If you have been aspiring to be a
writer like I have been for quite a number of years, you have dreamed up this
amazing life where you write for a living and can enjoy the awesomeness of
creativity. What I am writing to tell you (and what so many writers before me
have said) is that the vision you see, does not exist till a long way down the
road.
So, you want to be a Freelance
Writer is the first step in a series of
articles I plan to write on my blog that can give an aspiring writer like
yourself an introduction in to the world of freelancing. I have had some ups
and downs entering it myself and wanted to share those difficulties with you.
Let’s
Get This Straight
Just so there is not any
misunderstandings, I want to explain to you exactly what type of freelancing I
am referring to. With the advent of social media and the desire of many companies
to have blogs a long with their products and services, it has opened up an
amazing market of writing that they need filled.
The freelance writing that has the
money in it is not the creative writing of short stories and novels like you
might think, but the dry copy writing or marketing articles, advertisements and
ghost writing. It’s dry, long, and sometimes you just stare at the screen
thinking, “How am I supposed to put this article together?”
Honestly, I have come to enjoy
working on these types of writings. Instead of taxing my creativity side, these
types of articles spend more time taxing my analytical side as it seems to be
more of a puzzle to put the research I have done together.
How
Do I Start?
The first thing you need to do is to
repeat this four times. “I’m not going to
make a lot of money at the start”. If you have a day job, I highly suggest
you keep it until you are making enough money in your writing to justify
leaving. At this point, I have been doing freelancing on and off for six years
and still require a day job. Freelancing is pretty much what buys me my toys.
After that, you need to make sure
you have the grit and determination to stick with it even when the going gets
tough. You will reach a point where you just don’t want to write anymore and
that’s not an option. Your money is reliant on you putting out a product and
making sure that product is the way the client wants it, not the way you want
it.
Finally, the last metaphorical
preparation you should do is to be ready for failure. Starting out, you may not
give an avalanche of work and you might have to go for a job that is a bit
lower in pay than you want. This job is not an instant success story and if you
think it is, I would recommend against starting it. Like any business you are
starting, it takes time, effort, and diligence to build it up in to anything worthwhile.
If you still with it and you have an iota of talent, you could be on the way to
a great career!
I’ll
cover more in the specifics to the freelancing world in the next post, so stay
tuned!
