What are Winter Words?
Or rather, who is Winter Words?
My name is Alexander Winter, and Winter Words started on a crisp April day in Appleton, Wisconsin in 2010. I had just won a Watson Fellowship, offering me a stipend for a year of independent travel and research through Asia on a topic of my choosing. My proposal was to explore narrative design for the game industry, specifically how stories are shared across cultural lenses. Winter Words was the title I came up with for my travel blog during my Watson Year, having just finished Leaves of Grass, and an alliterative, pun-based title seemed appropriate.
After the Watson, I spent nearly 6 years as a freelance writer and narrative designer in the tabletop and video game industries. I stepped back from the game industry to pursue graduate studies at the University of Washington, achieving my M.Sc. in 2019. Since then I've been a software developer and engineer at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, although I'm currently looking for new opportunities!
What kind of writing does Winter Words offer?
As a narrative designer in the game industry, I wrote characters and worlds that empowered players to build their own story. My focus was crafting realistic personalities, characters the reader felt they had met before, and weaving histories that brought a spark of life to the world, cast, and story of the game.
Engineering the craft of writing
I also brought my background in engineering and math to the table in creative writing, infusing the fantasy and sci-fi worlds I created with a touch of real science, both within the fiction and in the mechanics of the games. This regularly found ingenious applications - I built a reputation for political intrigue in my writing, and I often handled the evolving reputation of players various factions with tables of interactions, where player decisions re-balanced a delicate network of alliances. I used linear algebra and graph theory to ensure that the system of equations which dictated how different factions would react to the players did have a solution, ie the players could win, and that the win criteria was reasonable.
Similarly, I used Java and Python in monte carlo simulations to evaluate the mechanical fairness of different design decisions for the 5th edition of Dungeons and Dragons.
Writing with craftsmanship for engineering
"Code is read more often than it is written". Most engineers have heard this, and while we all like to tell ourselves we want the code to speak for itself, we're all also familiar with the pain of poorly written or undocumented code. Documentation is in some ways the most important part of engineering - once the product has left the developer's hands, a user is left to their own devices, and there are really only three ways users get what they need when they hit a snag: solid user design, documentation, and support. The first is great if everything works as intended, but even the best projects don't launch without some hitches, and user support is the last stop before a user abandons a product, assuming it still exists. This leaves documentation as the the heavy lifter in fixing problems, directly connecting engineers to users.
My expertise in clear, concise, direct writing has been an invaluable asset to me as an engineer, and I'll offer tips and insight about how to be a better writer as an engineer.