Writing for a Living

Video Transcript

"If you want to write for a living, the first thing you should do is lower your expectations. You're not going to be driving that Lambroughini. Maybe an old Ford Escort... one of those cars they're not making anymore. There are a lot of those around now. Writing for a living, if you don't want to find a job as a professional or technical writer, or as a copywriter--that's what most writing jobs are--you're going to be doing a lot of sales: pitching yourself to magazines, to book publishers, to agents, if you're writing mostly books, to get them to send you work. So, a tremendous amount of the work is not actually writing. Freelance writing means knowing the markets, knowing who you're trying to sell to, and sometimes this means you're going to tailor what you're writing for particular markets. If you want to be a freelance writer for freedom, this is actually the wrong approach, because you're not going to write what you want, you're going to write what people want, what publishers want, magazine editors, and so on. It can be done. There are people who do it very successfully. There is an American Society of Journalists which will, if you join that, it will help you find markets. It will help you learn how to deal with the legal aspects, because there are a lot of contractual aspects to freelance writing. You have to learn about a tremendous number of things. You have to learn how to do research, because if you write a magazine article it's got to be adequately researched, and of course you have to learn, basically, how to write. You need to have all those basic skills of grammar, and punctuation. You may not use them all the time, but you need to have them available in your tool chest."