A reminder: This post courtesy of Julie Jarnagin’s 101 Blog Post Ideas for Writers.
86. A turning point in your writing career.
Quick, answer me this question first: can you have a turning point in your career if you don’t technically have a career?
Okay, for the purposes of this post we’ll presume that the word “career” refers to time and effort put into something, rather than an actual livelihood. Good? Good.
Now that we have that straightened away, I believe that the most important turning point of my writing career was when I decided to consolidate my Internet presence. If that sounds strange or confusing, let me explain. Prior to starting this blog, my Internet presence was scattered across the web in small, meaningless fragments. I had several failed webcomics, an “art” website that I rarely updated, a Tumblr account that served no purpose than to echo the art site, a handful of different blogs and online journals of which none had any real focus, and one account on pretty much every social media outlet out there. Most of this stuff served as a fun distraction from life for a little while, but in the end they were meaningless wastes of my time that accomplished nothing for me and causes unneeded levels of stress.
When I decided to start this blog I also made another decision: to cut all the other stuff loose. I kept some stuff of course; Facebook and Twitter can be useful, and my Fanfiction.net and FictionPress.com accounts are excellent hosts for stories I want to share for free. All the other stuff, however, I cut away without mercy. I deleted accounts, removed websites, and murdered meaningless wastes of time with a grim smile on my face. I had decided, finally, that I was going to focus my spare time and energy on writing and building a related social media presence. Now I blog, I tweet, I keep an eye on Facebook, and I write. And believe me, it has made all the difference. I’ve been writing on this blog (mostly) consistently for almost a year now, which is a longer stretch of consecutive time than I’ve ever stuck with one project before. In addition to that, since I made the decision to put my focus on writing I’ve written more than ever before. I’ve finished one manuscript and am getting ever closer to finishing another. I don’t think I would be exaggeration if I said that I’ve written more in the past years than in the total ten years previous. It really was an excellent decision that has seriously affected my writing “career” for the better, and I just hope I am able to keep it up for as long as it takes to turn that “career” into a career.
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