I am currently reviewing my writing resources weblinks. So far I have found 155 web links, around writing, journalism and short stories. I have what must be a couple of thousand other weblinks that I still have to go through to dig out writing weblinks, so it gave me pause for thought. Are these actually any good, or am I just wasting my time.
Age
Some of these writing resources have been curated over a good 10 to 15 years, so a lot of them are either dead or no longer relevant to me.
Relevance
Relevance is in relation to how they fit with my writing ideas at the moment. I will have looked at some because it featured a genre that I was considering writing for. Or it was related to additional types of writing as a form of income. Or just what I would have though of as a good writing site. Now I probably don’t have any idea why I selected it, so have to look at it again.
Quantity
As I said earlier, 155 web links that I know about. If all of them are any good, can you imagine the time it would take to regularly review them, extract topics that are useful for me and put them into practice? I’d hate to think, because obviously it’s something I haven’t done. And guess what, my blog will be an element of that as well, so I’m currently dissing something I am creating myself.
Conclusion
The conclusion I have come to is as follows;
- Weblinks all depend on my viewpoint, so will tend to be very specific.
- If I have referred to a link, it doesn’t means it’s of any use to you, but I’ll try to indicate why I selected it.
- What I try and do is extract useful information/skills that I’ll use in my day to day writing life from the site. I’m sticking it into a document that may one day become a ‘this is how I write’ book.
As ever, these are my opinions. Ultimately, you have to determine if weblinks are of any use to you and how you use them. The bottom line is, unless you are careful, they can soak up a lot of your time that you would be better using by actual writing.