Quote:
Originally Posted by ericthered
Perhaps it was low hanging fruit, but I'm glad to see it.
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Writers try for the "low-hanging fruit" because most of what practically writes itself is stuff that many gamers – the writer included – want and constantly talk about, but that not everybody has the time to push across the line between talk and action. Taking a few hours out to give it the needed shove is relatively easy and guaranteed good reviews. It's a win for everybody: writer, readers, and publisher.
By contrast, things that are a puzzle to write are usually that way because they're hard to frame. With only a vague idea of what people actually want, it's possible for the demand you think you're meeting not to exist. You stand a real chance of doing a lot of work for nothing, of creating a solution in search of a problem. I admit to taking far too many risks here . . . I still have no idea if anybody really
wants "Play Stupid Games, Win Stupid Prizes," "Putting Science in Your Fiction," or "Tactical Looting."
There are surprisingly few things that everybody wants but that are difficult to deliver. Usually, the difficulty is in winning the publisher's support for the necessary page count or format to deliver something that's ultimately pretty straightforward to write, and such things aren't suited to magazine articles. It's more about convincing the publisher to pay you for and then try to sell 200+ pages of stuff. Writing that many words is work, but not truly "difficult."