Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Monday 11 April 2011

11 April 2011

Mardy Diary writes: I know this diary hasn't been performing as it should in recent weeks - everyone's aware of that and is trying to get back to the days of witty, insightful diaries. At the end of the day, no diarist goes out there to write a bad diary - everyone wants to write a good diary, but sometimes we're just not seeing it through to the end. In recent weeks, I think perhaps we've started strongly in the first few paragraphs but for whatever reason we've not been able to maintain that level until the end, and we've let ourselves down. It's alright writing that killer first line, but if you don't follow it up with a high standard of writing it just goes to waste.

Of course, all diarists have to realise this is a team game. I think you can try as hard as you like to write a diary but in recent weeks we've had too many passenger diaries. People need to grow up a bit, even Guest Diary, and start taking responsibility. We may be coming to the end of the season, and certainly with the pre-match factfiles disappearing you can see that people's minds are already on their summer holidays, but there's a job to be done here. If we take our foot off the gas and coast through then we're doing the readers a disservice.

It's hard to see what the problem is - in the pub all the diarists are saying the right things and everyone is as keen as each other to put the recent poor diaries behind them. But then when it actually comes to writing the diary, something goes wrong. I don't know if it's just a lack of mental toughness or that there's no natural leadership there. But, no disrespect to the likes of the Vital sites, we should be able to outperform sites like that and not find ourselves relying on links to the Grimsby Telegraph to see us through to the end of a diary. If the Vital sites can get through to the end of the season with their poor grasp of the English language and a gut-churningly offensive approach to website design then we have no excuse.

But we simply haven't been good enough in recent weeks - we know that, the readers know that, Tony Butcher knows that. People have to realise that writing a diary is a woman's game and the diarists need to start showing their feminine side if we've any hope of improving. It's looking unlikely now that we'll make it to the yearly fanzine awards, although it's not impossible, but that's no reason for people to stop trying.

People haven't paid good money to read these diaries, and perhaps that plays on the minds of some diarists when they go out to write a diary, but that shouldn't be an excuse to not perform. Some diarists might be out of contract at the end of the season and might have their eye on another writing job somewhere else, but if they don't perform then they're fooling themselves if they think they'll land another job. No-one at the Guardian is going to be interested if they're not making the effort and the best they'll be able to get is the horoscope column in Drains Weekly.

I know some people say that the pressure can get to some diarists, and that when someone's emailing you telling you that your diary is rubbish then that can affect your writing. But this is the kind of territory you're in when writing diaries - it's part of the diary writing game. A professional diary writer shouldn't let things like that affect them - you've got a job to do and you need to get out there and do it. If you write a good diary, or manage to point out yet another hilarious gaffe on the official site then people forget about all that. It's our job as diarists to block all that out and try to perform to the best of our abilities.

At the end of the day, Ron, it's a results-based business.