The Writer’s Contract
When I am writing, I am constantly aware of a contract that exists between the reader and I. It goes like this:
- Writer: I promise to write something that isn’t shit
- Reader: I promise not be a cretin
It’s a simple contract but works well because it leaves both parties free to pursue their goals whilst putting the onus of quality on the other, thus ensuring that they are both playing at the height of their game; and it also opens both parties up to criticism but only to a degree that is fair, with each party regulating for him or herself what constitutes ‘fair’.
Until recently, this was something I knew without knowing that it was something I knew. What made me conscious of it for the first time was the writing I do for FlashBrighton. FlashBrighton is a local, volunteer run user group for enthusiasts of Adobe Flash & related subjects that meets once a week. Each week a different person presents a new topic, and each session needs its own description written in advance, so people know what’s coming up and can decide whether they want to attend or not.
I write these descriptions and I use them as mental training, like a weekly jujitsu workout for the mind. All that really needs to be said is:
‘[PERSON] will be presenting [SUBJECT], including aspects [A, B & C]. You might wanna bring [STUFF]. It’s taking place at [DATE, TIME & PLACE]. Sign up now!
But that would be awfully boring, both for me and the reader, and I would quickly give up doing it. So instead I’ve developed a technique whereby I - or the presenter of a given week’s session - will choose a literary style or author, and the description will then take the form of a wee narrative vignette written in that style, somehow incompassing all the essential but dry information above.
The palette can be very broad, recent authors include Mickey Spillane, Sophie Kinsella, William Gibson, Jilly Cooper, Charles Dickens, Hans Christian Andersen and J. R. R. Tolkien. Moving around so much through so many different styles forces me to read and learn texts I would never ordinarily choose to pick up. When exactly was I going to read Sophie Kinsella?
Which is kinda the point. Reading Sophie was an exercise in humility. ‘Confessions of a Shopaholic‘ might not be a very promising title, but a novel of any kind is no small achievement and I will admit to being impressed by the way she tied her characters together. Technically very sound, and when I speak of ‘mental jujitsu’, that is what I mean.
But there is a problem with this. A frequent complaint about these posts is that the reader, whilst entertained by the writing, has no idea what a given session is actually about, which is kinda the key thing.
It’s at this point that the contract comes into play. As the writer I have to go over my copy and see if I am failing to keep up my end of the deal. Is the piece shit? Sometimes the answer is ‘yes’, as in the example of the ‘Practical Typography’ session that Aegir Hallmundur gave a few weeks ago. Even if I do say so myself, it’s a very funny post, really entertaining. Looking for a good metaphor for typefaces, I hit upon blood groups. They are called ‘blood types’, and each person has a different one, which they need if given a transfusion. Also, type ‘O Negative’ is a blood type anyone can accept - something I learned from days of being an A&E porter - so is always used in emergency transfusions where time is short and the patient’s blood type is unknown; essential for the metaphor as all browsers have default fonts - Times New Roman, generally - which they can fall back on if none is declared. All in all I thought it a marvellous metaphor, patted myself on the back, and went about casting Aegir as the lead resuscitation doctor in an A&E ward, saving websites that had ‘crashed’ and ‘lost a lot of content’.
I got so carried away with the emergency fun that I forgot to make it clear what Aegir was actually going to be talking about. Having been taught to do so by my old girlfriend Ellen de Vries, a professional copywriter, I always put the crucial/boring information in bold type, so that anyone short of time or who can’t be arsed with the silly styling can skim read them, discover what’s being discussed quickly, and leave. Equally I always, always make a point of putting all the essential information a presenter gives me into these bold sections.
But that’s not enough, as I have learned. The information Aegir gave me was unusually brief, just that he would be outlining how to pick the right font for the right design. That was all. Because there was so little of it, it got dwarfed by the breathless hospital drama that it was wrapped up in; a bedlam of ambulances, trolleys and blood types. In this case the description should have been shorter and less dramatic, but I got carried away. My bad, nil-one to the visitors.
This isn’t fatal, I am certainly not going to stop using this approach. FlashBrighton is a collective of creative individuals, that the very session posts themselves reflect this vein of creativity is crucial. I will simply study my pieces and make adjustments. Learn, basically. And I will keep the contract in mind, because sometimes it’s not me but the reader who’s letting us both down.
As a reader there is a requirement on your part to understand the various elements that make up a piece of writing without having it tediously spelled out for you in black & white. Take this week’s post for instance, for a session entitled ‘Making a Flash game in 10 days’. Written in the style of J. R. R. Tolkien, it takes the three characters ‘Tim Baggins’, ‘the dwarf king Owen’ & ‘the Wizard Domdolf’, and places them at the entrance to Mirkwood from the book ‘The Hobbit‘. Owen and Domdolf tell Tim how the journey through the wood is a ten day march, that they must go ‘underground’ to make a Flash game in 10 days, consisting of a series of word puzzles designed to turn ’seven great goblins’ who live in the wood back into the letters from a book of spells.
What’s going on here? Well first of all there are three people - Tim Frost, Owen Bennett and Dominic Mason - who are making this game. To underline their actual-person status we link their Tolkienised names to their websites. Secondly, the game they are making is about a character that goes into a dark wood to solve a series of word puzzles and defeat seven goblins. Obviously Mirkwood is good fit there, and anyone that gets confused about where the line between actual Tolkienised geeks and the characters in their game is drawn… well that’s OK, not so important; all that’s required is that one understands that they are making some kind of puzzle based adventure game where one defeats goblins in a wood, or something.
Most important though is the idea of going ‘underground’. Tim, Owen & Dom are putting their heads behind the parapet for 10 straight working days whilst they build their game together. It’s key to the process of creating a decent game in a such a short space of time. All in all, the idea of using Mirkwood as the metaphor is ideal, and if you, the reader, fail to see that, or can’t distinguish between what’s actually happening and the stylised wrapper it’s delivered in… well, you’re not keeping up your side of the bargain. You could, in that case, just read the session title: Making a Flash game in 10 days. That should be sufficient to alert you to the fact that this is not about tramping through Middle Earth with a hobbit, but is in fact about making a Flash game in 10 days.
November 9th, 2009 at 9:17 am
Neil opened his laptop and waited an annoyingly long time for vista to wake up from hibernation.
He scratched his head and reached for his coffee. It was cold.
He had been wanting to add a comment to Rich’s blog about The Writer/Reader contract, but just couldn’t get the metaphors right.
Every time he re-read his draft comment he asked himself… “is this shit?”. The answer it seemed was always “yes”.