Writing and HubPages

WRITING IS EASY, HUBPAGES ARE HARD

I have been writing now for almost 30 years. I just do 1 page a day as a minimum. If I am more creative, great but if not, then at least I have done one page. At the end of the year, I will have at least 365 pages that I can work with. So, I thought that setting myself the task of writing 1 hubpage a day for a year would be a simple matter of transferring my skill to the web.

Wrong.

If I am writing a page, I can put a heading – or a load of headings – to give me the structure without having to write it all out now, especially if the heading would take me slightly off-track. Also, I could go back over a piece of writing and fill in two half-pages by filling in a heading or by adding something to what I have already written. It is also typical of me to have multiple projects going on at the same time. All of this makes it very easy to add 1 page a day because I am not restricted by writer's block or one subject. Anyway, at the end of it, I can take the manuscript for the book and severely edit it down if it has become bogged down in nonsense. None of this is a problem.

However, HubPages are completely different. They are finished articles. They have a beginning, an end and a progression from one to the other. To write a HubPage is to write a finished piece. Also, it really needs to be a third or fourth draft before it gets published otherwise you are wasting people's time for a jumbled, incoherent mess. What I normally do is write a draft, then leave it a few days. Then I come back to it, re-writing part or all of it, then leave it a few days. So there is a delay between writing it and finally publishing it.

I thought to fall back on my old writings to help while I re-learn how to write for HubPages but they have been written with a book format in mind, while HubPages suits talking about a single point or at best a group of points. Publishing my works straight to HubPages just would not work.

WRITING IS HARD, HUBPAGES ARE EASY

I think that I have finally cracked HubPages. I have put all my existing writings to one side for the moment and I have focused on those smaller articles I have always wanted to write but have never found a place for in my existing writings.

In addition, the immediacy of the format allows me room to chat more about my life and what has happened in it. By immediate I mean that the shortest time someone has taken to comment on one of my works was 3 minutes – so far!

That has been the real pleasure for me concerning HubPages – learning a new way to write and having new subjects to write about.