Graham McAllister (Part 3) on the art and craft of writing (CAL122, S6E16)

Geri: 00:00:05

Welcome to Changing Academic Life. I'm Geraldine Fitzpatrick, and this is a podcast series where academics and others share their stories, provide ideas, and provoke discussions about what we can do individually and collectively to change academic life for the better. What do you think about writing? And how would you answer the following questions? How do you write a book? Especially a book aimed at non-academics. What's your voice and how do you create a writing routine that fits in your life? These are all questions that Graham McAllister asked himself as he embarked on writing his book on games usability after he sold his company. He calls them the soft skills of writing books. And he wanted to use this book as a way to explore the process of writing itself. So in this last of three parts of my conversation with Graham, he shares his experiences about the art and craft of writing that worked for him. He talks about his commitment to making knowledge freely accessible about the process of discovering his writing voice. The importance of knowing your audience and being able to communicate clearly and succinctly with them, and how the writing process itself is highly iterative. He also shares the writing routine that he set up, how he did that, and also how he set himself achievable goals. So he set himself up for ongoing progress and success. And whether you are writing a book or writing an academic paper for an academic audience, I think you'll find a lot to take away from his experiences here. And towards the end, Graham also reflects more generally on the implications of his work within academia and industry and what's next for him possibly taking time again to reflect on the impact of past mentors and the importance of thoughtful work life integration and finishes with the call to us that we can design a better life. Enjoy this final part of my conversation with Graham. You said before about after you sold the company and you went away on holidays and you sat there and wrote a book or started writing a book. And what I saw is this book is freely available on your webpage. So talk us through the book, you know, both the writing process, you know, what lessons we might learn. So I know that for many academics, they have a book in them and it can be, feel really daunting. And also the decision to, to make it freely and not try to get a publisher and make money from it.

Graham: 00:03:28

Yeah. Um, first thing is part of me thinks knowledge should be free. Um, and I, I realize I'm a consultant, but I, I realize the irony in saying that, but I hear I'm thinking of. Can I name specific publishers? Oh, no, I'll not, I'll not, I'll not. So there's academic publishers who, even as an academic, I did not want to publish with because the research was funded by the government or something like that, and then they would charge to pay off that research. And I felt that research should be free. That's what I thought was fair. Wasn't paid for by you. I should be able to put that on my website or my research group's website or the university's website so that everyone can benefit from that. And that was one of my main frustrations as a, as an academic was there's some great work out there, but boy is it hard to get that, those findings out to the wider world. As someone who likes educating and learning and sharing what's been learned. That is a major pain point as an academic bit. That is a barrier. That is a usability friction point to my work. Also an economic one. That if you're rich and if you want to spend 50 dollars on a really boring academic paper that I wrote, you could probably have access to that. But there's a lot of people where 50 dollars, even if you knew how to get it, is very difficult. So just that whole access thing bothers me enormously with academia. Enormously. Um, so when I decided I want to write a book, writing is thinking, I love thinking, I love working on problems, I love thinking through the problems, I like clarifying the thinking, like am I really answering the question that I think I'm working on or am I not thinking clearly enough? So the whole writing thing is a thinking thing, you know, I can't, I can't separate them out. Um, so that was partly it in terms of, I knew I wanted to write a book and I A bit like, I have a lot of ideas. I think I come up with a lot of ideas. Usually when I'm running, I, they just come out. I can't explain it. They just Blow out at a high rate, um, so much so that my watch face when I'm running on my Apple Watch is the, the note recorder, so I run along and I hit the, people usually have their Strava times, like how fast they're running. Mine is to take ideas. So I have a button that takes, takes ideas. Anyway, I turn around an enormous amount of ideas. I had an idea for a series of books on organizational psychology, and I really, well, that's interesting. I'm not short on ideas of what, uh, how to help teams or design teams and thought, well, I better, I better start writing then. You know, if I've got this series of ideas, you have to begin, you have to actually do one, just do one and see how it feels. And so the easiest thing for me to write about is the field I've been in for the previous. I don't even know, 10, 20 years, wherever it was, in terms of user research in the games industry, HCI. And I wasn't interested in the topic. I knew I knew enough to write about it off the top of my head. I didn't need to read research papers, but I was interested in the process of writing. How would I write? What is my voice? And then I thought back to what's the problems I have with books, like why do I abandon books? And a lot of books even, I'm not going to joke, I'm a famous American academic and I've tried to read two of his books. And that is hard work, I've abandoned both. He's a CS professor and I like him on podcasts, but his books are terrible! Sorry, I'm getting It's like he's got one idea, and it could have been a really interesting 400 word article, but it's just padded out to a book because a publisher said write a book. And I have a very low tolerance for that BS, I must say, and I'm not having that. That's the other thing I should write back. When I give a talk, I'm not very good at putting up a Putting up with people's BS, I'm probably going to tell you like it is.

Geri: 00:07:07

mm hmm. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Mm

Graham: 00:07:09

common thing. But it's evidence BS, it's not just opinion usually. Anyway, so if I'm going to write a book, I decided I was interested in the softer side, the soft skills of writing books. How do you write a book? What's my voice? How do I write? What fits in with my life? What works with me is definitely not gonna fit in with you, you know? So I decided I'm gonna write from 9:00 AM to 11:00 AM every morning, two hours, because I feel more creative in the morning. Some people feel more creative in the evening. I used to when I was younger, but not anymore. So I'm going in the morning, I write here for two hours, and some days nothing may happen, but I'm not allowed to leave. I have to sit here for two hours and I have to, I am. I'm encouraging myself to write 200 words a day, minimum. But no, I may write more, and many days I did write more, but I, I, I should leave with 200 words. That's like a paragraph. Like, surely I could write a paragraph. So that's 1, 000 words a week, 200 words a day. I take the weekends off. I think I ended up working weekends anyway, because I couldn't stop it. But the idea in the beginning was Monday to Friday, 200 words, that's 1, 000 words a week. Um, so 4, 000 words a month. Uh, and I reckon I have the book done 12, 000 words, whatever, in three months or something, whatever it was, six months or 25, 000 words. It was that type of, I've got the, I've got the math wrong, so someone's going to make fun of me, that's fine. But that was the idea, something simple. Uh, and then I'd go for a run after that, do some form of exercise. That's what I think about what I wrote. And then the next morning, that idea or what I had, what I ran would feed into the next morning. So there was this loop, right? I would write. I would do exercise where most of the thinking happens. I would take the thinking and capture it, not write about it, just feed that into the next morning's loop. And I kept that going. I wrote 25, 000 words or something on the usability book. Um, but I wrote the book four times. I realized the first writing was just getting the idea out. It was just a long bit back CS professor who I'm criticizing. It was just like a, but it wasn't repeating the same idea. At least it was more content, but I realized that's kind of. Kind of reads like a book. I was, I was rethinking what a book meant. What does a book mean? A book means I'm sharing ideas with someone and their ideas I think are useful, but why are they always written in these long, you know, long chapters, like 20 pages? It's hard to keep 20 pages of stuff in your mind. I don't think I could do that. I'm pretty sure I couldn't do that. So at some point I had this idea of I'm going to chunk it up. Typical psychology, right? We'll chunk it up into how our mind works. And the original idea was something like, I'll come up with a hundred ideas on usability. And the book will have some pun around the number 100 or 99 or whatever crazy idea I had at the time. It ended up, I think there were 66 ideas. Uh, I didn't pad it out to 100, I think I could have, but I was trying to be authentic, which is, well, it's 66. Maybe I should have done a route 66 pun. Maybe I could have made that work. But anyway, you see, I should have went on another run, I think. Whatever the number ended up being, I just felt that's the number. I'm not going to artificially inflate it or reduce it to make it fit some clever title. Just, it was what it was. But I didn't care about the book itself. Um, so the book was an exercise in me writing. I love the writing. I love the thinking. I love the rethinking of what a book meant. Um, I put it on my website for free in 2023. Um, as we're speaking now in January 25, I'm just, I'm going through the process of getting it on the Kindle in print. Because the book I really want to write, the book on game vision, I want to get that book. That's the book I really want to write. I did not want to write a book on game usability. I wanted to write a book. Um, so this was the, me practicing the habit and the, the art of writing. So I was not interested in the technical side, the idea, which most academics are interested in. The domain knowledge they have. It's everything else, which is, well, even if I can communicate my domain knowledge, how do I do that? I thought through how best to get that idea out there, um, rather than just saying, oh, it's going to be in 10 chapters. I'll break it up. I think you can do, you can rethink that a bit more. Rather than just, well, these are the 10 chapters, I'll write the 10 chapters and get it done. Technically, you could do that. What else? You know, what else could you do? So, um, I don't know what the next book will be. Maybe it will be a boring, these are 10 chapters, and it could end up being that way. Um, but you at least think about it. You know, what, think through. My case, I was teaching the game usability, but with teaching someone else how to how to do a thing. So it made sense for it to be in 66 steps because that's actually what you're doing. You're following this step wise through. That's how you would teach it effectively. So it made sense to follow. It was like me sitting down beside someone and teaching them how to do it. I would follow through and tell them, these are the steps you need to go through. So it's a teaching book, so it makes sense to follow the teaching format. The game vision one, I don't know where it's going to be yet because I think I could take it in different ways. I could just tell you, these are the problems with mental models on teams. That could be an interesting book by itself, right? It's just, I'm just raising awareness. of saying, well, these are typical things that crop up and you should find this interesting because it explains lots of psychological problems on teams. It explains why you've got friction between management and creative. For example, that's a known psychological problem that came up. But then you went to the model and you can tell people, here's why. And let me point to some solutions. And my MSc thesis was half these are the problems. And then I introduced a model at the second half. And I say, here's my model. That solves all those problems. Maybe, maybe I don't have to write about that. I don't know. Sorry, you were going to ask a

Geri: 00:12:36

Mm hmm. No, I think that's a really interesting process that you've been through and I love that the first book was about finding your voice and finding your rhythm of writing and, and that it still had a clear purpose. Its goal was to educate people, you know, to teach them as a teaching tool to walk through these steps. Did it also provide some sort of closure as well to that phase?

Graham: 00:13:05

I think so. I think, um, I don't have any intentions of going back in that career. I don't think that's, that's a very unlikely path. Um, so I think it was good just to summarize. I was reading at one point, why do people write books? And that came up as a reason for sure. One is, you know, sharing knowledge, but other is closure, which is, well, I've spent my time in this career. What really have I learned? And if you can't even write a book on what you spent 20 years doing, it's not, it's not interesting by itself. There was a series of books I could have written on user research. I don't, you know, that's not the career for me anymore, so they will look for me in my ideas file. But I took one and just said that's the easiest one. I can still take value in that and give value to others, and I can learn more about myself as a writer. You know, I can learn how I write, or do I, it could have been, I do not enjoy writing. Like, I learned, for example, I don't like making YouTube videos. I started a YouTube channel at one point, and what I realized really quick was, I do not like making videos. I have no interest in doing that.

Geri: 00:14:03

What did you not like about it?

Graham: 00:14:06

it was very time consuming and the technical side of it wasn't a skill that I wanted to develop. Um, I also felt that I wasn't, it wasn't personally satisfying. Writing, I felt, satisfied me. I felt I was thinking deeper and quicker and I did not get that from making a video for whatever reason. Maybe some people do, but I did not personally. So, um, yeah, I think I just like writing. Uh, that's what I learned, which is good. You should know, but maybe you try a book and I hit this process.

Geri: 00:14:35

Absolutely. And that's fine. Isn't it? And it is about knowing ourselves. And I, I liked what you said about like, it's no good just to paraphrase you. It's no good just thinking about, I've got this series, a book, just get on and write one and see. So that making progress, which is often the thing that people find hardest when it's about procrastination, especially if you're a perfectionist. You want to get everything all lined up and feel like it's going to be perfect before you can start. And sometimes you just have to start and give it a go and reflect.

Graham: 00:15:05

And that's why I set myself a really low goal, like 200 words per day. It's so low. Like I remember writing it and thinking surely anyone could write, you could do that over a tea break, you know, and some days I did. But that was the point. It's, it's um, it's a bit like exercise. You're not allowed to do no exercise, you have to do some,

Geri: 00:15:25

Um, Um, Yes.

Graham: 00:15:25

But you can't, can't do nothing. That's a bad, that's a bad, you know, result, outcome.

Geri: 00:15:30

You're not setting yourself up to fail by having unrealistic goals, which is really helpful. It seems like you're still trying to find the, the clear why for the next book you've got the topic area, and it's more, is that, you know, to, to sort of more like unpack or communicate these things for people's awareness? Or is it about a how to do the, yeah.

Graham: 00:15:53

I think you're right. My, my main goal for 2025 is to write that book. Now I've got a thesis, an MSc thesis on that topic, and part of me thinks I could just, you know, repurpose that, um, which is one option. Um, but I'm not sure it's practical enough for me. I'm not sure it's gonna, I think people want to know what does it do.

Geri: 00:16:13

Yeah.

Graham: 00:16:14

And obviously that's why I designed it. It is designed to do something. It's not just an academic thesis. There's a practical, heavy practical element to it. So some people solve that by writing a theory book and a field workbook or some sort of, some of these books behind me here. I realize your people can't, listeners can't see it, but there's a bookshelf behind me. And it's common to write two books, the exercise book and the theory book. Um, and that could be useful because I plan to take this into a workshop. I'm already starting doing that, actually. So there is a workshop component, and so I should write like that if I know what I'm going to do with the book, or if I know how people are going to use it, I should write with that in mind. It's not a book, no one reads about mental models on a Sunday morning, it's not the book you pick up, you know, or go to bed with a shared mental models book. So I have to think through, well, how are people going to use my book? I know they're going to do an exercise at some point. But I like the bite sized format that I learned in the previous one, which is If you read two pages, it takes you a minute. If I can't tell you something interesting in two pages, am I communicating? Because I think there should be something interesting within a few minutes to keep your attention. Um, and if it's just waffle, then cut it back to the CS professor. There's a lot, I would find no tolerance for that type of book. Um, and there's a good idea in there, but it just could have been said. I feel it's going to be used in a different way, let's say.

Geri: 00:17:31

That's knowing your, uh, intent, intended audience as well in a way.

Graham: 00:17:37

I think so as well, because my audience is not academics. It's going to be people who want to solve the problem. However, I'm not going to shy away from the academic nature. I can imagine I would be putting academic references.

Geri: 00:17:49

Uh,

Graham: 00:17:49

That's my current idea. I might backtrack on this in this because I think I want people to know that this is underpinned by science. Because there's lots of people who've written, well not, there's lots of people who've got ideas in the game industry for vision, shared vision. But it's just an idea. They're like, oh, I think this works. And I would ask, well, how do you know? And they would say something generic like, well, I asked the team and they say it works. And I'm the other end of the scale. It's like, well, I'm interested in the proof behind that. So my model will prove if the team is aligned. That's why I designed it. Because I was tired of people saying, oh, we're definitely aligned. People say there's no problem here, and so I designed it, you know, so I'm always interested in here's how I got to that answer. And if you want to read that too, I'm going to pinpoint you to the very things that I learned. So I want to trade that, instead of dumbing the book down and saying, here's academia, and I'm going to remove all the hard slogs that we would read as academic papers, I'm going to remove all that and just distill it. I'm instead going to say, I want to bring you up and elevate your knowledge. And it's going to be a little bit tricky, but I think it's going to be worth it for you. So that's my current thinking.

Geri: 00:18:53

Yeah, and that seems like a skill you've really developed well is that communicating to people why it matters.

Graham: 00:19:00

I think, and I think that's the reason, I think, if you write a book that's hard to read, and you can't tell people why it's worth it to read through it, they're probably abandoned. But if you tell people in advance, this is not going to be the easiest of reads. There probably would be an easier way to say this. But, I think you will get more from it by going through this journey. This is likely harder to read. There's going to be academic jargon. I'll explain it to you. You will benefit stronger if you stick with it, and I'm going to do my best job I can to not write a long, woefully long book. I'm going to help you, to elevate you, to bring this academic terminology and models into your thinking, rather than keep it out of your thinking. I don't think I'm doing you any favors by removing it from your thinking and your mental model. My job is to improve you, but I have to, the journey's going to be a little bit of, Be a bit tricky. Not as hard as an MSc or a PhD, but it's not a blog article on, you know, Medium either. It's, it's in between.

Geri: 00:19:58

That's probably good food for thought for people, especially with the increasing push to impact, which requires a different sort of communication skill. We should wrap up. So what next for Graham McAllister? There's the book and you said about starting to do consulting.

Graham: 00:20:18

I, I, I honestly don't know. know. I do think this is the final career. So I guess, I don't know how you phrase your life journey. But I think this is the, this is the wind down phase, for sure, right? Um, I don't work five days a week, or, I don't work five days a month, you know. So, and that's my design, it's not for anything else. Could that change? Yes. So this is another one of those dots where I'm saying, I am here, and I spent five years going back to LSE and designing a model. And that model shows that the game industry is, Missing a substantial, you know, explains their problem, and I could bring that into the game industry. And all I know is I have to bring that to the game industry

Geri: 00:20:59

in some format. Uh, Um, Uh,

Graham: 00:21:00

format. And I imagine if we speak in two years I don't know what I would say, right? I could say it turned into nothing, or I tried and I failed, I tried to tell them and they wouldn't listen, or I designed this model and someone built on it and now it's this amazing thing, and you can imagine all the ways that could go, um, and I do not know, and I'm okay with that. I'm

Geri: 00:21:21

I was just going to ask, is it scary or exciting?

Graham: 00:21:24

No no. It's more on the exciting end, I think. The final part, the final, final part, I think is bringing it maybe to people outside of video games. As you hinted at, this is a human problem. This is a team problem. Whenever a group of people get together, they have an alignment problem. And that alignment problem generically is caused by language and the structure of their mental model. And yes, we could talk about values and things like that. But that's what's causing the friction ultimately. And so if we can generalize that and say, well, here's a mental, the general mental model for any team, but we know you'll need to refine it for your industry, while our team works in the automotive industry, or space, or healthcare, or fintech, or I get it. But generally speaking, this is a way of thinking, and again, that's one of the book outlines that I could write, is saying, generalizing that to teams, uh, of any type. So I spoke to a publisher years ago, pitching the Game Vision project. This is 2020 maybe 5 years ago, and this is a famous publisher in the States, and they said they nodded and listened and went, yes, interesting, interesting. Could you write that? So it's useful for any team. So they wanted to, you know, they said they'd publish the game book if I wanted, but the book they were really interested in is the thinking behind that model and applying that to the wider audience. And I said, well, that's not me. It's not my passion. But in 2025, since going back to LSE and seeing models with any organization, I do know, I think, yeah, I could see how I would go about writing that book as well. So I don't know, but I can see, you know, um, I could imagine maybe just writing books for the end of my, my final working career where, and you give a few talks on them and a few workshops and you love doing it. And there's nothing wrong with that path at all. You know, I don't see.

Geri: 00:23:26

So it's a lovely example of You never know where life will take you and you can pivot your career in many different ways. And you're still applying a lot of your core skills around, you know, like as you've talked about, identifying interesting problems and being able to articulate them, getting to the why, what's behind it, how do we solve them, how do we bring methods to solving them, how do we communicate the findings. So there's a lot of those red threads as well through all the work.

Graham: 00:24:04

I think so. I think so. It's like, why do these problems keep happening? If you're like an organization or research group. And you're seeing recurring problems. What on earth? Why is that happening? What's going on there? You know, so I think people, I think it's an interesting time for us to talk because people are rethinking what work is. This has been a common trend since COVID in particular, and they're saying, well, okay, I go to work, I get money because I need money to pay the rent, blah, blah, blah. I get it. But what about me? What about my, what do I bring? Am I fulfilled going to work? Um, this work life balance, you know, is it going to work to get money, but your life starts at 5pm when you come home and do it the things you want to do. And then people rebelled against that idea quite rightly saying, well, could they not? Can we not have both? Can we not go to work and feel happy there too? Can I bring myself to work? Why do I have these two identities? So this, all of this, the underlying theme between everything we were talking about, and I apply this particularly to the game industry, which has had a horrific Three years of companies closing and people crying in car parks and losing their jobs. And the other line, you could ask me, why did I do game vision? I've tried to give you some answers, but the bottom answer, the root cause of all of this is people are having a really horrible time at work. And yes, we could say it's partly leadership and culture, and that's true, but we can fix it. We can have, we can design a better life, whether you're in the video game industry or academia or wherever you're in. Um, it could definitely be better. I don't know how much better, but it could be better. That's what I would say. I think people are starting to pay more attention to that, uh, over the last five years, which is good to see.

Geri: 00:25:50

Yes. Definitely. Totally agree. Well, Graham, this has been wonderful catching up and such an interesting story and so much in it to reflect on, on lots of different levels. So anything that we haven't talked about that you would have wanted to cover?

Graham: 00:26:11

I don't think so. I think, you know, you've had a huge influence on my life. That's the final thing. Because multiple times, I don't know why. You accepted me into Sussex to start as a senior lecturer back then, 2007, 2008, whatever it was. It really, that was a major pivotal moment. Without that, there wouldn't have been a company. Without that, I wouldn't have went to LSE to do the vision, the share mental model work. You're, you know, and the generosity you have. I mean, we never got to talk about you on this podcast. I don't know if we want to, I guess, talk about you or not, but there's probably a consistent theme, um, about your generosity with your time and how you are to people. And I won't tell stories, but I definitely I think of stories and things you did that were so generous, back to that window we had in Sussex. Things you did, I remember thinking, what a wonderful, wonderful, kind person you really are.

Geri: 00:27:11

Oh,

Graham: 00:27:12

And honestly, there's so many examples, I'm not going to cite them because they're personal to me and they won't mean anything to anyone else, except to say that I'm not short of examples. You know, and I'm not the only one who says that, you know, um, the fact you're doing this and giving, giving back as well. But yeah, just, just to say thank you because you took my life in a massively better, more interesting direction that I would not have reached on my own for sure.

Geri: 00:27:41

And you, yes. So I really appreciate you saying those things. I'm very humbled. So thank you. And I also am honoured to have been part of that journey because you've Being the one who's made that path work and, um, take, you know, like used it and, and built things. And as you said, the multiple impacts on all sorts of people, companies, people in the industry, people playing games, you know, just generally. So we, we never know, do we? How, who we touch or how we touch people.

Graham: 00:28:21

That's what I was thinking about. These random, someone says a word in a corridor or a

Geri: 00:28:26

Um, Um,

Graham: 00:28:28

I like, I never get, I won't be able to tell Gary anymore that he changed my life too. This random lecture that he gave by saying yes to this talk at Queen's University and, you know, it sent my career on a whole different path. And

Geri: 00:28:41

Um.

Graham: 00:28:41

As you say, stop the podcast and tell people, you know, someone, because it's bound to happen.

Geri: 00:28:48

That's a great point to, to, uh, stop on. So stop now and go and tell someone what they did for you, what they mean to you. Yeah. So thank you, Graham.

undefined: 00:29:00

And so ends the last part of my three part conversation with the wonderful Graham McAllister. I just love his energy and how clearly he thinks through issues and connects the dots of his various career pivots. And isn't he such a powerful communicator? I think there have been nuggets spread across all three episodes. And in this latest episode, whether you struggle with writing or love writing, I hope you'll have found some things here that you can take away to try out. And even though Graham was talking about books and for non-academic audiences. I think there are aspects on the art and craft of writing that he's shared that could apply to all forms of our writing. I know that I took away a lot from my own writing practice. And finally, I just want to spotlight something that Graham said at the very end of our conversation. That I think comes through in so much of what he's done for himself across his various career pivots, and also the impact that he has had on the people that he's trying to work with to solve problems to make their lives better. And that's this quote from Graham about designing a better liFe.

Graham: 00:30:31

We can design a better life, whether you're in the video game industry or academia or wherever you're in. Um, it could definitely be better. I don't know how much better, but it could be better.

Geri: 00:30:45

So let's all work at making it better. You can find the summary notes, a transcript and related links for this podcast on www.changingacademiclife.com. You can also subscribe to Changing Academic Life on iTunes, and Stitcher. And I'm really hoping that we can widen the conversation about how we can do academia differently. And you can contribute to this by rating the podcast and also giving feedback. And if something connected with you, please consider sharing this podcast with your colleagues. Together we can make change happen.