The basic reason I write
these Random Writing Tips posts, is the idea that the more things I have out on
the internet, the more likely someone will stumble upon them, learn that I
exist, be interested enough to buy some of my books, and I make a tiny fraction
of the money I make from my hated day job.
I guess there’s also the hope of building up a friendly group of fellow
creatives. But instead of just writing posts
on random topics, I’m trying to write some that are loosely connected under the
topic of Writing Tips.
That’s nice, but why am I
telling you that? Well, I was trying to
think of a tip to write up for this month and I had an idea. But after thinking about it for a bit, I wasn’t
sure if it was a new idea. When I first
started these, I kept a list of the posts I had done, but I’d forget to update
it and whenever I remembered I had to add the last four or five posts. (So, I have a Word doc for Writing Tips. The first page or two has the tips I’ve
started writing, and then there’s like four pages of ideas, and then I have the
archive. But I rarely scroll that far
down, which is why I keep forgetting about it.) So to see if I had done the
idea before, I had to click the Random Writing Tips label in the blog, and
scroll through all the posts. And while
I did find that the new idea was new, it was very similar to an old idea.
This took a few minutes
of my time, which isn’t that bad, but I did wonder if I could do something
better. I also may have just needed a
little project I could work on for a few days.
So I made my Random Writing Tips List page. It’s just a list of all my writing tips, along
with the day they were posted and a brief description. So now when I get an idea, instead of
spending a few minutes scrolling through my blog to see if I’d done it before,
I can spend a minute scrolling down a page.
Cool. But does this really warrant a blog on
writing tips? Well, if you write a blog
where you review movies, it makes sense to have a list of what movies you’ve
reviewed somewhere, either sorted by release date, genre, however you score
them, whatever. But if you’re doing
something as nebulous as Random Writing Tips, you may not think to keep a
list. And a list makes it easier for people
to check out whatever tips sound interesting without having to scroll through
my blog. Will this list increase the
chance someone will buy one of my books?
There’s no way to tell, but it can’t hurt.
***
Image from Pixabay.
