Writing | Webcrumbs

I woke up early this morning and sat down to write. This is something I’ve wanted to do for a very long time but never set aside the time or space to do it. Instead, my early mornings and late evenings have been dealing with tending farm, working on my frontier land and cabin, building new and updated buildings in my kingdom, and fighting dragons. Yesterday, I stopped and realized that what little free time I have when I am not at work or doing things with my son were being eaten up by what I always called “Stupid Facebook Games.” So, I quit. Just like that. I removed all of the apps, their permissions, unsubscribed from their mailing lists, and blocked them from showing up on my wall. It was liberating.

So, I woke up early as I always do and sat down to write. Alas, I only wrote a single paragraph today and not a very good one, but it was a start and I’m glad I did it and look forward to continuing tomorrow. If you want to write, write every day, they say. And so I will. Before this, I only ever wrote daily during NaNoWriMo and the three years I have done that have always been wonderful. However, NaNoWriMo is a different sort of writing. There, you write with reckless abandon. You plough forward, never looking back, never editing, never questioning. Your goal is word count, not art. And it is liberating but it also has given me an incorrect view of what writing is. As I began working on this short story idea I have wanted to play with for some time, I realized that I can’t write like that anymore. I need to structure. I need to plan. I need to balance expository dialogue with action and description. I need to care whether my characters sound and feel real. I need the world I am crafting to be fully realized (at least enough for a short story). I could probably write the story in one marathon session and then go back and edit it but that somehow feels like the wrong approach. So, I am stepping back and working out the outline. I want to know where my story is going before I try to go too far into it.

I want to read more, especially paying attention to the craft as much as the story itself. I want to look for a writing class somewhere locally. I want to learn from other writers what works and doesn’t work for how they work and begin to find a process that works for me. So, that is the journey I am undertaking now. And it feels wonderful and exciting.

I am having social network fatigue. First, there are the long-form posting sites — my main blog, Posterous and Tumblr (though the latter may be argued as a short-form site too). Then there’s the quick snippet land of Facebook and Twitter. Then there’s the GPS-aware side of things like Foursquare, Loopt, MyTown, and Yelp! (I have since given up on Gowalla and Brightkite as not being particularly interesting to me).

The GPS group are getting a long form post from me soon enough as I have been evaluating them with an eye towards a blog post for some time now. At least that’s how I justify to my wife my continued use of them…

What I’m trying to figure out now is how I should talk to the world without having to worry about where I am writing. I am not a power blogger. I don’t really feel the need to blast 20 posts a day out there and I am not trying to set myself up as an expert in any particular field to make my site a destination for those in that field and resume fodder. I could just do things in my WordPress site and have my Posterous and Tumblr sites auto-carry the posts or at least links back to them and have links auto-posted to Twitter and Facebook. But I also like the ultra-simplicity offered by Tumblr and Posterous. It is just easier to pull a post together.

And then there’s the fact that I like posting pictures from my iPhone (not so much text — while I don’t hate the iPhone keyboard, I am just not interested in trying to type a lot on it) and I feel that it is much easier to go directly to Facebook or Tumblr than it is my WP site (yes, I have the app, I still find it a longer process than these other methods).

Maybe my problem is that I can’t commit to just one program and stick to that. I like so much of each of them that I want the freedom to use all of them whenever I feel like it.

I wonder what the rest of the world does. Where do you post and where do you ignore? How important is it to you to get your stuff out to as many sites as possible versus using just one and trusting that your audience (friends, family, whoever) can and will find it?