Is Publishing Articles on Internet Writing Sites a Waste of Time?

After ten years of moving from menial job to menial job, just after Christmas of 2008, I decided that I had finally had enough, and  made up my mind that I would give up the pursuit of a career that I did not want, and instead, invest all my time and energy into my first love; writing.

At school I was always encouraged to write, my teachers telling me I had a gift and that I should definitely make it my future livelihood. Of course, when you’re young and full of dreams anything seems possible. When you leave school and have to take any job you can find to pay your rent, your childhood dreams take a back seat, and this is without a doubt, what happened to me.

For ten years I didn’t write a thing, not one poem, story, barely even a letter. After all, who needs to write letters nowadays with the invasion of emails and text messages. For ten years I struggled, putting hard work into jobs I did not want, going into places I did not want to be, and as sad as it is to admit, wasting my life to a large extent.

And so, in January of this year, something cracked inside me, and I thought no more; at the age of twenty six I am going to go after what I want, I am going to be a writer. I never thought that it would be as difficult as it is to get well paid work, being a writer. I was not naive enough to think that I would be able to send a finished story to a magazine and for it to be immediately accepted, and so I thought that it would be a good idea to try and hone my craft on the internet.

The first problem I encountered with the world of online writing was the fact that there are no websites, that I can find, that are dedicated to the short story. All the websites that I have looked into are mainly after “how to” articles, sharing knowledge that you may or may not have with the world wide web community. Having no experience in writing articles I found this rather daunting.

The second problem, and without question the biggest spanner possible that could be thrown into the works of online writing, is the low, sometimes almost non existent level of pay that these websites are willing to pay their writers. One thing I learned quickly as I perused these sites; you will not get rich posting your articles on the web.

Which brings me to the question in my title. Is publishing your articles on internet writing sites a waste of time? My answer would have to be no, it is not. My reason for coming to this conclusion is that while you will never be able to give up your day job writing for these sites, the practice you get in perfecting your craft is unbeatable. If you have the time, you can write articles all day, on any topic you like.

The most valuable thing that these online posting sites can offer is feedback. Some sites use a rating system, if your articles are rated near the top, you know your doing something good. Some articles simply let you see how many people have read your articles, which, when that number reaches the thousands, is hugely encouraging. Some sites let readers leave comments, which of course, can sometimes be irrelevant, but more often than not are very supportive.

I won’t stop writing articles for these sites, now that I am back into the swing of things. At first, I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to write articles, having only written short stories before, but I do now find article writing quite enjoyable, and because it is a different style of writing than fiction writing, I have learned a new skill, and hope to constantly improve on it.