My blog on getting a job in game-writing was too long so I split it up. The main article page is here.

Have a template version of your CV ready. Don’t use any old CV. It needs to be focused on games writing.

What if you don’t have games or writing or games writing or whatever-the-hell-narrative-design-is experience? Well, you need to be able to look at the skill-set of a games writer and look at the jobs you have done, and marry the two up.

For example, game writers need to be fast! I’m sure you’ve experience that shows how speedy you are at doing stuff. (If you don’t, you may well need some real-world experience…) We also need to be reliable, charming, and NOT smelly aliens.

So write down all your significant work experience. Write out the skills acquired, including all those generic skills and traits you get from any job. Don’t forget your languages!

As you get older, you can start dropping entries. The school and university text will move further and further down. Certain jobs may disappear completely. My CV had so many jobs on it, I basically started summarising the excess ones on the second page. Which reminds me…

Keep it short. Two pages is the limit, one is ideal but the text might get ^{_{really small}}…

Remember, this is the template version you’re making. The one you’d send for the most generic job in narrative. Not the one you’d actually send for any particular job, as you’ll want to tweak it a little each time.

Not a huge amount, though. You don’t have to quite turn your experience into a direct sales pitch here. You do the actual concatenation, the linking of experience and necessary skills, in…

…borrows a dramatic crash of thunder from Edward Bulwer Lytton…

The Covering Letter.