I spent today at the Writing Industries Conference in Loughborough. For the most part I came away inspired. In particular, I was taken with the opening speech by writer Graham Joyce, which could pretty much have been designed with me in mind. He spoke about the challenge of writing for an age in which traditional print publishing is on its way out — whether or not people in the industry choose to accept it — and online media present whole new opportunities for writers who can capitalise on its possibilities.

Graham’s stance was captured in his suggestion that there are “opportunities for the industrious writer who is able to diversify”, reiterating that statement by saying that the twin themes of the new era are diversification and independence. Writers are often being offered advances a quarter of what was the case a few years ago, and Amazon sells 6 Kindle books for every 10 physical ones, where the same titles are compared. Online drama Kate Modern attracted 66 million hits thanks to its link with social networking site Bebo, and was only pulled when one of its partners, AOL, got greedy. This is a new world, and there are no set rules it operates by. Graham’s strategy, very much echoing the themes of my own thinking recently, is to adapt and find ways to capitalise on three or more of the income streams available to writers, if they’re so inclined.

And that last part is the contentious bit, where some people are concerned. More than I’ve experienced it before, there seemed to be two camps at the conference. On the one hand, those keen to support themselves through the monies available to them through writing. On the other, those whose hearts are in serving the community. And some of what’s been said about this apparent dichotomy is pretty ugly — one participant commented thus on Twitter: “Every time I hear the word ‘monetize’ in a conversation about community creativity I hear the word ‘cuntify’.” Nice.

This simplistic dualism doesn’t take all kinds of things into account. Like, as with people such as myself, many of those aspiring to support themselves through creativity have already been active in community arts of one sort or another. I’ve been there, done that, with — among other projects — a theatre company aiming to do work about learning difficulties in schools. And found that what we wanted to do was a no-goer commercially speaking, since Nottingham Council’s theatre-in-education team offered subsidised rates that we couldn’t compete with. So we didn’t: we did our shows for some years, to much acclaim, and with support from charities that barely covered our costs. When it came to divvying up the monies in the bank account when it all came to an end, we each had around £100.

So: when you dismiss writers wanting to make money, you’re dismissing people who may well have done more than their bit for community arts and education. Also, remember that advocates of arts in the community are the ones looking for jobs in same. I’ve encountered no end of writers in residence, creators working with marginalised groups, facilitators, drama therapists and so forth, and I believe that’s a perfectly good way to be spending your time. But not everyone has the networking and workshopping skills needed to get such work, or the desire to acquire them. Some people just want to write, and earn money for it. And that’s fine, too.

I’ve got a foot in both camps here, and I suspect that’s the way it’ll remain. Even with the potentially lucrative multiplatform work I’m planning there’s a utopian element in terms of the story content that I want to inspire kids with as I in turn was inspired by the characters whose adventures I followed. And if that works out, I intend to give money to charities from the profits generated.

Suggesting that writers are either moneygrabbing or community-minded is reductionist bullshit, and it makes me sad to hear people talking in such terms. Especially when the future is going to be challenging for us all, and we can help one another to prosper.

Writing does not exist in a vacuum. It’s not enough to have a brilliant script on your computer, or in a folder with a bunch of other work. Scripts are documents that are the starting point of a collaborative process. And that process begins with sending your work to other people for their feedback.

First, there are the people you trust to offer something like objective feedback on your writing. Maybe friends, possibly family, in an ideal world other writers, but certainly people who can offer useful criticism. That’s the stage I’m at having circulated the first couple of chapters of the novel I’m writing to some female friends. I’ve been particular about choosing women, and women who are intelligent readers — and in one case a writer — because those chapters are narrated by two sisters, and I felt confident that female readers would pick up any failings in my ability to inhabit the skin of those characters.

Fortunately, the feedback is very positive. As one friend commented, “I hope to fuck it’s published because I NEED to read the lot!”. What it lacks in specificity it makes up for with attitude. And I’m hoping to get more detailed comments from my writer pal tomorrow.

So, there’s the feedback you can ask for that’s useful when engrossed in a project, especially at those points when you’re unsure whether it’s utterly brilliant or entirely fatuous. And that feedback can help guide your writing and revising process until you’ve got a draft you’re happy to send out into the world. Which is when the other kind of feedback comes in.

Sooner or later, as a scriptwriter, you need to engage with the industry. The exception is for street performers, but if so you’ll be exposed to the direct opinion of an audience, which either sticks round and puts money in your hat, or departs in favour of the half price fridges advertised in the window behind you. For most of us though, we’re faced with the business of sending scripts out to production companies, broadcasters, theatres, and so forth. And what counts at this point is anything other than a generic rebuff, which is why I was pleased to receive a letter in today’s post from a production company I rate highly:

“Thank you for sending us your script. I have now read and discussed it with the rest of the development department.

“We thought your idea had the potential to be an interesting and thought provoking series. Although I’m afraid that given our large development slate currently we don’t think it is the right project for us.”

Which, admittedly, isn’t as positive as “we enclose a six figure cheque and an invitation to our hotel at Cannes” but, you know, ain’t shabby either. Rather more encouraging was the response I got from an actor looking for a play suitable to stage this year, whose response to Breaking In — available as a sample script on this very site, folks — was “I love it, it’s on our short list and my personal fave…I was wondering, did you have any other one act plays?”.

You will note, as I did, that the enthusiasm of the response varies according to the financial rewards of the medium: I’ll be able to pay for a slap-up meal on the proceeds of the play, whereas I’d be looking to clear my mortgage with the tv project. So it goes.

Feedback, as the saying goes, is the breakfast of champions. The more perspectives on your work you can glean, the more you can learn from them, and the better that will shape your words so that a potential purchaser will squee when they see them. (‘Squee’ is a technical term, yes.) And one strategy I found useful in my earlier days — and still do — was to always be waiting to hear back about at least one project in addition to the one you’ve just heard about. Meaning, you’ve got an incentive to keep producing work and looking forward to good news rather than brooding on feedback that didn’t tell you what you wanted. Right now, I’m waiting to hear back from a radio producer, Big Finish (who put out a call for Dr Who ideas a while back), and a local audio drama project. Wish me luck — I know I do.

Why do we need narrative to help us engage with games? Isn’t the interaction of players controlling pieces enough to provide engagement? Apparently not. The key is in the business already mentioned of ‘players controlling pieces’. Whether those pieces are on a chess board or in a science fiction online game, the key to it all is the player’s interaction with a symbol system. In the moment, symbols are not viewed as pieces of wood or collections of pixels — they are emblematic of ourselves, and our identification with them is what leads people to have real emotional experiences while engaged in play.

It’s the same when people follow football clubs. They get caught up in the action on the pitch, and off — newspapers are full of tales of footballers and even their partners, boardroom coups and bids for foreign players. Again, the whole experience is of immersion in a narrative, and even though the supporters are spectators than participants the emotional engagement is all-encompassing.

Sometimes, a game’s narrative can spill over into other areas of the lives of players. There was a case the other year of a German man who travelled all the way to Britain to kill another participant in an online game. And real world fortunes change hands for virtual artefacts in World of Warcraft.

None of this should be surprising, really. Babies respond positively to a balloon with an upturned line drawn on it, interpreting it as a smile. Our relationship with story is hardwired. So, for those of us engaged with creating games, how do we take advantage of that tendency?

Fortunately, there are plenty of tools in the writer’s arsenal to provide assistance for this kind of thinking. One classic example is The Hero’s Journey — I know of a writer who gained a position with a computer games company based primarily on his knowledge of this story template, popularised by Chris Vogler in his book The Writer’s Journey and derived from the pioneering work of Joseph Campbell.

The Hero’s Journey is a valuable skeleton that can be built up in all sorts of ways according to your intentions. The basic idea of a protagonist who is called to act against an enemy, but can’t tackle that antagonist until they’ve found their inner hero, and then returns to their community changed, is a powerful archetype. And no wonder: it’s distilled from the study of hundreds, maybe thousands, of mythical tales from cultures worldwide.

It’s all about execution. The Hero’s Journey is too often applied clunkily, with stereotypically ‘wise’ mentors imparting wisdom to their youthful charges. But it doesn’t have to be like that. As with any tool, it can be used to create work of quality — or crassness. That said, how about exploring alternative ways of creating story for your game? Vladimir Propp studied Russian folklore and came up with a list of 31 elements that a story could contain. It doesn’t have to use all of them, but the typology is worth looking at, and imaginatively applied could bring fresh life to a concept that you’re tiring of.

Given that gaming is bigger than film these days, it makes sense for developers to pay more attention to story than has traditionally been the case. People complain that Hollywood films are more like games, and at the same time games increasingly resemble films. It’s already the case in terms of design — now narrative has to catch up. And that’s nothing to do with technology and investment, and all to do with attitude and willingness to think in new ways — while making the most of age-old paradigms too. Sure, there are issues to do with interactivity that make games and film fundamentally different, but there’s every reason to believe that games can work with our innate desire to be excited by and involved with story.

Marshall McLuhan was famous for fifteen minutes way back when for trumpeting ‘the medium is the message’, and he had a point, even if no two people can agree precisely what it was. Right now I’m thinking of business models to support an online project, the collaboration with Andy Tudor that I mentioned recently, and like McLuhan in that it involves thinking about the nature of media, and in particular how to create a commercially viable project in the online age.

Getting the model right is important, and what’s interesting with the online scene is there’s no definitive ‘how to’ that will produce the cashflow you’re looking for. Well, that’s true with offline work too — the mainstream comics model is one based on revenues raised from monthly publication. But in recent years that trend has been joined by another, for collecting serialised works under one cover. So you can buy an anthology of Daredevil issues for instance. And that in turn has led to a change in the way that writers conceive of their work: many now ‘write for the trade (paperback)’, which allows them more time to develop a story that works in 120 or so pages with rising and falling arcs and all that stuff you read about in McKee, rather than being five cliffhangers followed by a concluding issue.

The serialise-and-anthologise model works because the costs of producing the comic are covered by the audience that buys monthly comics, meaning the profits from the collection are gravy, and increasingly part of the money that creators make for their work. But that’s only one way to do it. As book publishers have entered the graphic novel field, it’s become common for writers and artists to be given advances for the work they’re going to do.

Warren Ellis is a canny thinker about the economics of the comics business. Interested in creating work that’s experimental by mainstream standards, he collaborated with publisher Avatar to create the Apparat line of comics. The first wave of Apparat were single-issue sized, and the downside of that is they tend to exist in a shop only so long before they’re removed from the shelves. So, next time round, the Apparat titles — one of which is reviewed here, and others of which I may well cover in time to come — were done as 48 page ‘graphic novellas’. Never mind the nomenclature: what it means is that these slim volumes are on the shelves long term, not restricted to the ‘this month’s titles’ selection but filed alongside Watchmen and Persepolis and the other anthologised collections and original graphic novels. Meaning you can buy Frankenstein’s Womb or other graphic novellas at your convenience rather than having to get it in a particular short calendar period, and that Avatar, Ellis, and his artists can benefit from the shelf life of their brainchild. Smart thinking.

Ellis scored again with another Avatar project, the online comic Freakangels. A serial produced in weekly installments of several pages like the 2000AD comics Ellis was familiar with in his youth, this collaboration with artist Paul Duffield is a big hit online, and has also spawned successful anthologies. And it may be that the concept of the story was geared to the audience that Ellis and Avatar have cultivated: Ellis’s online presence attracts a significant number of young people into alternative lifestyles, and the Freakangels themselves are the ultimate outsiders, misunderstood even by their peers. That comment, by the way, is by no means a criticism: what sense would it have made for Ellis to launch into a comic about the Lakeland poets in their twilight years? It’s easier to write with constraints than utterly free of them, and creating work for an identified audience is one constraint that makes a great deal of sense.

It’s not just Ellis that Andy and I have been learning from — the recent piece on Alex de Campi and Christine Larsen’s Valentine has prompted us to think of what’s possible as well. And those are just two examples of the way that the digital scene is changing the way that forward thinking creators conceive of developing profitable properties.