Patreon Special ~ About Writing (Patreon)

Hi everyone!

Today I want to write about something that's still giving me some difficulty: writing!

When I quit school to go full-time on my personal creations, I thought it would be a good idea to have some sort of weekly log, to keep track of myself. That log was, and still is, the weekly recaps!

I learned afterwards that it was strongly advised for game devs to have this kind of log, for a bunch of different reasons.

The first reason is that it's a way to check on what you worked on weeks ago, or whether you did or didn't do something the previous week for example. It's not always easy to remember!

The second reason is that when you write an entry for that log, you're actually showing yourself the work you did during the week. At times when you feel like you're slacking too much, it can be very motivating to see that actually you did some pretty good work. Besides, being aware of that log, you will want to have things to write about in there, so you will push yourself to produce at least some stuff.

The third reason is that it's bonus content if you make it public! It seems some people will really enjoy reading about your process and/or have a place where you reference the main content you put out that week! Giving it to them instead of keeping it for yourself is just smarter.

That said, I recently took a look at my very first weekly recap and... Was I really that bad at it?? :O

Yeah, it really looks like my writing improved a ton over the last year-and-a-half. When I think they used to tell me I was very good at English in school... Really? Was I!? So hey, here's a fourth reason to write weekly recaps if you're not a native English-speaker: you'll get a lot better at writing in English!

So, writing a weekly log was a really good idea and doing it publicly was also a good idea, even though at the time I could never have imagined anyone would read it. But after almost half-a-year I wanted to write other stuff than the log. I didn't really know what exactly though and there was always something else to work on, so I never got to it. Until I make the Patreon.

The Patreon was really cool because it was motivating me to write stuff for you, my kind supporters! But also, I was much less afraid to let you guys, rather than the whole internet, read what I had to say on any subject. That's partly why one of the first rewards of the Patreon used to be the access to the Doodle Insights!

At that point I didn't exactly know what the Doodle Insights would turn out to be. All I knew was that I'd be writing about my Pico-8 Doodles in a way that was accessible to people with little coding knowledge. I believe that knowledge should be shared, just so that it can be useful to more people. That's what led up to the series being sort-of educational but also (hopefully) not boring. Because there's tons of educational articles out there and most of them are just sooooo technical and bland!

And that's our transition to how I write my stuff!

The way I go about it is almost always:

• Draft a plan of the write-up.
• Write the write-up.
• Read and edit the write-up I just wrote, removing sentences that seem unnecessary, adding info that seem to be missing, setting important things as bold and less important things as italic and adding gifs.

I feel like I should always have at least one thing to put in bold in every paragraph, otherwise that paragraph may just be useless.

You probably noticed already that in everything I write I use bold and italic a lot. While it does help telling what bits are more important, it's also a great tool to add rhythm to a write-up and that's why I use it so much. I myself have a pretty short attention span when it comes to reading technical stuff, so it's really important for me to make sure you don't have that problem when you read anything I write.

And writing about things has been really useful to me too! They say you don't truly understand something until you can explain it again to someone else. That's very much how I feel about this. Writing about something lets me make sure I understand it and it makes me have a clearer understanding of said thing. So it's win-win!

Yet, I find that writing stuff is still pretty difficult for me. Even though I got better at it, sometimes it's still really difficult for me to find my own writing acceptable and I often end up rewriting whole parts of some write-ups and/or just taking a lot more time than necessary to finish a piece.

This is why I still struggle to stay consistent about my write-up output. Because even though I find it interesting to write about things, it can also turn out very frustrating or tiring, especially at times when my mood isn't the brightest already.

But on the other hand, I really want to get better at that too. Getting write-ups done faster, not being too critical with myself and just being more enthusiast about it all. Besides, I know that at least a few of you support me for the articles and believe me I'm never forgetting about you guys. You're the reason I brought the Doodle Insights that far and I'm very honored to have gained your support through this. I'm not letting you down.

I hope that didn't feel too much like rambling and I hope you got some useful stuff out of it! If you have any question, feel free to ask!

In the light of getting better at things, I'm gonna be moving to my new apartment in Le Havre soon and I'm hoping to have a better internet connection! So I'd like to pick up streaming again and do it better than last time! More info on that soon!

Thank you for reading and thank you for your support!

Take care!

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