When I attended the Writing Industries Conference earlier this year, one of the strongest pieces of advice was from the keynote speaker, Graham Joyce, who said that writers shouldn’t confine themselves to one area of writing.\u00a0 They should take their writing opportunities where they can.<\/p>\n
This is sound advice and in many ways goes along with the old saying of never putting all your eggs in one basket.\u00a0 For some time I’ve been thinking about other areas of writing and trying to expand my repertoir and when I started using Twitter I thought it would be an ideal way to keep abreast of all things writing, follow other writers and find great links to writing related sites.\u00a0 This is one of the beauties of Twitter – it is perfect for making these connections and finding the information you need, particularly if you’re a writer starting out on the road and need all the advice you can find.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, I also think it can be a problem and deliver too much advice.<\/p>\n
If I read every article and news piece that were posted by the people I follow on Twitter I’d never have the time to do my game writing, let alone the non-game writing I try to fit in.\u00a0 Twitter and the internet in general are wonderful, but it often feels to me like there is simply too much advice out there.\u00a0 For the would-be novelist who is having to fit in their writing during the evening and at weekends, reading all these articles must seriously eat into their writing time.\u00a0 But when anyone is starting out, any advice you can take on board is incredibly valuable.\u00a0 Or is it?<\/p>\n
Without doubt, there is lots of good advice to be had, but there is a lot that’s either bad, misguided\u00a0or written in a way that’s controversial and the controversy can sometimes hide the message or the quality of the advice.\u00a0 There is a lot of repetition, too, which can be frustrating.\u00a0 If you’ve already read a useful piece on character development you don’t want other articles written from the same standpoint but ones that offer further detail or another view altogether.<\/p>\n
Twitter can be a valuable filter if you learn to use it as such.\u00a0 If you follow people whose opinions you can respect, the links they post are likely to be more pertinent to you.\u00a0 This is not something you can latch onto overnight, so it’s important that you use and develop Twitter as a proper network that feeds you the kind of information you will find interesting and useful.<\/p>\n
We’re all in danger of being swamped by too much information, too many links and repetition that wastes our time, but we have to control this in the best way we can if we need to maximise our creative time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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