, and when they go "tell us a story" you should be able to snap into action immediately.

Someone should be able to hire you, and within a couple days, you've provided a portion of what they hired you for.

I've only done that once, and it wasn't just my wheelhouse, it was my soul. Writing, narrating, and editing videos like "Making a Game Last Forever" is what I've been doing for the last ten years. When GOG officially hired me, it didn't feel like I'd been hired for anything. It felt like I was just doing my usual job, with the only difference being occasionally getting up at 4am to greet a Polish Film crew with my bloodshot eyes leaning back in a bathrobe occasionally answering a question.

I definitely didn't feel like a writer.

That video almost wrote itself. Its voice was just mine, and that's all it needed to be, were I hired to write anything else, I probably wouldn't have taken the gig, because I'm not sure I'd even be able to write it.

I've not cultivated the skills to see a character sketch, and give them a premise, inner-conflict, set of beliefs, a personal goal, or their voice.

The times I've tried those things so far, I've come up short. The lines I write don't sound human, the character's voice is just a version of mine, their story doesn't really start, nor end, and this is all under the context of not having one constraint.

I don't write for budget, time, property, or producer. I just try to write, and come up short, unless it's something like this.

Even then, I'm rarely confident when I upload my own writing, I just do it because it seems like it's worked more times than not, so the fear of failure is dulled. If I was hired to try to write for budget, time, property, etc, I don't think could handle it.

Yet, that is what the overwhelming majority of entertainment is written in.

An individual or team of writers is told what their next project it, what the high-concept is, and that it's going to be released to millions of people in roughly two years.

Get to work.

Do you have a great idea for that high-concept?
Is its main-character the one you want to use?
Does your story work or need more time to cook?

All of these questions matter for the viewer but not to the people tasking you with writing this. They're paying for a product, and they're going to release it regardless if your answer to these questions is genius or trash.

When shows, games, or films are criticized for their writing, they're often discussed like the writer has been locked away in a Tardis, absent from the influences of time and space on Earth and has only brought the final product to supervisors what they think is complete, and we get to judge if their assumptions were right or wrong.

That's almost never the case.

Stories are like game-engines. Characters are like mechanics. Lines of dialogue are like controls. They're going to be what they are, not what they could, would, or should. It's technical, a writer tries to make a character like a level-designer tries to make an arena.

This is most definitely because I've never written in this type of environment. I've never had to write a character on a deadline and make them authentically sound like somebody I am not. Because I've never had to make a story decision for a reason that has to do with assets, production woes, or just a brainless manager...

But that sounds like hell, an incredibly sub-optimal way to create stories, and I have to hold some respect for the people who willingly throw themselves into this, regardless if their results are brilliant or terrible.