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Weekly column experiment
Mar. 8th, 2010 02:10 pmI'm two weeks in to a writing experiment, posting a long opinion piece about games every Monday to the Gameshelf. I'm not limiting myself to Mondays only, but the rule is that there has to be something there on Monday no matter what. The columns I've written so far are Farewell to Megaton and Shelf Space, intended to be my first couple of steps in a series of columns about the state of online gaming (and my own relationship with it). I don't necessarily intend to keep writing about online games week after week, and might switch to some other topic for a change of pace before I've said all I intend to say about that.
So far I'm not super happy with my output. It's not like the TF2 column, which really wanted to be written and punched its way out of me. I know that if my deadline wasn't there, I'd have said this isn't going anywhere in both cases, and abandoned them. Instead, I spent hours and hours on each, working and refining until I finally ended up with a structure that had approximately one focus and seemed to stand up by itself.
More than anything, the experience so far reminds of one of the most painful things of working as an editor for The Maine Campus, the student paper that defined my life in the middle 1990s. One of the rules for being an editor was writing an opinion piece on a regular schedule, weekly or biweekly. As a group, we'd occasionally write a real goodie, but usually we wrote vapid stinkers just to take up the column-inches. Sometimes we openly apologized within the column itself for having nothing to say that week. But, you know: deadlines. Hope you're enjoying your lunch, anyway!
I guess I'll see how I feel after a month of this.
So far I'm not super happy with my output. It's not like the TF2 column, which really wanted to be written and punched its way out of me. I know that if my deadline wasn't there, I'd have said this isn't going anywhere in both cases, and abandoned them. Instead, I spent hours and hours on each, working and refining until I finally ended up with a structure that had approximately one focus and seemed to stand up by itself.
More than anything, the experience so far reminds of one of the most painful things of working as an editor for The Maine Campus, the student paper that defined my life in the middle 1990s. One of the rules for being an editor was writing an opinion piece on a regular schedule, weekly or biweekly. As a group, we'd occasionally write a real goodie, but usually we wrote vapid stinkers just to take up the column-inches. Sometimes we openly apologized within the column itself for having nothing to say that week. But, you know: deadlines. Hope you're enjoying your lunch, anyway!
I guess I'll see how I feel after a month of this.