Starving Writer (Advice/help need)

[zawxsome6464]

Hello humans, I am aware there are some people who have professional jobs here and maybe I can reach them or anyone who can help.

I should start with introducing myself, I'm a recent high school graduate and I have what one may call "protective parents". I mention that because it means I can not go out and get job, they stated it has to be remote and to use the internet.

I have a dream like you all to work in entertainment, I want to work in comics, animation, and gaming as a writer. For about 2-3 years I worked on Upwork, f=Fiverr, and reddit to make money. I took many ghostwriting jobs and me not being able to share my work did hurt me and made it hard for me to gain attention. I was paid enough for these jobs though, lately things have been empty, no one has been accepting applications and my constant clients said they would just chat gdp and other things to help them.

I'm going to a community college for general studies, they didn't have a class for the career I wanted to go down.

Now I'm looking for any job in the writing field that might help me reach my goal inch by inch. I am also working with an artist to release a manga this year.

My question here is, What should I do to help me achieve my goal?

I understand both of the jobs I want to do require me to work with other artist, and as it stands now the one I were working with no longer cared to create comics. No one was to blame, they just didn't care to work on comics anymore. (When I say comics manga is included).

I want to share my creativity and skill with people, but as things look now I just need money now.

If things help here are works I have gotten paid for and 5 stars https://docs.google.com/document/d/13p_AoK-zYZef1RU5M5x8LhhKmuP16JsZJvsEXkulM3Q/edit?ouid=104190887987273285784&usp=docs_home&ths=true

s=Some are repeated customers. I've learned a lot from there and have improved as of recently

Thank you for reading my post, and thank you even more if you comment. If anyone would like to speak with mw privately here is my discord lattebraus

[E.V.Macredes]

Hey Fellow Human,

Obviously, I don't know your situation, so take all of this with a grain of salt, but this is my opinion formed from my experience.

I think there's kind of two paths you can go down with artistic endeavors:
1. Get a day job to support your hobby and work on what you want
2. Figure out what art you can do that sells - might not always be what you want

In general though, I think it's a slow everyday/week process that you don't see the rewards from for a while, and you need a way to support yourself until you do. No one really makes it overnight without a lot of money and advertising backing them - it's the people that are still churning out a web comic every week or so for the past three years or longer.

College is an amazing option because it opens more paths for you down the road. Community colleges have a surprisingly lot to offer and are a lot cheaper - you can often transfer a ton of credits if you choose to go on for a Bachelors. As for your parents, respect to them, but I'm assuming you are 18 and honey, it's your life.

Whatever you decide, it won't be forever Change is the only constant and those silly little poems or writings you work on now may be your livelihood in ten years. Or maybe writing isn't what you love and you find a passion for computers. Ha! Whatever the direction, it isn't wrong. If you don't "make it" as a writer full time, it doesn't mean you're any less of a writer if you're still writing anything you enjoy.

Hopefully that helps a bit - capitalism really dries out the soul and if I leave you with nothing else, its this: don't lose your spark. Do what you have to live and there's no shame in that, but don't compromise what makes you, you, because you're the only you that there is.

E.V.

[darthmongoose]

Okay, so as I understand... your current position is that you're a high school graduate, your parents are protective and so are stopping you just going out and getting a job, so you're presumably living with them while you attend community college. You've done jobs on Fiverr and similar, and you're working on a comic.

As far as I can see, you're doing everything right for getting into the industry from a background without contacts.

Instead of troubling yourself with making money from your writing to pay an artist at this stage, I suggest you focus more on building your portfolio. Try searching online for "Comics Anthology Submissions for Writers" and you should find a bunch of them that will take submissions from a writer and pair you up with an artist for that short project. See if you can get artists on places like the Tapas forums, deviantart, LinkedIn etc. to work on short portfolio pieces of say 10 pages.

If once you have a few good samples, if you can find a place to get a professional script review, like a comics event, or somebody who takes online submissions, do that. Also getting a proper website for your portfolio and profile, rather than a google doc would really help, so if you can sort that out, that would be good.

If you want to make money from your writing while building visibility, you could try to get gigs writing for social media, write a blog or similar and use that to build a following, make youtube videos or a podcast, or you could write serialised novels on places like Tapas, Wattpad and Radish, which could all potentially both make money, but more importantly will build your personal brand and visibility.

If you want to work as a games writer, the easiest way in is weirdly to either become a games tester and work your way up from there, or to learn to code or use code-free or code-light game making tools, like twine, Ren'Py, RPGMaker, Game Maker Studio etc. to start making indie games with minimal art assets, and selling or distributing on itch.io and The Humble Bundle. That or learn to code to pro level and get work as a coder. It's a really different path to writing comics (unlike drawing comics, which tends to overlap with games a lot more).

Your writing samples look solid. Grammar needs a little work, so maybe get on sprucing that up a little, but overall, I think if you keep going you have good odds, so hopefully some of that advice works for you!