I want to theory craft how to proceed with the weekly improvement blog. I’m surprised how much traction the blog actually got. Seriously. The blog gets decent hits for how irrelevant and self-serving it is for me. It started as an exercise to help myself improve at smash and writing and I think it has helped with both. It hasn’t changed either skill drastically, but it’s helped me get comfortable with writing and helped me self-reflect on my Smash performance, but I want to make the blog more purposeful. I want it to continue to help improve my skills with Smash and writing, but also make it more entertaining for the readers. So in this post, I want to say some of my ideas for the blog going forward.
I don’t think I need to go over every set I play anymore. Not even my losses. I should focus on what I’m struggling with still, but I should pick one concept and focus on that. For example, mentality. I can dive into my own experience with mentality and then theory craft on how to improve my mentality and hopefully give others ideas on how to improve theirs. This doesn’t mean I’ll never tackle mentality again after the week I focus on it, but I think having a specific goal will help with actually improving on that goal and I will revisit the concept when it becomes relevant to me again.
I made goals before, but they were either bigger goals about beating a certain player or caliber of player or smaller goals based on fixing small things in my gameplay. I hope focusing on one larger concept can help with my improvement and be more relevant to a wider audience. The people who read the blog don’t always fight the people I fight (some of you do though of course and shout out to my Colorado homies), so focusing more on themes than matches will hopefully help myself and the readers. I also think making these posts less self-serving and more about themes will help my writing, making the blog post relevant longer because they won’t be a weekly wrap-up and more of an exploration of a topic.
I do like the personal aspect of the blog, but I might only give the weekly wrap-up a paragraph or two. I want to discuss what’s going on and highlight my community but not at the expense of relevancy. I’ll start talking about the global Smash community more as well. Tons of creators and players speak on how to improve and I think their advice is valuable. If I find relevant content on the topics I cover, I think I’ll link them so the readers can further look into the weekly topic. I don’t have to do all the work to theorize improving because there is so much amazing content out there to help and there are people much better at this than me.
These are my current ideas on the blog and I want to hear if anyone else has ideas. You can message me or tweet me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/ICYoyoDaBlack if you have any ideas or thoughts. I’m sorry I haven’t done the blog in a while. I said “if I play smash I’ll write about it” and that hasn’t been the case for the last month or so. I’ve been playing in tourneys again and I’m loving it but I’ve been noticing without the blog, I haven’t been as invested in how I do, so that’s another big reason I want to bring it back. I want to be motivated, improve in smash and keep writing about smash. I love smash, and while covering majors is fun, I want to write about it more often and I feel like this is a good way to do it. Thanks for reading!
Bernard Lamar Rice 