-Vineet Raj Kapoor
I’ve been doing it wrong. This whole time.
Mario Maker is a Mario game where you can create custom Mario levels. You can also play levels created by others. A guilty pleasure of mine is watching top players beat levels made by other creators. After seeing a number of them, I started to learn about game design. There’s a reason one level is good or bad the same way there’s a reason some movies are good or bad. Structure.
Great Mario Maker levels start out simple. They introduce a new concept in a simple way. They then build upon the concept increasing in difficulty. After a checkpoint, they introduce another new concept and build upon that concept, while increasing difficulty. After a second checkpoint, both concepts are combined for the final challenge. They fit together in a fun, unique way. This is basic; This is predictable.
I enjoy reading my old essays, but they aren’t predictable enough. My essays should fit this structure to be massively consumable. My essays are more an exploration of how I think and why I think what I do. I’m an exploratory writer. I’m the type of person who when halfway through writing a fictional short story, doesn’t know how it’s going to end. And it’s my fictional story.
This could potentially work for short essays. But it’s scattered. I personally find my scattered random thoughts interesting… but it’s because they’re my thoughts. There’s a reason Gladwell is a successful non-fiction writer. Yes, most of his books could be blog posts. But they’re repetitive and people love repetition. People can talk about them at cocktail parties after only reading the first few chapters. Say a theory, repeat it, give example after example. It makes writing more predictable.
The best orators all had repetition in their speech. It was MLK day when I wrote this. MLK would constantly repeat himself in the same cadence. No one talks like that. Imagine talking like MLK in conversation with a friend or to a stranger at a happy hour. It’d be super weird! Even those heavily maligned by their critics like Trump, admit Trump is a master orator who repeats key phrases over and over.
This is unnatural for me. I don’t like to repeat myself. I like chaos. This is a bias I struggle against.
Doing things for the masses isn’t always optimal. But if you’re creating content that you want people to consume, it behooves you to learn what people want to consume. If you run a restaurant, you can’t make food that only you want to eat. The same way a SaaS company has to make software that their customers will pay for. Content is meant to be shared. Content is meant to outlive us. Even internal content should be sticky. If this is the case, it’s time to change my pattern.
All that said… part of me thinks changing my writing style may destroy my voice. We’ll see.