To Paragraph or To Post

A writer’s dilemma – do I paragraph or do I post?  Producing content – consistently – is part of the game.  And so I struggle with having to produce posts for my social media accounts to keep followers engaged AND to actually get down to the writing, the paragraphing, the story telling.

Time management gurus would say we all have the same 24 hours in a day – ok, sure, they are right.  No one’s yet to create a formula to time travel or to magically attach an extra 60 minutes onto the earth’s rotation.  There are places on our planet where they get more daylight, and others where darkness is predominant at certain times of the year.  (Side note – how do people manage that?  Talk about messing with your natural sleep cycles!  I guess it’s a good thing I live in the northeast United States so I don’t have one more sleep obstacle to hurdle.)

So how do we find the time to do the writers chore of butt planted in seat, hands upon keyboard, or pen and paper in hand?  It’s a matter of choice.  Pick and choose.  Waste time rearranging the furniture in your living room (for the 46th time) or get down to it.  When I look at the minutes and hours of how I spend my day, it’s a bit of a mystery.  It feels like a magician’s trick – Abracadabra, make Liz’s time disappear!  Poof – it’s vanished.  Into thin air.  Although I know it’s really there, I just can’t see it.  I’m sure it’s lurking behind the handkerchief – saddling the fence of illusion and misdirection.

Posting is relatively painless.  I’m an Instagram advocate (at the moment.)  It’s easy to post something quickly – to have gotten something “out there.”  Building a brand, a tribe, a following is work.  It takes time and energy and brain space.  It takes away precious minutes from paragraphing and crafting and pretty much everything else.

The funny thing is, although there is no greater time than now to be a writer in the world – with all the publishing platforms and options available to the modern writer – there is also the added layer, or strata, of creating that needs to get done.  The platform building, the social media extensions, the online connections that need to be woven into the fabric of the writer’s life.  And I’m not a great sewer.  I prefer to take my pants to the tailor for hemming.

It’s an AND world.  One must paragraph AND post.  Or watch Netflix.