Storytellersunplugged

I call myself a writer, but it’s not really enough. It’s a small word to encompass all the different things I do professionally. For instance, over the past several months, I’ve worked on the following things:

1. Wrote some of the scripts for a Blood Bowl comic book miniseries for BOOM! Studios, based on my Blood Bowl novels for the Black Library.
2. (Re)wrote a screenplay for a feature film for Reactor 88 Studios, based on my Brave New World roleplaying game.
3. Wrote a “non-fiction,” coffee-table book about orcs.
4. Revised my novelization of the Mutant Chronicles feature film, based on a roleplaying game I used to work on in the early ’90s.
5. Wrote the story for an upcoming game for the Wii.
6. Wrote the story and initial cutscenes for an upcoming game for the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3.
7. Wrote The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Drawing Superheroes and Villains, Illustrated.
8. Designed the mechanics for an electronic game for a major toy company.

I’ve also signed on to write another nonfiction book, plus my next novel for Wizards of the Coast, and I’m pitching around a few other novels around, so I haven’t given up on the form at all. I love writing novels and don’t plan to ever abandon them.

However, there are so many other things out there to do—to write—that I don’t ever want to hem myself in by claiming I’m solely a novelist. It’s like saying “I’m a father.” Sure, I am that too, but it’s not the only thing that defines me.

Perhaps I need to find a way to focus, to zero in on my strengths with laser-like precision. The world seems to prefer specialists, and as any gamer can tell you, you can only maximize your preferred skills by ignoring others. As a game designer, I understand how that works and why it’s made that way. It provides the player with interesting choices and ways of differentiating their characters from others.

In real life, though, I just can’t bring myself to do it. I like working on all sorts of different things. Although I admire the inventiveness and tenacity of J.R.R. Tolkien, who spent decades developing a single world in glorious detail, that’s not for me. I’d rather take a dip in many different ponds than soak forever in one.

This is how I keep creative juices fresh and flowing. I sample from everything I can get my hands on, and I try my hand at anything offered to me. In the past few years, I’ve also edited novels, designed a collectible card game or two, designed puzzles for a children’s book, created the user interface and operating system for a handheld gaming unit, directed voiceover work for an animated comic-book I wrote and produced, written hundreds of trivia questions, scripted and designed large chunks of a computer game, written cutscenes for another computer game, and—among all that—written about a dozen novels.

I like it this way. The world is too big, too amazing, too wonderful for me to want to stick to looking at it from one angle, to try to capture it using a single set of tools. It’s said if you have a hammer then everything looks like a nail. I want to carry around a whole box of tools instead, and I’m always hunting for new things to add to it.

In the end, though, all these things require writing skills to one extent or another. They all combine to make me a better writer. The skills I learn to use in one form can inform and inspire my work in another.

So, maybe “writer” is a plenty big enough word after all.

Or maybe I’m just suffering from an advanced case of ADD.