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writing these days
When I left Nike, went freelance, all that while ago, I had an idea that I would 'try more writing'. I knew I'd never make a living at it but I liked the idea of including 'writer' as some of who I was.
By a lot of measures I've not done very well. I've not written another book, the Wired column dried up, I've never done anything else for the radio, I've never written a word of fiction.
At the end of last year I'd pretty much written it off. Never mind, I thought, I'm not a writer. Maybe I'll be a sculptor.
But, looking back now, I've realised I'm doing OK, it's just that 'what a writer is' has moved beyond my sense of Hemmingway in a cafe with pencils and notebooks.
To start with, I still love doing the Campaign column and I need to remember that 460 words a week, for at least five years (maybe more) about an industry that never changes is hard and I've learned loads doing it. That's proper writing even if, now, it feels more like a long, comfortable walk.
And, pleasingly, Wired and The Observer still ask me to do the occasional thing. I love doing these too. It's entirely fact-free, mostly crowd-sourced, entirely speculative and more like Punch than Techcrunch. I like being a slightly sideways voice in tech writing. And I like the place that sort of thing has in a magazine - it's the MacGuffin, the baseboard they use to mount all the stuff people actually want to read, the little pull-outs and things you can buy.
(The latest Wired one was about 'wearables'. Massive hands-up to this (above) though, guilty as charged)
But still and all I can't get past how un-networked these things feel. Solid, embodied slabs of text, changing yet changeless as canal water. It's odd. I learned my writing on this blog, and in teams, writing with others. I much prefer being the writer in a team. And I prefer writing for things that live on the web, in one form or another.
For instance - of everything I've 'written' in the past couple of years - the GDS Design Principles have probably had the most impact. They started as a bit of expedience, a way to postpone design decisions until we'd had chance to make them in the field, but they turned out pretty good. None of the ideas were mine, the whole team baked them from Tom's starter yeast and Mark enforced some proper rigour, but I like to think I spiked up the language enough to make them stick in your head. Principles, a manifesto, bullet points - this is a literary form I'm comfortable with.
Similarly, I wrote the words for this GOV.UK video, they're just the scaffodling for the bits you actually remember, but it's an intereseting task, writing a video about a website. It started off as more like a radio commercial than anything, then talented designers found the right images to make it work as a film. It's not going to win any awards but it does its job.
And I helped Mike write this talk, which summed up a lot of what we've wanted to say about GDS for a while. Again, they're his ideas and, obviously, his delivery, but I made the slides and sometimes, found the right words for the task.
Those three things: the principles, that video, that talk are the most useful and effective bits of writing I've done for years, but until now I've thought of that sort of thing as somehow not 'proper writing'.
Maybe I'm wrong about that.
Maybe what might be interesting now is working out how these kinds of writing might do other kinds of jobs. For instance, what might you write for Wired that works like the Design Principles?
Anyway.
cabinets
I'm rather fascinated by these cabinets. Bits of the network gathered and poking up into the street. You don't often see them abandoned like this.
You mostly notice them when they have their priests in attendance.
middle earth exploratory land archive
Went to see the British Land Exploratory Archive show a while back. Saw The Desolation of Smaug the other day. There are similarities.
new year
2014, The Postman plus one, Akira minus five. Vuvuzela plus four.