Finding a style

Over the past few weeks I've faced an unpleasant emotion regarding my work. I've started feeling unsatisfied with my way of writing, the pace of my sentences, the nature of the emotions they convey, and how it all reads. I can't quite pinpoint what the reason for these observations may be. It could be because I'm reading more now, and I'm facing the work of more accomplished writers. Or it could also be because once the sediment has settled, it's easier to see what it reads like, and to come to the conclusion that I don't really like how it reads like.

My initial intention with the Encyclopaedia Erathia was to go for a very factual academic or informational style. Something that reads as an atlas or the Encyclopedia Britannica. And while I do like the approach, it's slowly starting to feel like a very dry writing style, that lacks the emotions and mystery I believe this world deserves. By introducing Erathia through the POV of a scholar that writes his volumes based on the available information, my goal was to have an unreliable narrator. Unreliable not because of his motives, but solely because of the incomplete intel he is receiving and piecing together. At the moment, I'm not under the impression that this is where this is heading. From my position, it feels like I'm writing facts, with a twist, and that the tone does not really reflect the individuality of the scribe behind the prose.

That's got to change.

This brings me to the alterations I'm going to be making in the upcoming weeks, both in the existing articles, and the upcoming ones. I'll slowly try and introduce a more subjective POV in the articles, by mixing what feels like straight up fact mixed with the observations and thoughts of the author on the article they're writing. If that makes sense.

I'm also trying to think about what I'd like the Encyclopaedia to be in the long term. I have this deep connection to TTRPG, and i'm sometimes thinking of this becoming a setting people could be playing in. A goal like that implies a certain prose and information delivery that I would consider to be mostly absent at the moment. I would need to go back to reading some settings I really liked to learn from them and their way of introducing information to the reader in a linear fashion. Which, obviously, the Encyclopaedia is not doing, since it's a more nodal/wikiesque approach.

That's where I'm standing at for now. Trying to figure out what my style could be, and adjusting my trajectory to get there. :)

Thanks for reading,

Cheers !

-Erwan