A brief reflection on my Earn This writing, and an announcement
To the loyal readers of Earn This, few and far between though you may be, I have a confession to share: in spite of the few dozen articles and reviews I’ve written for this site, which I am overall quite proud of, I have fallen into something of a rut recently. Bear with me now as I attempt to analyze this breakdown and present my solution.
Of the last fifteen articles I’ve started writing for this site, only one has resulted in a finished product. From these aborted reviews and features, I have assembled some conclusions on why I’ve been struggling with my role on this site in recent weeks:
- I really only like to discuss and analyze what I like. In fact, many of my mixed and negative reviews have been written with the thought “well, I don’t want readers to think I like everything” in mind. I get bored writing about music and movies I don’t like.
- This site has been appealing to me in part because it’s so broad; essentially any entertainment or arts topic that catches my fancy can become a feature or review. But this also has made it difficult for me to focus on specific topics in great depth. Aside from my a few extended projects, all of my writing has been general, overview writing.
- I lack the comprehensive mastery of all of cinema and music to comment on any piece’s place in the grand scheme of each medium. But I do feel I have a mastery of smaller spheres that I feel I can provide genuine insight into.
- Much of my favorite writing is more academic, in that I like to bounce my theories off of others’ that I find through research online and in books. But the style of writing that traditional reviews use does not really benefit from this kind of approach.
And so, I’ve decided to come up with a mechanism that will help me deal with all of these problem: themed months.
The premise is this: Each month (or at least, for this pilot month) I will choose a single, relatively small field of music or movies, and write exclusively about that topic for that entire month.
My hope is that this will cure many of my struggles. Assuming I choose a field that I find appealing, I’ll be writing largely about what I like and understand well. The constraint of writing about a single topic will allow me to pursue it with deep analysis.
The preliminary goal will be to write (not necessarily publish) a thousand words per day on the topic, which is significant but doable, I believe. The hope is that I’ll have something to publish about five days a week.
My topic for July is animated movies. I have already written quite a bit about animation on Earn This – and written more in early drafts for this themed month – but I will try to tread on different topics from those I’ve already written about.
I’ll start with some articles outlining the fascinating history of animation, then some features on some phenomena and trends in the style. Reviews should be sprinkled in there. Lastly, I hope to have some culminating posts to close the month.
I run the risk of alienating some readers by expounding so much on a single topic, but also gain the potential of catching some new eyes by looking at something in such depth, more depth than my previous posts have in general had. Plus, I expect Colton and Grant to continue pursuing their broad spectrum of topics, so there will be some variety.
Though there’s the distinct possibility that I’ll give up on this within a couple of weeks, I hope to at least stick it out for a month. If you have some input on this experiment and how I can make it more valuable to readers, please let me know.
