Bad Habits of Beginning Writers
Hi there folks! I’ve been reaching out to a lot of new / young writers recently about some trends that I have been seeing, and so I wanted to make a post about it. I also want to start by saying that all of my posts or articles are just friendly, unrequested advice, but I truly only want to help. So, if my advice isn’t what is right for you - that’s fine! You aren’t bad! These are just things I wish I had known sooner, so I am sharing this with you. So, here are my top 3 lesson’s I wish I’d learned sooner:
The mistake here is that so many writer’s I know forget to start building their professional following until late in the game. I wrote a whole post (found here) last week about how writers can utilize social media to promote their writing. Today, I just wanted to quickly stress why you should be. The sooner you start professional social media accounts, the larger your following will be when you need one. By “need one”, I mean when you start getting published. Some publishers do look at your social media following before choosing who to accept. If they only have one more spot open, and it’s between someone with 5k followers, or someone with 12 followers, they are going to go with the 5k, because they will bring more people to the site / magazine. Even if being published doesn’t matter to you, you have a following to share your work with. Plus, when people find your work, you will eventually have a few creepy people who message you regularly to say they love you. I only have 6k followers between facebook and tumblr and I already have 3 creepy followers messaging me. You do not want them finding your real facebook. You want them to follow a professional one only so they stay away from your real life, friends, and family.
I look at what people I admire do on their social media and try to keep things similar. I only post relevant comment on my professional pages. I occasionally post personal pictures if I am doing something cool, but I keep it about me and my writing - not my family vacation or binge watching habits. I definitely do not use it the same way I use my personal social media.
#2 Publishing via Posting:
If you write for fun and just want to share it with the world, feel free to do that. It’s not my job to tell you what to do. Still, it breaks my heart when I see such incredible poems or stories posted onto a blog or public facebook page etc. Once you post your work, it is considered published. So many of you are so incredibly talented. You work is worth payment. In my opinion, you should be submitting it to magazines. Then sharing the magazine’s published version of your work before you post it yourself.
While I 100% believe that all of you amazingly talented writers deserve to be making money from every published work you have out there - that is a high expectation. I applaud anyone that holds out until they feel they got a fair price for their work, but it is also okay if you choose to work with smaller magazines to publish work without getting paid. Publishing through websites and magazines still helps you further get your name, and by extension, your writing, out into the world. You deserve that.
I stand by my statement that so many of the people I follow are incredibly talented and gifted writers who all deserve to be paid for their hard work and published. However, I also notice how many people don’t edit their work before they post-publish it. Don’t feel bad - I am guilty of this too especially with my weekly articles (I’m a busy person, sometimes I just don’t have the time!). It is so important that when you post a poem or a story, even a fan fiction, that you take the time to actually edit it - especially with poetry.
Poems are not written in one day. Every professional / published poet I know spends days, weeks, and occasional months on even the shortest poems. My most recently published poem, “Mermaids”, took five months for me to finish. It’s less than 20 lines. When I was in high school and college, I would regularly write a poem in one sitting and leave it at that. I’d post it online and share it and honestly - they were never good. They could have been if I spend more than 20 minutes on them though. So please, writers, just edit your work. Read it aloud to yourself. Walk away from it for a few days and come back before you post or submit your creative writing anywhere.
Best of luck and happy writing!
MarinaProse’s Writing Blog
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