Card games are great!
……
Been thinking about these film and game reviews I’ve been doing here intermittently over the previous months. My usual process when reviewing something would be to take notes for days, weeks, months, to jot down everything that came into my head, explore the thoughts, sometimes make sure I’d covered the main bases - so for a film had I made notes about the look, the themes, the script, the performances, the score? For a videogame what did I think about the mechanics, the visuals, the audio design? I’d write about what I thought the piece was trying to get across, whether it was successful, what other works it reminded me of. Where it fitted in the genre, the landscape.
That’d be the sort of foundations to lay if I was struggling, make sure I had notes on those major points, and I could pretty much build upwards and then lash together the structure of a review from those columns. But more regularly the notes would naturally begin to turn into more coherent writing, into a through-line, and I’d find myself organically working through a first draft.
Writing can be engineering, assembly, but it can be looser art as well - even for prosaic stuff like criticism, review writing. You can plan a plot, lay foundations, build your central pillars, attach floors between them, in an organised, regimented fashion - or you can pull random Lego blocks from your mind and start building and see where your internal desires take you. My process tends to be some combination of the two.
However it happened, though, I’d end up with a first draft. And I’d be full of enthusiasm and energy at this point, feeling like I was making great points, lost in the discovery of the thing.
Then I’d get up the next day (or two weeks later, often as not) and read back what I’d put, and despise every word. What felt so exciting in my head would never have come across on the page. It’d be masked by confusing sentence structure, meandering asides; I’d start a section making one point, and end making another. The bit that sounded so cool in my head would, it’d turn out, be subconsciously stolen from a better writer. I’d have got on my high horse about some failure of the filmmaker or game designer, but with hindsight I’d see I’d mistaken their intention, and my whole argument was invalid. I’d have mixed metaphors. Misused semicolons. Sentences would fizzle into nothing.
So then: despondency, insecurity, certainty of lack of talent.
But I’d try a second draft. And bits would get fixed, but other bits would break. I’d get enthused about something brand new and go off on a thousand-word tangent, and then have to decide whether to ditch the original thrust, or pare down the tangent and find a way to integrate it into the whole. I’d clip the overgrown mixed metaphors, and then build brand new ones.
So it would go, back and forth, wrestling with some thing that was always utterly broken, inherently disappointing, that was never going to work .I’d sit staring at the screen wondering what the hell ever convinced me I had any ability to write. I’d redraft, rewrite, tidy and fix and glue. I’d wonder if whatever was initially living and beating in those first notes had been killed and dessicated and stuffed in the editing, and now shuffled like a corpse. I’d think about abandoning the whole piece, and sometimes actually would.
But often, after a month, a few weeks, a few days, depending how much I was working, how much I was drinking, how good my self-esteem, a finished article would begin to take shape. I’d sense a rhythm that wasn’t there before, a cohesion and … I guess the sense of a gestalt. Something that was not now disparate parts but a living whole. Something that breathed as one. And that would be great, but there’d still be all the polishing. Reading it through repeatedly, working on the musicality, the flow, looking on the synonym section of Dictionary.com, trimming every ounce of fat. Making it ornate and also making it not a word too long. Strong, confident, elegant. This is often the difference between something that’s acceptable and something that shines, and it’s a part of the process I really enjoy. Stick on ambient music, fade out the wider world, get lost in the zone.
And only when all this was done would I send it off or put it up on some blog or other, would I let it be seen.
...Which is why this daily blogging thing is such a departure for me. The process for the reviews and articles on here has been: Oh fuck I’ve got two hours before I go to work, quick, write down anything I can think of, smash out some kind of structure, Christ none of it works, what’s my point here? Uhhh find a point. That’ll do. Tape it together, tear that wobbly bit off, hit publish, done.
And, to be honest, it’s been great. Like, yes, all /this/ I’m writing here is half notes, half mad first-draft. It’s coming straight from my head onto the page and that’s how it stays. But that’s great. It’s not the meticulous full process, but I know I can do that. My problem was doing it more than a few times every six months. I was trapped by the perfectionism, terrified of anyone seeing through the facade.
Yet every day of this blog is through the facade. Some days a miracle happens. But mostly it’s messy and ragged and unfinished.
And what’s the consequence of that?
Nothing. Not a thing. I just get to try loads of pieces, get to develop willpower and dedication, throw out sketches faster than ever before. And I get to work on rediscovering the joy of writing - the joy beneath the finishing, the feedback, the polish, the joy that has nothing to do what other people think, the joy that I had completely lost.
So that’s lovely. I mean, I can’t help get frustrated the days when it doesn’t come together, which I suppose is human nature. And it’s a pain when it’s 2am and I can tell I could write the shit out of a paragraph if I could leave it for an hour and rest and come back, and instead I’ve got to grind out some garbled nonsense and then go to bed disappointed.
Been thinking about these film and game reviews I’ve been doing here intermittently over the previous months. My usual process when reviewing something would be to take notes for days, weeks, months, to jot down everything that came into my head, explore the thoughts, sometimes make sure I’d covered the main bases - so for a film had I made notes about the look, the themes, the script, the performances, the score? For a videogame what did I think about the mechanics, the visuals, the audio design? I’d write about what I thought the piece was trying to get across, whether it was successful, what other works it reminded me of. Where it fitted in the genre, the landscape.
That’d be the sort of foundations to lay if I was struggling, make sure I had notes on those major points, and I could pretty much build upwards and then lash together the structure of a review from those columns. But more regularly the notes would naturally begin to turn into more coherent writing, into a through-line, and I’d find myself organically working through a first draft.
Writing can be engineering, assembly, but it can be looser art as well - even for prosaic stuff like criticism, review writing. You can plan a plot, lay foundations, build your central pillars, attach floors between them, in an organised, regimented fashion - or you can pull random Lego blocks from your mind and start building and see where your internal desires take you. My process tends to be some combination of the two.
However it happened, though, I’d end up with a first draft. And I’d be full of enthusiasm and energy at this point, feeling like I was making great points, lost in the discovery of the thing.
Then I’d get up the next day (or two weeks later, often as not) and read back what I’d put, and despise every word. What felt so exciting in my head would never have come across on the page. It’d be masked by confusing sentence structure, meandering asides; I’d start a section making one point, and end making another. The bit that sounded so cool in my head would, it’d turn out, be subconsciously stolen from a better writer. I’d have got on my high horse about some failure of the filmmaker or game designer, but with hindsight I’d see I’d mistaken their intention, and my whole argument was invalid. I’d have mixed metaphors. Misused semicolons. Sentences would fizzle into nothing.
So then: despondency, insecurity, certainty of lack of talent.
But I’d try a second draft. And bits would get fixed, but other bits would break. I’d get enthused about something brand new and go off on a thousand-word tangent, and then have to decide whether to ditch the original thrust, or pare down the tangent and find a way to integrate it into the whole. I’d clip the overgrown mixed metaphors, and then build brand new ones.
So it would go, back and forth, wrestling with some thing that was always utterly broken, inherently disappointing, that was never going to work .I’d sit staring at the screen wondering what the hell ever convinced me I had any ability to write. I’d redraft, rewrite, tidy and fix and glue. I’d wonder if whatever was initially living and beating in those first notes had been killed and dessicated and stuffed in the editing, and now shuffled like a corpse. I’d think about abandoning the whole piece, and sometimes actually would.
But often, after a month, a few weeks, a few days, depending how much I was working, how much I was drinking, how good my self-esteem, a finished article would begin to take shape. I’d sense a rhythm that wasn’t there before, a cohesion and … I guess the sense of a gestalt. Something that was not now disparate parts but a living whole. Something that breathed as one. And that would be great, but there’d still be all the polishing. Reading it through repeatedly, working on the musicality, the flow, looking on the synonym section of Dictionary.com, trimming every ounce of fat. Making it ornate and also making it not a word too long. Strong, confident, elegant. This is often the difference between something that’s acceptable and something that shines, and it’s a part of the process I really enjoy. Stick on ambient music, fade out the wider world, get lost in the zone.
And only when all this was done would I send it off or put it up on some blog or other, would I let it be seen.
...Which is why this daily blogging thing is such a departure for me. The process for the reviews and articles on here has been: Oh fuck I’ve got two hours before I go to work, quick, write down anything I can think of, smash out some kind of structure, Christ none of it works, what’s my point here? Uhhh find a point. That’ll do. Tape it together, tear that wobbly bit off, hit publish, done.
And, to be honest, it’s been great. Like, yes, all /this/ I’m writing here is half notes, half mad first-draft. It’s coming straight from my head onto the page and that’s how it stays. But that’s great. It’s not the meticulous full process, but I know I can do that. My problem was doing it more than a few times every six months. I was trapped by the perfectionism, terrified of anyone seeing through the facade.
Yet every day of this blog is through the facade. Some days a miracle happens. But mostly it’s messy and ragged and unfinished.
And what’s the consequence of that?
Nothing. Not a thing. I just get to try loads of pieces, get to develop willpower and dedication, throw out sketches faster than ever before. And I get to work on rediscovering the joy of writing - the joy beneath the finishing, the feedback, the polish, the joy that has nothing to do what other people think, the joy that I had completely lost.
So that’s lovely. I mean, I can’t help get frustrated the days when it doesn’t come together, which I suppose is human nature. And it’s a pain when it’s 2am and I can tell I could write the shit out of a paragraph if I could leave it for an hour and rest and come back, and instead I’ve got to grind out some garbled nonsense and then go to bed disappointed.
But, hey, it’s all experience. And it’s a lot of fun.
And now it’s 2am and I’m done with /this/ garbled nonsense, and ready again for bed. Ta ra x
