When you're a writer, everything that interests you feeds into your work.

Have confidence in your strengths, dear writer, or give it all up now and create apps instead.

When I mention that I'm a game designer as well as a writer, someone will nod and say, 'Ah, that's what we like about your script. The videogame feel.'

Standing out as a writer today requires more than a bright idea and limpid prose. Authors need to become businesspeople as well.

Now, I admire The Sims as a game, but from a story viewpoint, there are two glaring problems. First, your relationship with those characters is like they're bugs in a jar. There's no empathy. And secondly, you've got this clunky, chemistry-set interface between you and them, with bars to show how tired or angry they are. It's all tell not show.

If your agent or publisher is jumping up and down at the thought of your novel, it's because they're picturing the movie poster on the side of the bus.