Little Mathletics Workblog

Changing Pace

0 Comments Published by alistairw May 27th, 2008 in Uncategorized

If I might dip into introspection for a second: I feel like I’m approaching writing from a different angle these days. A lot of that’s to do with the events of the last few months – after experiencing a touch of burn-out at the end of last year (and not in the good arcade racer kinda way) I took a brief sabbatical away from writing for a little while. There were other factors that don’t really bear going into right now, but I definitely needed a break. And so I stepped back for a good five weeks or so.

I’ve been back at it for a few months now, but it’s definitely feeling a lot fresher. Part of that is because I’m making the vast majority of my income elsewhere at the moment, and the alleviation of that ‘oh god I need to write more to pay my bills’ stress is really freeing me up to only take on the work I want to. Or, more to the point: to only push and pitch the work I want to. It is, as far as I’m concerned, still ‘my career’ (but hey, don’t tell my current boss, okay?), but it’s amazing to feel like it’s a hobby once again.

Another big part of that has come from simply experimenting with the way I write. Mostly, this has happened in my new column for GameSetWatch, Quiz Me Qwik. The first time around, while writing interviews under the GameSetInterview banner, I still wrote everything much like I used to here, back when it was an “interview-blog” (as GSW editor Simon Carless once dubbed it). Really, it wasn’t any different to the tone I use/used to write Gamasutra pieces: straight to the point, formalised. Some might say staid – that might be appropriate, but I don’t necessarily see that as a negative, for a news site, anyway.

It has a time and a place, let’s say that. There’s a time when it’s appropriate to write formally, and there’s a time when it’s appropriate to be more informal, and there’s even a time when it’s appropriate to experiment with form and language.

That seems like a pretty simple revelation, but it’s really only something that’s been a factor in what I’ve been doing over the past few months. Being asked by Simon to make the column less…hmmm…stolid has opened up a lot of options. I’ve used the chance to rethink the way I’m approaching writing; taking chances, and worrying less about the way people might react to the outcome.

Because, oddly, that’s something that’s concerned me in the past. That’s why I’ve tended to shy away from “bloggy” Little Mathletics entries like this, and why I’ve also tended to shy away from first person writing at all for other outlets. To a degree, I’ve been concerned that I didn’t want my work associated with the negative connotations of blogging, and the amateurish self-aggrandising writing that I’ve experienced in (far too many) street press articles.

But Quiz Me Qwik is changing that. Check out the first four entries via the link above, for example. The first is pretty formally written – and was actually edited by Simon to be less so. The second actually has a joke. The third uses singular pronouns no less than twice. And the fourth? Well, I’ll let Little Mathletics readers in on a secret: I made the whole damn thing up, and based it all on person experience. That is, the situations referenced are real, but the interview is a complete fabrication. What an incredible breath of fresh air, as a writer.

From there, five through eight talk use my own experiences as a base for the introductions: they’re fun to write, and simple, and I think that comes across. They might even be funny, but I’m not going to comment on that.

The latest one, number nine, uses the intro to talk about the time I “kissed Julia Mildenhall once on the mouth; no tongue” when I was 12. I’ve never done that kind of writing before, and it’s allowing me to see that it’s possible write from experience and put across opinions - other than those presented as a reviewer – without coming across as an ignorant, self-important twat. Which is nice.

And so I’m actually feeling comfortable writing like this. It occurs to me that I didn’t even need to apologise for the fact that I’ve dipped into introspection here. And what’s more, there have been things that I’ve written – and more things in the works – that experiment with style in a way that I haven’t before. Writing never stopped being exciting for me, but it’s practically thrilling at the moment. That’s a really great feeling, and I hope that’s going to come across in what I write from here on in.

As for Little Mathletics, well, who knows? It’s a site that’s gone through a lot of different changes over time, and has been a lot of different things; some of which have been far, far more successful than others. For now, let’s just see if I can keep up the updating for a little while, eh?