Quick tip 9: Pinterest for learning your craft

Disclaimer: I am in no way associated with Pinterest beyond being an enthusiastic user. I’m not being paid for any element in this post, nor have I been approached to write about it. I merely wish to share with you a tool that I find invaluable as a writer and believe you’ll find an asset to your writing.

​Pinterest is a tool of many uses. Thus far I’ve blogged about (click links to visit previous posts) why Pinterest is great for writers, how to do it right the first time, injecting your brand into your boards, and storyboard creation. In this post I’m going to talk about how Pinterest was my classroom as a beginning writer, and how it can be yours too!

Pinterest was my best source of learning when I decided to commit to writing as a career. I wanted to learn as much as I could to make my writing quality, and worth reading. Trawling the internet was a start, but saving and categorising my learning sources was difficult. I needed to know about plot development, character development, setting description, and eventually how to revise and edit, then how to publish. I can tell you, there is an absolute multitude of information out there, and it pays to keep what speaks to you in a handy place. At this early stage I’d been using Pinterest for teaching ideas and home improvement things, and then it occurred to me that Pinterest would be the perfect platform to collect my learning and preserve it for others who’d like to use it.
When I started out, I found bits and pieces of writing wisdom all over the place. There are several superb websites with a large amount that interested me, but there were also sources with just an article or infographic I was interested in. I spent hours and hours collecting items together, and I wanted to cut out all the searching for quality pins for others, and provide boards that contained quality pins and what really worked for me. So, when looking at my Write boards and Biz boards, what you’re looking at right there is all the research that’s made me the writer I am today. My Pinterest account is a resource I add to daily, and revisit several times a week – it’s a working resource for me, and you too can use my boards to develop your craft and save and/or share what works for you.

A bonus about Pinterest is, when you’re setting up your account, you can choose to do it your way – have your own titles, sections, and ways of saving everything so it works for you (I’ve written a post about this already, see link above). I suggest looking at other people’s accounts to see how they set out their boards and jotting notes down as you go – map it out even. Instead of having several boards under WRITE, you may have a single WRITE board and create your sections from there e.g. character development, plot development, setting development.

Side note: I chose not to do it this way because you can only create sections within a BOARD, not sections within a SECTION, and I felt I needed to be able to separate out, especially in the case of my Character Inspiration boards – each section represents a person with their name and birthdate, so it had to be that way. Incidentally, you can have up to 500 sections within a board (yes, I’ve found that out through creating 500 sections in my character boards and having to start second boards!). Give yourself room to expand and, if you’re keen on building a following, do your best to avoid deleting boards, as this deletes all the followers of that board (whom sometimes don’t follow your whole account, just that board).

I encourage you to pop on over to my Pinterest account and have a good look through my setup. It may or may not suit the way you’d like to do things, but therein learning happens. Truth be told, I’m not entirely happy about my Business boards setup, but for now, they work ok. They’ll most likely be my next rework at some time in the future. I’m very happy with my Write boards, particularly my character banks, and image bank. There is so much of great value to writers there, and I offer it to all of you to save you the time and hassle of beginning completely from scratch.

So, if you know anyone headed in the writing direction, or anyone else wanting to learn a new craft, let them know about my account and share away. Pinterest isn’t just a ‘save’ space, it can be utilised as a learning space, for marketing, sharing, and so much more!
Enjoy!