What Every Aspiring Writer Needs To Remember

This post was supposed to begin with an infographic that provided a list of famous writers complimenting insulting other famous writers. It was supposed to help drive home the idea that great writing is subjective.

That infographic  would have helped illustrate it in simple terms and perhaps made you smile or gasp at what these men and women said about other authors except I couldn’t make the infographic work the way it was supposed to.

The designer built it in such a fashion it wouldn’t render properly and I decided I didn’t have time to try to figure out how to fix it and that offers its own lessons.

What Every Aspiring Writer Needs To Remember In The Digital Age

If you are publishing content that you want to be consumed on digital devices you need to figure out what devices your readers use and then test your content on those devices.

When your digital content has formatting issues it doesn’t matter if you just wrote the next Tom Sawyer or Tale of Two Cities because people aren’t going to spend much time trying to figure out why it doesn’t work, they are just going to push on to the next thing.

My kids hear me talk about this kind of thing all the time. If you are going to spend time working on putting something together you might as well take a few minutes more to make sure you did it right.

People run races for a variety of reasons and sometimes the goal is to just cross the finish line but most of the time it is more than that. Most of the time we are interested in not just finishing but trying to win the damn thing.

And if you can’t beat the entire field or placing in the top 10 it might be about beating those few people who have been running alongside of you.

One of the ways you do that is by taking the time to make sure your content is formatted properly otherwise you wasted your time. If you don’t care if people can read your work online you might as well just leave your words on paper in the diary you keep under your bed.

What do you think?