Writing, Learning & Networking

Posted by: kerrynangell

If you’re reading this then you’re not writing. To be a writer you have to write, you have to keep learning and you have to network. If you’re reading this you’re probably learning and you’ll probably check in at the forums so you’ll be networking too.

If you’ve started to seek out information about writing online you will have come across some great writing communities that are helpful, encouraging and a fun place to be. If you’ve been hanging out in writing communities for a while you’re probably spending a large chunk of your time keeping up with the activity. You may even find that you’re not writing as much as you’d like because of it. This becomes more obvious when you participate in challenges such as SoCNoC and it’s easy to put the blog and forum reading to one side for a month but that doesn’t fix the problem for the rest of the year.

This is where you’re going to get a little selfish. You are a writer first but you’re lucky that the learning and networking means you also can be involved in some great communities.

1. What are your writing goals?
2. What are you working on right now?

Your time needs to go first and foremost to your writing and just like in a story everything else should support those goals. Everything you’re learning, the forums discussions and blog posts you’re reading should support the goals you’ve set.

I had to do this assessment myself a few months ago. I had been reading a lot of blogs about the industry, about querying and markets. It was all great information and good to have a base knowledge of but I didn’t have my novel ready to submit yet. The time I spent reading these blogs I could have been revising my novel.

I was also struggling to keep up with several writing communities: Will Write for Wine, Kiwi Writers, Think Sideways, Forward Motion and had found a few new ones that I wanted to check out. There were some commitments I already had, like with Kiwi Writers, but with other forums like Think Sideways I was able to select certain forums and topics to follow.

Take stock of all of the extracurricular writing activity you do and make sure it’s helping you to reach your writing goals.

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07 Jul 2009 23:07:20

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