Whatever your Writing Goals are, they should, first and foremost, always be very private and about your personal success as a writer. Social Media groups such as found on Facebook, Twitter, etc, are not ideal places to share everything about your current story, or personal ideas about what you are writing.
There’s an excellent reason for this, and it goes against most people’s advice.
There is a trend on social media to share everything, bare your heart and tell all and sundry everything about yourself and your goals. This is an unhealthy practice for a writer – it puts you in a vulnerable place.
Social Media has a problem. I think most intelligent people agree on this; influencers having to constantly come up with new ideas, stay ahead of their game, and find new ways to attract followers for their particular brand of “how to do something special”.
Writing is all about expressing your ideas, and hoping to influence a reader’s feelings and thoughts about a subject.
When you sit down to write, you find yourself in a world where only you can understand why you were moved to write something. Only you can make sense of it until it’s finally finished and ready to show the world of readers.
As soon as you begin to share your writing ideas with strangers on the internet, you are liable to hear lots of advice coming back at you – advice that you didn’t ask for.
Writing advice on social media pages is often quickly thought up BS, often, it’s cobbled together from a commonly used axioms about “how to write”.
What works for Freddy the Keyboard Hack, isn’t necessarily going to be good practice for you.
Listening to other writers and wanna-be writers telling you that your ideas need shaping up, or that nobody will want to read what you are working on, is just uncontrolled egoistic drive on behalf of those super-advice givers.
Your best Counsel is your own Counsel
You probably began writing stories or creating a blog because of nagging feeling inside.These feelings wouldn’t go away until you’d given yourself the chance to prove to yourself that you want to really write something.
After beginning to write your stories, you discovered that you love it. Then you kept going, and then you discovered that it doesn’t get any easier.
That’s the point where many would be writers decide enough is enough. They throw the pen and paper in the corner for the cat to play with.
It’s a shame, but it was probably the right thing to do.
You kept going. Knowing that if you continue to write and follow your goals as a writer, you will discover more and more about yourself as a writer. You kept your own counsel.
Social Media is an attractive and addictive place. It’s a danger zone that can suck up your time and energy. It’s full of snippets and ideas that have been crafted into Memes, and short phrases that are designed to influence your thinking.
Mostly, it just wants you to believe in it enough so that you will follow. Social Media doesn’t care a monkey’s toss whether you reach your goals or not. In fact, it would be, as a machine, quite pleased to know that you aren’t killing it with your writing goals.
Social media, your goals, and your deepest desire to make something of yourself as a writer or blogger, is the perfect hunting ground for the fear mongers.
Fear is the natural weapon of influencers these days. It works well when used in the right place and on the right minds.
You need knowledge about how to keep going as writer. How to find the energy, how to get past the tough parts, all these obstacles can create a fear factor in your mind that you might’ve bitten off more than you can chew.
But, writing is tough business to be in. Firstly, the toughness of it is the writing of stories, the creation of great posts that really are beneficial to readers and visitors to your website. To achieve your objectives you must put the work in, there are no Apps out there that will write for you.
If you think you need an App that will find your character names, write viral introductions for you, edge your writing into a certain style so that it is bound to be a big success on the web, then really, why bother with writing?
Writing is human endeavour. We do it because each time a person starts to write, they begin to bring something special to the world of knowledge and information – mainly because they’re doing their way, and ignoring the machine talk, the Influencer advice and all the hacks that are on offer out there.
You decided to start writing, and to get serious about blogging, or about writing a novel, because something in you shifted and your perspectives came into line with an idea that you knew that you could write about; you have something to show the world by writing about it.
Your success and your writing goals concern you only. Writing is a lonely business . It’s no team sport.
When you have a problem with what to write about, or how to write something, be it a passage of story, or a blog post that you find important, then thank your lucky stars that you have something meaty to work with. Life is full of problems, those problems are often very personal. They pop up in our work, slow us down and finally make us realise that we won’t get far until we face up to them and work on them.
Working on the problems that are writing, is to deal with your own problems of how you view life, the world, and yourself.
If you get into the bad habit of Googling every problem that you have, you won’t learn to solve any of the smaller problems, you won’t be able to build strategies and ideas about how you personally deal with your writing problems.
If you encounter problems at the beginning of a book, or post, you will encounter similar problems at the end, too. These problem are there for you to solve in a personal way, they can’t be solved by another person – that’s not how writing works, unless it’s a technical problem such a grammar or spelling. You should have mastered those two before or during your writing.
Writing creatively, and blogging is a creative process, is where you discover the gems of information that lead to deeper understanding. The solutions can only be found in the work.
If you push through and become determined about solving your writing problems, you will discover more and more about yourself as a writer. It will boost your confidence and lead to mastery of your work.
Most people on the web, around the forums and threads that waffle on about writing and creativity, tend to ask questions about how to write.
They want to know how to begin writing. That’s a sign that they are already at the lazy stage of things, and are hoping that somebody out there will tell them that there is a secret to the whole process; a secret to writing great posts, great fiction, but avoiding the pain in the process.
Basically, they are looking for the short cuts. What those short cuts are is easy to tell you, just quit. That’s the easy way out.
Life is a tough cookie to crack. It’s full of problems and disappointments. But without those disappointments we don’t learn jot about what we are doing, without the problems we can’t have goals and objectives to strive for.
People who look for the easy way end up wasting a lot of good lifetime. They learn nothing, stay ignorant and keep Googling for answers, keep searching the threads and forums on the web, they spin around in circles all day, hoping to find the answer to a very vague question : how can I be successful at what I do?
If you set out to write something worth reading, you must put your heart into it. You will encounter problems that need to be solved before you can continue with the writing.
You create problems by doing things, like writing about something you thought you were familiar with, then you discover that you aren’t that knowledgeable about the subject.
This means that you must stop writing, and start researching. Then go back and start editing all the stuff that you wrote because it doesn’t fit anymore.
Sometimes, it’s all about elbow grease. Just keep writing, the problems are minimal, the flow of ideas is great, just keep writing.
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