Talking about writing is fun. There’s a sense that it’s productive, because it’s about writing, but it’s also a little bit illicit, because it doesn’t actually involve doing any writing. The rather popular variation of writing about writing (instead of writing what you’re actually supposed to be writing) is also great fun.

But is it stopping us from writing what we’re supposed to? After all, if we’re spending hours each week writing blogs (ahem), reading other people’s writing blogs and commenting on posts, we’ll be losing time we could be spending working on our ‘proper’ writing projects.

I think one of the big reasons for the popularity of writing-related-but-not-actually-proper-writing activities is that we all love the idea of writing, but actually getting started is something of a challenge. Then there’s the fact that we can, in fact, learn quite a lot from talking, reading and writing about writing. It’s great to read blog posts from people with loads of success and experience and pick up tricks or find out things we never knew before.

It can even improve our writing, so it’s certainly not a complete waste of time.

However, we can’t deny the fact that talking about writing is not the same as actually getting on with the business of writing. We can read and write all the blog posts we want and learn as much about writing and self-publishing and the industry as we want – but it’s not going to get that novel written.

At some point, we have to stop talking about it and just get on and write it. That doesn’t mean we should stop talking/reading/writing about writing altogether, just that there often comes a point when we need to re-evaluate how we’re actually spending our time, and whether we’re spending as much time on the actual writing as we could be.

Time is precious, and unless some Doctor Who-style plot becomes reality, there will only ever be 24 hours in a day. We need to get as much out of those hours as we can. Of course, writers can’t write all the time. We have to do other stuff, too: learn about self-publishing, market our work, get the word out and, yes, talk about process and methods of writing. But we still have to make sure we’re spending as much time writing as we possibly can – otherwise we’ll eventually end up running out of things to talk about.

What do you think? Do you find that talking about writing helps you, or do you just prefer to get on with the actual writing?