Wasting Words, or Just Wasting Time?

I am a poet, a blogger, a Facebook User, I use Twitter, I’m writing a novel, I write short stories (sometimes), and I put out a monthly newsletter for my local town. I enjoy doing all of those things, and some of them I do every single day – the Social Media pieces of writing, commenting on Facebook, and tweeting on Twitter. I blog at least every coupe of days, and often post a new blog post once a day or more. I am a writer.

I’m a member of a writing group that meets once a week, and another group that meets once a month, and I will always write something new either at, or for those groups. The thing I most want to be though, I think, is a published novelist. So why don’t I write a novel?

I sort of am, writing a novel. The writing I do at the weekly writing group, is often a short piece that will go into my novel, eventually. I think on the writing prompt for the session, and think on my main characters from my novel, and about what I’ve written so far for my novel, and I write, and there is another fragment of writing for that novel I’m working on.

But is this a way to actually write a novel, I wonder? I have short pieces, perhaps 150 to 300 words, and that’s it. a week or so ago I actually managed to write a new piece for my novel that followed directly from the piece I wrote the week before. I happened to have the same notebook with me, and so it was simple to look at the previous week’s work before starting on the writing exercise for that day.

I’ve used various notebooks for the writing exercises, and I’ve written other parts of my current work in a file on my laptop. I’ve written other pieces on my phone, other parts on our PC. If I gathered up all of those pieces of writing of that novel, I’m not really sure how many words I’d have. It may be 50 to 60 thousand words. But am I putting all of those bits of writing together? No, I’m not, I’m happily doing other kinds of writing, the blogging, the comments on Facebook, the tweets on Twitter, and the poems at other times.

I’m writing words, but as the title of this blog suggests, I’m wasting my time, if that is what my writing aim is … Or am I? Living my life, thinking about things, being a part of my various communities, these all add to my knowledge of life, and five me ideas about things. And surely writers have to have interesting things to write about, ideas, thoughts.

So perhaps I’m not wasting my words, perhaps I am writing that novel, and perhaps this novel, these characters, will finally make it out into the real world. What do you think? Will Meredith and Travis, my main characters, beat the bad guy, and then finally commit to a relationship together? What do you think?