A: My route into writing professionally involved a lot of luck and happened to me quite young. As a result I can only give some pretty vague advice.
The first is to read. Read a lot, and not just subjects you know you will enjoy. I worked for a bookselling company for a while and I got colleagues to recommend books to me without worrying about whether it was my genre or not. So as well as the genres I wrote in, I read plenty more, including literary fiction, book club romances and old-school science fiction.

The second is to write. Again, write a lot, and find excuses to do it. One of my best experiences was a creative writing night class, which encouraged me to write something for each class. Just the act of writing is like exercising so even if you never do anything with what you’ve written, it is still worth doing. As a wise man once said, writing = ass+chair.

The third is to plan everything thoroughly before you write it. This is a more personal piece of advice, since every writer works differently, but I find a proper plan makes everything many times easier. I haven’t had writer’s block, but I have been paralysed by not knowing what to write next, a fate that can be avoided by having a complete plotline thrashed out ahead of time. Some types of writing may need less planning than I usually put in, but I can’t imagine a situation where you’ll find yourself wishing you had planned less.

A: I’m afraid, again, I don’t have a lot of good advice, as the game developers contacted me on the strength of the work I had already done for Games Workshop.

Video game writing is more like other types of writing than it is different, so anything that helps with writing in general will help you when working on video games.

A: Sometimes I just have to stare at a blank page or empty screen until I come up with something. There’s no trick to it, unfortunately.

There’s lots of advice out there regarding improving creativity which can all be relevant. For instance, a maxim I’ve found to be true is ‘restrictions breed creativity’. If you give yourself a couple of restrictions to work within, it makes it easier to take those first steps in generating something new.

A: Just write them! I got started by coming up with an idea and some scripts for a podcast I could potentially make myself with some basic editing skills. This became the first season of Out of Place. I was lucky enough to be put into contact with a producer who was after new projects, but if that hadn’t happened I could well have ended up making it myself. Podcasts are an accessible medium, since they don’t need a lot of equipment (a decent mic and a computer is about it to get started) and can be done by a small number of people or even alone.

I found a podcast network by contacting the makers of some podcasts I liked which were in a similar vein to Out of Place, and while they were not able to take on a new title they were able to pass on my enquiry to a network that did. So in my experience, write, record, try out new ideas, and think about contacting people who have been doing similar podcasts to you. It can be daunting to contact podcast creators like this out of nowhere, but if you choose them carefully and are polite and patient there’s a lot of potential for collaboration.