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| Photo credit: pOOfkAt on Flickr |
So the other day I wrote a
post about Why I'm Glad I Joined Twitter in which I basically wrote 500 words
about how awesome Twitter is, especially for writers.
However. As awesome as Twitter and
other social media sites (hello tumblr and Facebook) are, there is one very
scary danger that we writers are particularly vulnerable to: the Time Suck of
Doom.
All writers have their own time
management challenges. Many of us have a full time job, or are full time
students, or full time parents or some combination of all of the above, and
then on top of that we're writers and we're putting together a book (or books)
and maintaining a blog and popping in to Twitter and Facebook and tumblr to try
to keep our web presence from shriveling up and dying, all while trying to
remember to eat three square meals a day and keep a healthy lifestyle (oh, and
someone needs to do laundry. You should probably get on that).
Point being, writers don't often
have an abundance of time— and we rarely have any time to waste.
So when you consider just how easy
it is to fall into the trap of spending hours scrolling through your
Twitter/tumblr/Facebook feed (what I like to call the Time Suck of Doom),
social media can be just as dangerous as it is useful.
Truth is, too much of anything can
be a bad thing, and social media is no exception. For writers, our number one
priority (after family, bills and remaining generally healthy) must be the writing.
It doesn't matter what you're writing, what matters is that you constantly
improve it, add to it, practice it until you have a finished manuscript (or
four), and then when you've completely polished it and are ready for
publication, you keep writing.
Because for writers, there is
nothing more important than improving our writing skill. Because yes, the
connections you make through social media are fantastic and yes, a web presence
is important for writers in this day and age and yes, you do find some really
incredible and useful links through social media, but the writing must always
come first.
So next time you catch yourself
surfing the web/streaming videos/playing XBox when you know you really
should be writing that book/blog post/poem/short story, remember what your top
priority is as a writer and get back to work.
You can tweet about it later.
What do you do to fight the Time
Suck of Doom?
