The best advice I have is keep writing, keep practicing, keep winning, losing and understanding the difference. Never stop learning, never stop pushing yourself. Then find yourself a team you can work well with and help make awesome things happen.

I can pretty much spend an entire week talking about how the writing process works, to be honest! It can really vary from project to project and is often dependent on when you're brought on board, the genre, the platform and the narrative desires of the project.

By the time a writer comes onto a project (if they're being hired as a contractor) the main character has usually been designed, as that's always done during a project's pitching stage.

There's the underlying feeling that writing must be easy, because it's all about putting letters together. That's only true in the same way that programming is all about putting numbers together.

Generally I wouldn't accept work on projects where I didn't agree with the sensibilities behind the main character.

Traditionally games never used professional writers to create their narrative, so there's definitely a residual feeling that hiring a proper writer is somewhat of a luxury, rather than a necessity. Like a feng shui consultant.

They are very good reasons why voice acting in games can be so terrible. Writers are in a great position to be able to bridge this gap.