Blog

Will Brinkman

There’s a lot of new blood rushing to create content for the World of Warcraft TCG. For those with no formal writing background or those would like to clean up their work, I’m going to spend the next 3 blog entries (every-other week) to assist those in understanding how one should go about writing an article, as well as touch on a few different forms of media for those of you in the podcasting realm.

The drive to write originates for one reason or another. While you could write just to express yourself, I’ll make the assumption that you want to share your World of Warcraft TCG information with the world and not make some LiveJournal or Facebook E/N update. If your goal is to eventually publish this work for the public to read, these are the questions you’ll need to ask yourself before you even hit the keyboard.

What do you want to write?

You can break down most writing into the three forms of essays: persuasive, expository, and narrative. You can go a level below that and angle it for reporting like “human interest story,” but most writing starts there. There’s a fair amount of bleed in our hobby in terms of content across those three forms; for example, a tournament report (narrative) will usually have a section for the deck (expository). If you're SCM, maybe your expository deck feature is actually a persuasive feature in disguise! ;) When I went to WoWTCG player Glenn Jones (a content manager as well) with the question as to how to best communicate these lines, he explained that he likes to think of articles as a position in a Venn diagram than a single type. It's not about labeling your feature, but deciding where it lies across all three categories. It’s a great explanation.  How to best hedge those lines is something you’ll learn over time.

Who’s reading this thing?

Since you want to share your offerings with the world, think about who your audience is. It’s foolhardy to believe that you can write something that will appeal to the entirety of the World of Warcraft TCG community.  For example, if you’re writing for new players, you can’t use terms acronyms like AoE or terms like card advantage without explaining them. If you’re writing for established players, you wouldn’t spend time explaining a “rush” strategy. While you don’t have to completely tailor your piece to a specific group, be aware that you’d rather connect deeply with 10% of the community than have 30% of the community read it and take a pass on your future work.

Is it worth sharing?

I want to emphasize that your motivation could be the exercise of writing itself. In that case, go wild. If your desire to write is to either start a conversation with the reader or add to an existing one, you should really ask yourself if the piece is necessary. If you follow the NBA, which you should because it’s the best sport, an example of this is the Carmelo Anthony trade. If you don’t follow the NBA, I’ll explain:

Carmelo wanted to leave Denver, but couldn’t outright say it because of potential fines from the league. Any time a reporter asked him about it, they were quickly dismissed in the typical “I’m just here to play and focus on today’s game.” It’s not as if he really needed to say anything; refusing to sign a contract extension with the Nuggets that offered him the maximum amount of money possible was message enough. Since there really wasn’t any public information, reporters relied on the same rumors and second-hand information. For two or three weeks, every website basically read the same. NBA color commentators across every network had the same conversation. Every. Single. Day. Nobody was saying anything of value because everybody knew he’d go to one of two teams and nobody would know which one it was until the trade actually happened.

If it’s already been said and said well, think of something else to say. Spend your time wisely. You’ll develop your own identity and style as a writer, and readers will appreciate a writer publishing quality work. Sure, some attention-grabbing headline and a piece parroting the same old song may garner a few extra clicks in the short-term, but you want to develop a readership and have people bookmarking your site or looking forward to your weekly scheduled column. That can only be done with high-content offerings.

How do I want to share my work?

Every story has its perfect voice. That’s basically where people are coming from when they say “the book is better than the movie.” Songs are more than lyrics. Sometimes world-building works better in a book than it would a film. You want to ensure that your medium is the perfect venue for your voice.

One of my favorite websites is The Basketball Jones. The Score is the Canadian version of ESPN for those of you in the states, and TBJ has tons of content across many different forms of media. They have a daily running blog, daily video podcast, and weekly audio podcast. The blog entries are just quick news bites and stories from the league. Picture, caption, short blurb—the perfect way to handle small, digestible pieces of current news “as it happens.” The video podcast is aimed at those trying to quickly digest information for last night’s highlights, for fans of the NBA. It also functions as an audio podcast for those listening at work, so they know their audience well. The weekly audio podcast is a semi-structured with a lot of bullshitting, more for fans of the site than ones of the NBA. You can’t really have a running, semi-structured dialog in an article and it’s probably too boring for the eyes to put in a video, but the audio podcast is the perfect form. And don’t think these two guys work well together by accident. Paring an excitable, higher-pitched voice who makes exaggerated comments at times with a more baritone guy who’s way more even-keel provides a lot of balance to the show.

With that (second) lengthy aside out of the way, I hope you have a better understanding of finding that perfect voice for your work. Sometimes things work best in a podcast, other times things work best in an article. You’ll have to figure out how to best tell your story with the tools available to you. For the most part, this series will focus on those writing articles, but you’ll be able to apply a lot of this work across different mediums.

Now that you’ve determined what you want to say, who’s going to hear it, and how you want to say it, you’re ready to start actual work on the piece. Next time, we’ll focus on preparation for the piece as well as the work you’ll have to do once you’ve penned your first rough draft. See you then, and let me know if I missed anything in the comments!