To a writer there’s nothing more satisfying than seeing your work published (other, perhaps, than getting paid for it). Before the internet this always meant waiting at least several days, and sometimes, if you’ve written a book, it can be a year or more.
But now you can make a blog entry or write a few words on Twitter, click a button, and you’re published. You can do this several times a day, and many people do, but to me just making one post a day is equally satisfying. Better still, though, is to make several posts each day to each of several blogs!
With facilities such as Twitter and Facebook available, everyone and his brother is publishing their learned thoughts online and becoming a writer. But is this increasing the quality of all the writing we read on the internet?
Hardly. Good quality writing is still hard to find (just as it is offline). It just means there is more low-quality writing. The only thing any writer can do about that is to do his best to raise the standards of online writing by writing quality content every day and resisting any temptation to write sub-standard junk.
If you’re a writer you have to write in accordance with the creative urge within you. Just as a painter or sculptor wouldn’t place on public view something that was junk (apart from purveyors of “modern art” rubbish), so it is with true writers.
To be truly creative you have to be capable of producing work that enhances and reflects your culture, that makes people better for having come into contact with it, be it writing, painting, music or sculpture. The more spoilt for choice we are for such things the luckier we are.
So let’s all of us in our own way make the internet a better place for the content – writing, graphics, music, or whatever – that we ourselves produce.
Philip Gegan
