Personal

Born and raised in NYC, Nick is a child of the seventies/early eighties.

With posters of Freddy Kruger and Jason Voorhees over his bed, Nick established his love of Horror at a very young age. While most parents sent their kids to bed, Nick watched Hellraiser. At nine years old, he wrote elaborate fifty page Dungeons and Dragons fantasy adventures for his friends. Love of fantasy fiction check.

An avid reader at a young age, Nick constantly tried to slip books from Issac Asimov, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Arthur C. Clarke, and others into his elementary school assignments. Yeah it mostly didn’t work, but regardless, Love of sci-fi, confirmed.

He went through the public school system of NYC and attended the Bronx High School of Science. Nick never gelled with the structure of school, or the cliques of kids. He was liked, had plenty of friends, but was always on the outside looking in. He was much more interested in staying at home, hacking on his computer and gaming, than conforming to structural norms and taking standardized tests.

After graduating high school, instead of going on to college, he jumped into a job at Den Design Studios on 14th st, in Manhattan. This was a special effects and prop studio servicing film and television. Nick spent many a nights on the set of Saturday Night Live breaking bottles on his head with the prop crew and showing them how to work some wacky new prop he created… and yes, was locked in the Gumby display during a tour.

Special effects were awesome, but the folks there were far more creative with their hands than Nick.

Nick is NOT an illustrator, painter, or sculptor. His realm is a mental one.

Eventually, Nick left the special effects studio and pretty much fell into computer graphic design.

Flash forward a bunch of years later, and Nick would move to the East Village of NYC where he opened his own full service design studio, Wikidd Media (named after an infamous New England pirate).

A few years later, he then shifted gears to open a Coffee shop in Brooklyn, known in the neighborhood as “The White Guy Bodega.” Still taking an occasional design job on the side… and of course, always writing in the peripheral.

Sometime after the nine eleven terrorist attacks, with a lot of his friends moved out, married, kids, whatever, he decided a complete change of venue was in order and bid farewell to the city he loved so much, but had changed, to a point of becoming almost unrecognizable. And moved… north. Settling in New Hampshire.

Adventurous years, Nick bounced around working whatever jobs turned up, from a cook at diner, film projectionist (actual film), construction, big box store floor cleaner, no job was beneath him to meet new people and make rent.

In all this time, across all these years, the one constant in the background remained writing and story.

Throughout the journey, writing crept more and more onto center stage, finally reaching the point where it demanded all his attention full time.

And this is where he’s been ever since.

 

Professional

Nick Macari is a freelance story consultant, developmental editor, narrative designer and writer–working primarily in comic books and games. An overall story mechanic and word smith. His main wheelhouse focuses on Sci-fi, Fantasy, and Horror, though his love for fiction falls to everything engaging and entertaining. Years back TBS cable ran a commercial, “Movies for Guys who like Movies,” and that pretty much sums up where Nick spends a lot of time in fiction.

In 1998 he entered the comic book industry, self-publishing (way before self-publishing was open to the masses via the internet) Varick: Chronicles of the Dark Prince, through Diamond Distributors, while simultaneously working on 4 other comic titles.

Since then, he’s been writing and editing in virtually every area of the entertainment industry, from comic books and graphic novels, to video games, CCGs, RPGs, board games, novels and screenplays.

Combining inspired passion, a love of writing, an analytical business sense, and extensive experience, Nick provides top tier expertise and a bold, intelligent creative edge to every project he’s a part of.

 

So what exactly does Nick do and who does he do it for?

Nick works with indie publishers, one-on-one with individual authors, and in general, anyone looking to maximize the effectiveness of their story for the commercial market.

Story Consulting: Looking at the bigger picture and asking the broader questions guiding you to unlock the fullest potential of your story, whether it’s a novel, screenplay, short or comic.

Developmental Editing: Looking at the smaller picture and asking more precise questions. The goal is to address specific weaknesses and areas that need further improvement, unifying your vision and making sure it’s articulated in the best way possible for your target audience in today’s market.

Comic Editing: Primarily looking for mistakes: grammar, format, continuity, etc. Includes review of art, supporting effective communication between writer and artist.

Prose Line Editing: The extremely time-intensive process of editing long fiction line-by-line requires a significant commitment and long-term relationship with the client.

Writing: Either working from existing material or creating a completely new intellectual property. Nick delivers everything from comprehensive outlines, to narrative dialogue, to fully realized story bibles or complete manuscripts.

Crowdfund Consulting: If you’ve got a game or comic crowdfund and really need to maximize the experience, Nick’s got you covered.

CV or Résume

Sorry folks, Nick does not use a CV or Resume. He does not keep a master list of every project he’s worked on, or client he’s helped. (If he tried to list all of that, it would be 20 pages long.) 

• Nick’s written 150,000 words of mind blowing creative writing insights, compiled from nearly 30 years of writing, over at StoryToScript.com …
• and 250,000 words on writing, here in the writing craft section on this site .
• He’s published 2 books on creative writing, “Storycraft for Comics” and “The Working Writer’s Guide to Comics and Graphic Novels” and currently working on his third, writing Manga book.
• He’s published 2 novels. Written a third “Beyond the Isles of Avalon” for a client that was never published and is currently typing away on his fourth.
• He’s worked on a number of successful video games including the Tower of Time and it’s sequel, Dark Envoy (sorta–see the video games page).

Nick’s hired countless people over his career as a creator and publisher. He’s seen firsthand the best talent look horrible on paper and vice-versa, the worst talent look great on paper.

You can find everything you need to know about Nick here on NickMacari.com and over at StoryToScript.com .

If your story has a problem,

if no one else can help,

and if you can find him…

maybe you can hire, Nick!

 

Writing and Entertaining in 2024

Today’s world is a lot different than Nick grew up in. He remembers a time when the TV would show static or the national anthem late at night.

Now, there’s a million streaming services and so much content being pumped to people 24×7, you could never watch/read it all in a life-time. Entertainment’s role in our society has changed, becoming much more dominant and readily available.

Nick writes in many genres and styles. One of the best things about writing as a profession is the ability to live in completely different worlds from project to project. He appreciates intelligent, meaningful fiction, whether it showcases a guy in tights and a cape, a masked murderer, or the FBI tracking a serial killer.

Often asked who his influences were/are. The true scope of this list is far too large to absorb–it’s over thirty years in the making. But he supplies these highlights.

Movies:
Krull
Portrait of Jennie
The Blood Of Heroes
For a Few Dollars More
Brewster’s Millions
Highlander
Alien(s)
Time Bandits
Seven Samurai
The Thing
Casablanca
Robocop
Captain Blood
Thomas Crown Affair
Big Trouble in Little China

Directors:
Steven Spielberg
John Carpenter
Hayao Miyazaki
Alfred Hitchcock
Akira Kurosawa
Ridley Scott
Robert Zemeckis
Sergio Leone
John Ford
Luc Besson

Writers:
Robert E. Howard
Bernard Cornwell
Marion Zimmer Bradley
Glen Albert Larson
Michael Crichton
Frank Miller
Chris Claremont
Marv Wolfman
Roy Thomas
Philip K Dick
William Gibson

Star Trek

 

Final Thoughts

If you’re a garbage man, or a plumber, who you are as a person probably doesn’t affect your job performance too much. But in writing, this is the opposite. Writing (and editing) takes place through the lens of the person viewing the entire world around them. In this regard, knowing what a person does in his/her spare time, tells you a lot about them.

In his spare time, Nick writes on his own projects… but in his spare, spare time, Nick raises German Shorthaired Pointers (see header picture of this page).

He can also be found bee keeping, working in the vegetable garden, tending to other farm animals, building a new barn by himself, or working on an old car.

Basically, when Nick is offline, he loves to enjoy the world of meek things, make real connections with nature, and work with his hands fixing and creating tangible things.