I’m new to the internet game, at least insofar as it comes to writing. Several months ago, I read that an author needs to build a platform if he wants to be taken seriously – 
so I set about doing just that. It’s been a great ride, and I’ve met some wonderful people along the way, but there are some things about this game that concern me. Participating in blogs, Twitter, Facebook, forums, NaNoWriMo, or any of the gamut of writing outlets, despite the benefits, comes with some serious risks. Here are four of them:
1. Time Management
Stephen King once said that you should spend two hours reading and two hours writing everyday. I disagree. I think you should spend somewhere in the vicinity of four hours writing at least five days a week. By no means a hard limit (my sessions have ranged from 20 minutes to twelve plus hours), it’s an excellent point of reference. You have to be writing, a lot, if you want to be a writer. Spend all your time blogging, tweeting, etc, and you just might find yourself in novelist-to-be purgatory.
2. Mismanaged Social Networking
Too often I’ve had people I’ve never met before trying to friend me on Facebook, family asking me about my day on my blog, and tweets devolve into non-topical conversations. Each network has its own niche carved in the social stratosphere. Familiarize yourself with them and execute accordingly.
3. Unwanted Solicitation
I don’t like dating websites. Maybe I’m old fashioned, but shopping for someone seems like the wrong way to go about finding a partner. Focus on yourself however, and you will naturally gravitate towards like minded people. Same applies to books. If you’re craving an audience, beta-readers or paying consumers, don’t force your book on them. Get to know people. Not only will they be drawn to you, but you stand to make many friends in the process.
4. Word Counts
The worst offender. I spent three years waiting tables while I wrote my book. Word count was is a tool that works for me, not the other way around. Rely on quotas to reach a goal, and before you know it you’ve lost sight of your goal. I strive to achieve an emotion, to complete an arc, to introduce new conflict. And I don’t stop until that goal is achieved.
Your point of view on word counts is one I am coming to believe as well. Back when I was not writing but one of those lame “I want to write” people, word counts were the perfect thing to get me actually writing. They made me feel like I accomplished something. But now, writing for the word count is just ridiculous, and I am hindering myself. My goal is not to write XX number of words. It is to write beautiful words.
Love the way you finished your comment. And yes, that is an excellent goal.
A great reminder on time management … why so easy to forget? That’s a great insight into word count. I have a tendency to fixate on quotas, so appreciate the distinction. I think I’ll be printing this post to tape to the wall.
I’m so glad I could help! I haven’t written much in the last few months because I’ve been so busy editing, but it worries me that when it comes time to write again, my new online activities might hinder my creativity. So I too just might post this list nearby
I’ve done NaNoWriMo very successfully for three years in a row. It is amazing crazy wild writer fun.
Despite that, all of those drafts suck and I can barely use them as even ugly outlines of my novel. Instead, I have to scrap them if I want to really save the novels, only focusing on the ideas I had. The words were just plopped down for sake of plopping.
It was fun though. But now that I am focusing on writing quality instead of quantity, I do get a lot more of out it. You read my first draft and saw me freaking out over work count, which is silly. But when I can get a good word count and keep it consistent, I like it. I should just put the quality of the words I’m writing way before the quantity of them. Better to have a little good than a lot of useless muck.
Three years in a row? Wow. When you’re successfully published I want you to print those three copies and market them as a reminder to all that you too came from humble beginnings
What, market the crappy version, or the cleaned up version? haha. Actually, of those three novels, I’d really like to rework the two latest ones so they’re publishable. I’d still be working on them, accept one came with challenging historical research, and the other had a very big character problem that I’m not yet willing to try and fix. And lots of research.
(Historical fiction is probably the biggest reason I wanted to write scifi: I could make stuff up instead of research for months. Go me!)
And, let me see… I wrote about 247, 000 words for all three years. The last year I hit 112k in those 30 days.
I was really, really good at NaNoWriMo. Too bad my quality was so terrible!
Haha, so sci-fi is your cop-out? Geez, I see how it is :-/ I kid. Oh, and on a completely irrelevant note, Nov 30 is my birthday. And Mark Twain’s. And Winston Churchill’s B-)
Great insight on the word count/goal. I have also found that word counts generally don’t work very well for me. When I worked on my first NaNoWriMo novel, I focused on a daily word count of 1000 words. It let me get a lot of writing done. It helped me finish my book–but it wasn’t the book I wanted to write.
Contrast that to the last NaNoWriMo I participated in. In addition to a daily word count of 1500, I also aimed to write a complete scene each day. (I equate writing a “scene” to writing until something changes in the story. My definition of a “scene” is the same as author Holly Lisle’s.) That helped me write the book I WANTED to write while I also built the word count. Win!
You wrote with two simultaneous goals? Wow… how did you fit in time for other things, like sleep? Win for sure, well done.