Re-Create and Learn

A long time ago, I would say in 2009, I wrote on the website HubPages, and while it was good, it also had some serious drawbacks to it.  One of them was as long as I produce some sort of content, and fast, I was able to create a small penny wise income.  I was not able to earn the income which I envisioned would make me happy and feel good about my writing.

Which is not a good place to be if I was to grow as a person and an artist of any sort of nature.  It was designed to “pull away” from quality and focus on quantity and forum movement.  I was not the type of person to market my work, and I was not a strong enough writer or person to question how to make myself better.

So, here’s a snippet of what I would write, from one of the articles I wrote there:

In this business everyone is setting goals, and they will often have a timeline as to when they will make money online (or will want to do so). The truth of the matter is we all want to make money writing on hubpages, and get massive traffic and all that that means. We envision it, and some will publish hubs to get it done, but it boils down to how long you want to wait before you have to get something done. For the most part people believe that they can go online and make money in a few weeks. Not just a bit of money but a lot of money, say $500 a day type money. For the most part they are partly right. See, it is all about a definition of money, You know if you make a penny you’ve made money on hubpages. Again, that is why i say they are partly correct. They have forgotten about a few things. One the market for certain niches are well saturated and the writing needs to be high quality. Great content is a must in this business and this is because on the Internet for writers to earn money you will need to be found by search engines. Writing is a business as well as an art. I am of course not suggesting we write to make money, but we don’t need to be starving writers. In fact we should be writing for a living if that is the goal. It is a business and with a little online/ Internet knowledge you’ll be well on your way to success. Which means time lines (also known as goals.)

Looking at this writing, I mean really looking, it’s not great. I can say that as I person I was a babbler, and didn’t delve deep into the subject.  I re-read this, looked at it, and I felt as if I didn’t learn from my mistakes, I could have done something different, built more of a rapport to potential readers.  I could have stopped promising the moon, when I could have under promised.

Is this worth looking at again?  Yes.

To become more creative, is to take some time away and learn from the lesson I gave myself.  I was not creating I was simply putting words in a series of sentences. And I repeated it.

Looking at this, knowing that I babble to make something look good, I was trying to make a point which should be about 20 words, with well over 300.  I could have said “If you want to earn income, do better than your best.”  I could have written about how to improve your writing, but would anyone take me serious?

Probably not.

The reason for my statement is that while more of the professional creative artists saw right through my “smart” wording, the people who didn’t couldn’t.  It is general and surface statements. It doesn’t show that I know what I should know, more it shows a vague idea in brush strokes that could mean anything. Here’s a few things I’ve learned.

• It is repetitive
• It is uninspiring
• It doesn’t give an answer, but general feelings
• It sounds padded
• It is trying to be business like- and failing
• It comes across as being written quickly, and not with anyone in mind
• It comes across as both naive and patronizing
• It doesn’t give anything in terms of responsibility
• It changes tone, and doesn’t use the “I statement” at all.

It was not creative, it felt that it was trying to be something that it shouldn’t be.  It was fast, underwhelming, and in the end, it was something I forgot I wrote about until this point.  One of the biggest things I learned was that I am more reflective than I was at that point in my life.  Being careful about what I can learn from mistakes is the key to learning.

The sentence which struck me the most was the comment about success, near the end of the paragraph.  That’s quite possibly the biggest lie I could have mad to my readers.  It takes a lot of work to make money, and it takes the life out of you if you want to see yourself successful in the grand scheme of earning money.

I could re-create this, but I have already learned from this.

It doesn’t need to be re-created, or made better, it simply needs for me to let go of it, to re-create my thinking and learn from my mistakes in it.