So one of the other things I’m avoiding is re-reading previous entries or hitting the delete key. Which means on occasion I’ll repeat myself. I’m avoiding re-reading previous entries or hitting delete, you see. THAT WAS A ‘CLASSIC’ TRIFORCE-STYLE JOKE.
I didn’t write much after Monica for lots of reasons. Because I’m lazy, sure, because I was sick of crushing deadlines and the aching fatigue / boredom that came after beating one. Because I thought it was the best thing I’d written and I couldn’t imagine doing that again.
The same was true on a smaller scale with the blog. I (think I) said yesterday that I’m my own biggest fan and harshest critic. This is true; I used to re-read my own published work over and over again and I derived so much satisfaction from that. I still do, only now it’s about design docs, Powerpoints or particularly perfect emails. Awful, right? In at least two ways. The harshest-critic part is equally true. When I’ve written something I know is poor it disgusts me so much that I can’t look at it and now we’re back to reasons why I stopped blogging.
So one of the other things I’m avoiding is re-reading previous entries or hitting the delete key. Which means on occasion I’ll ETC YOU KNOW WHERE I’M GOING WITH THIS.
Another reason I’m back is because of Edge.
I don’t know if you’ve seen Edge recently but it has had a ‘redesign’. That’s often magazine publisher code for a relaunch to fight falling reader numbers. For Edge, whose readership never seems to vary much from 28k, it’s more about ensuring it’s still fresh, relevant and surprising. I don’t read much videogame journalism these days for fairly obvious / tedious reasons. I haven’t read all of the new issue of Edge yet, either, but I can tell you this much: the new design is nothing like the old one and it is great. It plays to the strengths of a magazine, like a weighty fuck-you to websites. It is proud of being tangible.
As part of their relaunch Edge published 150 ‘classic’ reviews on their website. Because I was chief emo adolescent / hyperbole vehicle / troll of the Edge team during the PS2 / Xbox / Gamecube era, several of these stand-out reviews were mine. I remember them as being fun, overwritten, punchy. I remember being proud of them. I was not so proud of them when I reread them. I have not been back to the site since.
But as big a shock as it was to discover younger Ste was not The Greatest Writer Of His Generation (and mortifying to realise everyone I worked with must have recognised this at the time) it was also helpful. Before reading my work on Edge Online I’d always assumed I was exactly the same writer I was ten years ago. Now, thanks to my own sense of (initially unnerving) disgust, I know better. I know I’m better — maybe not by much, but enough to make persistence worthwhile.
Armed with that knowledge I revisited Monica over the weekend. It is still, structurally speaking, the smartest thing I have ever written (actually, I noticed structural niceness in those old Edge reviews too, obfuscated by the words of a young writer trying too hard). Much of the dialogue is paraphrased from real online conversations I had at the time so judging it against my other writing is hard; but it is certainly imperfect, I can recognise a clumsier voice in there, and excising those words in favour of better ones is cathartic. To what end? Maybe just catharsis, honestly. We will see. I always found editing easier than writing.
Incidentally, on that subject, I wrote the script (and did almost nothing else) for the upcoming 3DS version of Crush. Had to fit all the dialogue inside a pre-set template, visiting already mapped locations. It wasn’t really writing, more like Sudoku, but fun in itself. The game is brilliant and you should all buy it. Particularly if you have a 3DS.