Posts Tagged ‘cockbite’

I have a number of friends who are starting up blogs[1], and I’ve been giving the same advice over and over. So instead of repeating myself, I decided to make a post I can just point to. I talked about this when talking about my blogging goals for the year, but here’s something more concrete.

Less is Metal

I’ve said before that “500 words is the new black.” This is not just a cute idea. Start with short posts. It’ll get you used to blogging regularly — learn to climb hills and lesser mountains before you take on the Everest that’s a 3000 word post.

One Topic Per Post

You might have a dozen ideas that are related, but if you put them into one post, you’re giving folks commenting too many things to respond to. That way lies disjointed comment threads and people who feel too overwhelmed to comment. (I call this tl;dc — too long, didn’t comment.) Stick to one core point, and maybe three or four supporting points.

The side effect of this is that when you get to doing that, breaking that rule because a noteable moment.

Headers are your Friends

If you ignore the “three or four supporting points” bit, like I’m doing today, use headers. I still make sure there’s one core point for the supporting bits I’m writing, but then it becomes my job to easily segmented them. A trick I’ve learned by watching Chuck Wendig blog[2] about things like  yelling at writers’ bullshit.

Post Often

Man, I cannot say this loud enough. Blogging often makes you a better article writer. This is something Rob Donoghue once mentioned, and lately I’ve been feeling it as well. I submitted a proposal for the upcoming Cortex Plus Hacker’s Guide, and was able to turn around a couple thousand words pretty damned quickly–something two years ago I would have spent too much time overthinking before sitting down to write.

And every post you do gives people reason to read the post before. Blogging is like playing the supplement treadmill game. New posts gain new readers, some of whom will read your older stuff.

Fuck Up Aggressively

It’s okay to be wrong about stuff. Post anyway. Do not treat yourself like a guru on top of a mountain. You’re among people. You have commentors that’ll call you on your shit. You’ll change your mind as you get new data and perspectives. So don’t let the fear of being wrong get in the way.

As I said on Twitter a couple months back, “Failure is metal. Not failing due to paralysis is not metal.” Same applies here.

Focus on Topics

I suggest everyone starting out focus on two or three overall topics for three months, and see what ends up sticking — both with what your new readers like and (more importantly, to be honest) what you like writing about. I started with “RPG design talk,” “Social Media thoughts,” and “Podcasting.” I don’t talk about podcasting much anymore, and have added talking about editing, critiques of games as products and as text, and being a new creative professional in general (like this post).

I also have to occasional humorous post, another trick I learned from Chuck. But that’s a whole ‘nother blog post about brainhacking. :)

Edit After Publishing

So you’re done writing your post. Awesome. And you want to give it a once-over…for the second or third time.

Stop. Click “Publish.” Look at it on your site and not in the editor.

Then go back and revise. This will get you in the habit of two things:

1. Knowing how your posts will look to others while you’re writing it in the editor
2. Becoming comfortable with posting something flawed.

These are blog posts, not professional articles. I only ask people to read articles prior to publishing these days if either it needs a subject-matter expert to check my facts or it’s a post that might be cockbitish to publish.

Above All, Experiment

Try new things. See what you like. If my advice doesn’t work for it, tell it to fuck the hell off.

Invite Comments

Be welcoming. Get people to engage with you. That’ll help you be a more awesome writer, blogger, overall human being. It also helps get word of your blog out, as more people talk about it.

Speaking of…

What Am I Missing?

I know a lot of bloggers. Old hats, tell me what advice you have for newbies!

Happy bloging[3], friends.

- Ryan

[1] Which I won’t be linking to until that’ve got a few posts and want more exposure.

[2] Follow the Almighty Penmonkey.

[3] “Bloging”? “Blogging”? “Bloggggggggggggginating”?

Eddy Webb, John Wick and I were on The Walking Eye podcast for one of their round table discussions. Kevin Weiser of said show wanted to talk with us about “drifting the rules of role-playing games.” From their site:

Kevin sits down with Ryan Macklin, John Wick, and Eddy Webb to discuss the pros and cons of drifting the rules in RPG’s. It’s a good discussion, and fair warning, the last 10 minutes or so are actually a tangent on the realities of being an internet microcelebrity, and how people act vastly differently to said celebrities when they meet them in person rather than how they talk about them on internet forums. Still  a pretty interesting conversation, but if you’re here just to hear about drifting, you might wanna skip the last 10 minutes.

The episode clocks in at just over an hour. It was really fun to do, and to hear Eddy, John & I mostly agree but use very different language and experiences to back it up was pretty fascinating. The last bit, which started with Kevin making a joke about how he grabbed the of the most hated people in RPG land for this round table led to a bit of venting about Internet bullshit.[1]

Anyway, worth giving a listen. And to restate a point I state twice in the episode: If you do that “you can drift X, but they you’re not really playing X,” you’re a fucking judgmental cockbite. Even if you’re the designer saying it. (Right or wrong, you’re a cockbite.)

Edit: Judd Karlman has a great fucking response on his bloggy blog. And the comments are on fucking fire, between folks like Rob Donoghue, Fred Hicks, Daniel Perez, Judd & myself.

- Ryan

[1] Which, while we recorded the episode last December, is awkwardly timely today. Or maybe it’s always that way.

When I read advice text — player or GM advice in RPGs, blog post with advice, lectures, etc. — one thing routinely happens that the advice tells you to “be” something and doesn’t back up enough of what that means. To illustrate, I’m going to use Graham Walmsley’s Play Unsafe.

Disclaimer:

• Yeah, three years ago I was a rabid cockbite about this book. File that under “actions I regret.”
• His recent works, A Taste for Murder and the just-released Cthulhu Dark (which is free), are brilliant and worth checking out.
• If you’ve absorbed improv jargon and technique by being around story gamers, it’s a good collection of thoughts.

The Issue: “Be” Advice

From page 6 of Play Unsafe, Graham talks about “being average”:

Graham is telling you good advice here. However, as with pretty much every form of “be” advice, he’s not telling you how to do it. This creates one of two situations:

• People who are clued in enough to understand how to do what’s being talked about nod in agreement, and proclaim this to be good advice.
• People who aren’t clued in enough to understand how to do what’s being talked about experience frustration at the book for being unclear or shame with themselves for not getting what is so obvious to the writer.

The core of that is whether or not the reader has the skill you’re talking about — and when you talk about “be” advice, you’re saying “employ this skill.” The author almost always has that skill, and hopefully has it well, so this tends to be natural. Paul Tevis did this quite a bit in drafts of A Penny for my Thoughts, which I’ll talk about in a moment.

Why “Be” Advice is Useful

I’m not saying this form of advice is a crime.[1] There are two places where “be” advice is really useful: when you’re reminding people who already have the skill, and when you’re giving permission to experiment.

We did some of this in Penny:

What this ends up doing is reminding people that being specific is good, and gives permission to do that for those who feel like they need it. Now, folks like me and many of my readers likely don’t need the permission (though the reminder is still handy), but we’re writing to a larger audience.

And even if we today don’t need permission, I recall a time a few years ago when reading something like this would have felt like I had that permission to experiment with a technique. Permission is about table social contract, after all. But that’s probably a bigger topic. Just trust me; it exists and is impacted with such advice text.

How to Make This Better: “Do”

Look at any time you’re telling someone to “be” something. (Especially the dreaded “be creative.” Man, do I want to punch that advice in the face whenever I encounter it.) Ask yourself the following:

• Are you happy talking only to people who possess the skill you’re talking about? If so, don’t change anything. (This, by the way, is not a passive-aggressive question. A lot of one-page or super-short RPGs assume they’re talking to at least one person who possesses skills. Graham’s Cthulhu Dark says “roleplay your fear,” and it doesn’t need to say more because of its intent and target audience.)
• Do you want to give your reader the tools to develop this skill? If so, read on.

For each point, come up with three simple actions — either specific actions or examples of the “do” in action — that back up this “be” advice. If you can’t do that, you might not actually understand what you’re talking about enough to write on it. Enough to do it intuitively, yes, but not enough to convey that to another human being. Especially via text.

Once you have three, work those into your text. Editing will reveal if you have one (or even two) “do” elements too many, or if you need to add one. But start with those three things. In the case of Penny’s Be Specific above, we have one in example-form. In Be Brief, there’s none. I’d probably add something today like “Keep it under twelve words,” but Paul might disagree.[2]

Important: Examples of not employing the advice aren’t “do,” because it doesn’t give the reader a tool to work with, nothing to use to learn a skill. It can be good supporting text, though don’t lead with that.[3]

Maybe there’s a degree to which the complexity of the skill needs more or less “do” support. Maybe Be Brief in Penny doesn’t need anything, and Be Specific needs only one thing.[4] Play Unsafe’s Be Average, though, is in my mind far more complex, enough to where maybe even three “dos” aren’t enough. But that’s what the revision process is for. Start with three.

Exercise for the reader: Can you come up with three actionable items for “Be Average”? Share them in the comments!

A Litmus Test on “Be” Advice

Does it seem hard to come up with “do” advice for something you’re writing “be” advice for? Then that means your “be” advice needs “do” advice to back it up. If it’s hard for you to grasp some elements, imagine how hard it is for someone without that skill.

“Be” conveys why something is important and reminds people to do it.

“Do” tells people who have yet to master a skill how to do it.

Be a great instructor. Do both.

- Ryan

[1] And not just because I’m trying to avoid hyperbole in written form.

[2] For all I know, we actually discussed that back then. It wouldn’t surprise me.

[3] Leading with counters and don’ts will be a future critique. Man alive, it will be.

[4] Yes, this is also critiquing Penny, to a degree. That’ll get a couple of its own posts later.

Say you’re going to post something up on the internet — a tweet or FaceBook status, a video, a blog post, whatever. Here’s something key to keep in mind when dealing with people checking that out: you don’t actually own your message.

Simple statement, complex idea. To break it down some, hopefully, we’re dealing in an age of rampant asynchronous communication and content-on-demand. (To be fair, synchronous communication over long distances is by and large a relatively new concept to humankind, and we’re still struggling with institutions that have business models set up around content-on-scheduled-broadcast. So, these are partly societal growing pains. At least, I utterly hope it’s just that.)

Parenthetical disgression aside, the point is that because we’re talking about content that is consumed at the viewer’s choosing and lacking an immediate feedback cycle, we’re actually kinda fucked as content creators. Here’s why: we have no idea what mental state our reader/viewer/listener is in.

One, we have no control over the immediate past. Living in a constant fire hose of subscription-centric information, with Twitter, Facebook, RSS feeds, all that, whoever reads what you’ve written will do so with the last thing their read still imprinted on their mind. Here’s an example:

• Jeff is reading this very blog post on his iPad’s RSS reader while waiting for food delivery. He’s a bit grouchy from being hungry. Right before that, he got an email from his boss who is pissed off because their client is pissed off and it’s trickling down to Jeff. So, Jeff’s in a crap mood and that’s coloring how he’s reading this post.
• Will is reading this in the morning, after waking up all natural-like on his day off. He’s got his iPad RSS reader and reading in the bathroom, right after checking his email. He got a sweet love-letter from his girlfriend that he read a few minutes prior, so he’s going into everything super-charitibly.

Those are extreme examples, but even positive or negative tweets you read prior to a new, unrelated one will color your read of that tweet.

Two, we have no reasonable expectations for when our readers will end up reading this. This gets into talks about circadian rhythm and all that jazz, but the time of day we read something does have a great impact on how we read things. (That said, this feels like utter common sense that someone’s done an actual study on. So if anyone knows of one, please comment with a link? Thanks!)

Three, in an age of retweets and likes and other social media propogators, you may well be impacted by someone’s commentary before reading what they’re talking about, thus coloring any follower’s perception of that blog. Now, people will still form their own opinions, but coloring is pretty influencial.

• Jeff sees a tweet to this post with the hashtag #smartpeopletalking, and clicks on the link. His viewing is likely now colored with a sense that he’ll get something out of it. Maybe I’ll fulfill that expectation, maybe disappoint, but regardless that’s what he’s coming in with.
• Will sees a tweet to this post with the comment “Macklin’s got it wrong again, that fuck.” He’s probably viewing this now with hostility or at least negative interest. So, hey, I have a reader that has a very differently-colored agenda with my post.

(That said, the latter can also work to your advantage. If you hear that someone that routinely hates things you like rants against something, you’ll probably go in with a more open mind thanks to the magic of association. Couple years back, used to be that RPG Pundit fulfilled this role for fans of indie games, which is why people sent him review copies. Negative reviews sell games.[1])

Four, people have long-term baggage and innocuous elements of a post will set people off in random directions, positive and negative. For instance, when I see someone add a smilie to charged language, like:

You’re wrong :)

…I get extra-pissed off at the passive-aggressiveness of it. Now, person might be trying to inject levity, but man instead I have years of interactions where that’s been used in order to get away with being a cockbite. So, I can’t read that uncharged. Similarly, I had a friend recently tell me about how he sees the footnotes[2] that Paul Tevis, Rob Donoghue and I do as being “cliquish.” I wanted to say, rather dismissively, “eh, that’s just your baggage,” but then I realized he had a point — and one of the reasons I’m making this post. I don’t control his reaction to using footnotes, or anyone else’s. And I have to remember that.

Granted, that doesn’t mean I’m going to sterilize my blog. If I did, I wouldn’t have a giant cockbite in my tag cloud. But I have to understand the cost of using these techniques of information presentation, if I’m going to be effective.

Now, not all of these problems are new (nor is this list exhaustive), but the ways in which we consume media today worsen their effects. And they ways in which we can be very publicly reactionary[3], which then further worsens it. While I like to add “and here’s stuff to do” to these sorts of ideas, I don’t have one right now. “Be mindful” is crap advice, but it’s all I have at the moment. Be mindful as a content creator and as a content consumer.

Because, again, you don’t own the moment your post will be read. You don’t own the headspace of your reader. And as much as you wish you did, you don’t own your message…because you don’t have control over the messenger: the Internet.

- Ryan

[1] And since negative reviews sell games, I never negatively review. If I hate something that much, the worst thing I can do for it is to give it no traffic.

[2] Hi!

[3] Which, for personal reasons, has been a touch harder for me to put a lid on lately.

A couple months ago, I told a dear friend the following. She said she has it on a post-it note on her wall now. So I thought maybe someone else in blogland might make use of it.

Opportunities do not stop coming if you continue walking forward. No matter how slowly, forward is still forward.

It took me a few years to learn this. When I started out, I felt like I had to say yes to every opportunity that came up…which wasn’t many or often. A slow trickle. And really, I had little reason then to say no to something — Paul Tevis wanted me to edit his book, awesome. Fred Hicks wanted to work with me on Don’t Lose Your Mind, sweet. Jenn Brozek wanted me to write short stories for her, fuck yeah. These all trickled in, and I kept saying yes.

Then, as I started to become known as this dude what makes your words pretty[1], I started getting more in demand. And I was suddenly in a situation where I was afraid to say no, because I believed in the back of my mind that saying no would be like dispelling this amazing thing happening to me. One “no” and no one else would ever offer a sweet gig to me again.

Yeah, I know, it sounds stupid. That’s why I say “back of my mind.” So I pushed myself a bit too much during the last few months of Dresden and burned out a bit. People kept approaching me, but then I started to say no. (I’ve also started to say “maybe, but I can’t right now,” which is slightly different.) I was afraid still, yes, but I had to for my own sake and for the sake of my would-be clients, you know?[2]

I was prepared at this point for opportunities to cease. Turns out that I was full of shit in the back of my brain, because opportunities keep coming. The reason they keep coming is because I keep walking forward — sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly — but I keep making progress in this thing I’m doing in my life. And now that I’ve come this far[3], I now trust that saying no to opportunities will not screw me over for ever and ever. Intellectually, I could understand this from day 1, but now I trust that. And that means I can say no when I need to. (It helps that I avoid being a cockbite in saying no.)

So, when I see others struggling to try to make a sudden wave of opportunities all work, I want to sit them down and talk about how they should focus on fewer and to make those they take on badass, rather than stretch themselves too thin because they haven’t yet learned how to say no. And I want to help convey in them how to keep self-confidence after saying no that there is still a bright future ahead.

Opportunities do not stop coming if you continue walking forward. No matter how slowly, forward is still forward.

A corollary: taking on too many opportunities and burning out or failing on them is not walking forward, but backward. It’s a line in yourself that you probably won’t really learn until you hit it and screw up, so it’s hard to say where it is in each person. But be mindful, yo.

- Ryan

[1] Clearly, I could use such a dude right there.

[2] Another hard-learned lesson I still struggle with.

[3] Which with only a few years under my belt, frankly, isn’t that far.