How did you begin your career as a freelance writer?

My career began in two stages. I first started freelancing about 30 years ago, but only in an "off and on" sort of way, as I was still working full-time and didn't have much spare time for writing. I still managed to get quite a few articles published.

In 1996, my husband and I were talking about various ways to increase the family income. Someone had started talking to him about Amway, and he was looking into that -- a thought which, I confess, simply appalled me. I thought, if we need extra income, I'd far rather earn it doing something meaningful than "selling soap." I was no longer working, so this seemed the ideal time to sit back down and start reading my Writer's Market and getting some queries out there. Within the year, I was getting regular assignments from several publications (all of which, by the way, are now dead -- hopefully no thanks to me!). It was rather gratifying, as I'd been TEACHING freelance writing, and I could now say, "Hey, this really does work!"

What has been the most challenging part of your career?

Probably the most challenging part of this TYPE of career is the need to stick to it and force yourself to write those queries and get things out the door when perhaps you'd really rather be doing something else. Unlike a "day job" where someone is standing over you, telling you what to do and when, as a freelancer, the only person standing over you is YOU.
Initially, the self-discipline is the hardest part.

Ironically, however, once you really get entrenched as a freelancer, one of the biggest challenges can be just the opposite: Knowing when to STOP working, and put your personal life first. When you're working at home, it's always so easy to just put in a little more time at the computer, answer a few more e-mails, polish up that last piece, etc. The more you rely on that freelance income, the more difficult it becomes to "step away from the computer" and do something else. I've heard from so many writers who have so much trouble trying to keep their evenings and weekends separate from their "work" time, and who never seem to be able to take a "vacation." (We always take "working" vacations, with the idea that wherever we go, we can find things to write about when we get home.) When your office is in your home, there is no obvious "separation" between your work day and your personal day (as you have when you "drive home" from the office).

Another challenge is choosing what you WANT to work on vs. what you NEED to work on. Most freelancers, I suspect, get into this business because we love to write. Most of us probably dreamed of writing novels, short stories, poetry, etc. -- but we also thought it would be just grand to make a living "doing what we love," which is WRITING. But writing for a living is very different from writing for the love of writing -- and you can easily find that all those things you DREAMED about writing (the novel, the stories, the poetry) are put on endless hold while you write the things that pay the rent. And this then puts freelancing on a par with any other "day job" -- you end up doing what you have to do to keep the money coming in, at the expense of what you might have dreamed of doing in the first place. Hence, I find that a lot of freelance writers (myself included) start dreaming about the day when we can STOP "doing what we love" for a living, and get back to the sorts of things we wanted to write in the first place.

What are the advantages of becoming a full time freelance writer?

That's a difficult term to define. What IS a full-time freelance writer? I define this as someone who earns the majority of their family income from writing -- i.e., a function of how much of your LIVING is based on freelancing, rather than specifically how much of your TIME is spent on writing.

The primary advantage of becoming a freelancer at any level is that your life is your own. I love working at home; I would hate to ever have to go back to an office to earn my living. I love working on my own schedule; I can get up when I want to (which tends to be late) and stay up as long as I want (which also tends to be late), and to work when I'm most inclined to be creative. I can balance my schedule so that at those times of day when I'm feeling more or less mindless, I can handle household chores, and when the juices are flowing, I can be at the computer. I can set up my workplace any way I like -- and when I need to "go home" it's just a step away.

I can also choose my own projects. I can choose to write about things that interest me, and I don't have to take on projects that are of no interest. (You'll read a lot of advice about how to take on various types of commercial writing, brochures, and so on -- my personal thought is that this would bore me to death, and the main reason I became a freelancer was to avoid being bored by my work.)

However, there's a downside to all this. Being a freelancer means being very much at the mercy of the marketplace. You don't set your fees; instead, you try to choose publications that pay a decent amount for your writing. You can't tell a magazine, "Here's my article, and I want $500 for it," if, in fact, the magazine pays 5 cents a word. Increasingly, I find that we writers are dealing with less experienced editors who have no idea how articles are written in the first place and apparently have no concept of what used to be basic magazine etiquette (i.e., sending rejections and so forth). If you don't get paid, if a magazine folds, or if a magazine suddenly changes its contract and decides it must have all rights to what you write, there isn't much you can do about it. And if you ARE a full-time freelancer (i.e., most of the household income comes from YOU), there can be issues of health insurance, the fact that you get no sick leave or vacation pay, the fact that you're responsible for your retirement and pension fund, and so forth.


Describe a typical day in the life of a freelance writer?

I don't think there is such a thing! Every writer has their own routines, their own schedules and practices. One will tell you that it's just essential to get up at 5 a.m. and write for two or three hours before the rest of your family starts their day. (I can barely open my eyes at 5 a.m.) One will tell you that it's essential to write for a certain number of hours each day; another will say that it's vital to crank out a certain number of words or pages per day.

I tend to get up fairly late in the morning and attend to any household tasks and errands that need to be done first; then, after lunch, I'll settle down to the computer for the rest of the afternoon. I'll break for dinner, and then often go back to the computer for another couple of hours before breaking off for the night, when I curl up with a snack and a book for awhile before going to bed. I don't try to allocate any specific number of hours to work -- it all depends on what work is pending, and what is required to get that particular job done. If I'm working on a specific assignment, I'll tend to focus on that and get it done before moving on to anything else; I don't like to be juggling two or three different jobs at once. I like to get ONE job done and then move on to the next. But if you have several assignments pending, sometimes that's not possible -- so you may be writing a query to one magazine while conducting research or interviews for another piece, while polishing up the final draft of something else.

You'll also find that there are spells of "feast or famine" in this business. You can go for weeks without having too much to do -- and then suddenly five assignments will hit at once, all with about three weeks before deadline, and you're running madly to try to get them all done in time. (And then you wait weeks for the checks to come in after doing all that "rush" work!) So I honestly don't think there is any such thing as a "typical" freelance day!


What does it take to succeed as a freelance writer?

It takes determination, and it takes skill. It's not "politically correct" to really talk about that last little qualification, but let's face it, if you are not a good writer, you are not going to succeed as a freelancer. I get e-mails regularly from people who want to start writing, and they can't spell and have apparently only a nodding acquaintance with punctuation and grammar -- so I just politely point them to our "getting started" section on the site and say no more. This is a competitive business, and there are thousands of very good, skilled writers out there -- so basically, without the ability to write well, one isn't going to make it in this business.

But even if one DOES write well, there's that "determination" bit again. I've known a number of people who were good writers and always felt that "maybe, someday" they'd do something with that -- but someday just never comes. Self-discipline is the only way to get ahead in this business; again, no one is going to stand over you and force you to write. So if you're not good at forcing yourself to do something that, on a particular day, you may not WANT to do, it's not going to happen.



How does one get started freelancing?

OK, I'm going to beg out on that one. I've written two complete books AND set up an entire, HUGE section of my website on that question -- so it's not something that can be answered in a paragraph. The very very short answer is that you need to learn the ropes involved in querying publications, researching articles, and polishing and submitting your work. You need to understand how to read and negotiate a contract. You need to know how to identify potential markets, and determine whether a market is the right match for you -- based not only on topic but also on the level of expertise and quality that a market may expect of its writers. You need to know what types of articles a market will be looking for (and what types are generally "sure sellers" as opposed to "unlikely sellers"). As a tip -- personal experience articles are the LEAST likely to sell, while "how-to" articles that offer some helpful advice to the reader are the MOST likely to sell. There's a lot to learn about breaking in, but fortunately there is a huge amount of free information out there that can help you do just that
(http://www.writing-world.com/basics/index.shtml)


Is there any special training one needs to be a freelancer?

There's "learning the ropes," as I said above, but one doesn't need to go to school or take special classes or anything like that. This is one career that, if you ARE a good writer, you really CAN learn yourself just from what is out there on the web and in some excellent books on the topic (and, of course, from experience).


Do you have any advice for someone considering a career in freelance writing?

Um.... Apart from 600 articles on the website? (Well, admittedly, not all 600 of those are MINE.)

Seriously, I think the one piece of advice that I would give any would-be freelancer is to think carefully about why you are getting into this career and whether this is really what you want to do. It IS a very enjoyable way to make a living. The money CAN be very good. But I do see a lot of people thinking about freelancing who really want to write poetry or stories or personal experience essays -- and they're really hoping they can make a living at it. That just isn't going to happen; the market isn't there. (There are lots of nonpaying markets for poetry, literary fiction and essays, but the key word is "nonpaying.")

What do you dream about doing? If you really enjoy writing, just about ANY type of writing, and you dream about using that skill to earn a living, this is a great way to do it. But if you're dreaming about a particular TYPE of writing, and you're hoping to finance that dream by taking on some OTHER type of writing, it doesn't work. One of the pieces of advice I always give people is that "if you want to write, don't get a JOB that involves writing." I worked as a magazine editor for several years, which involved a lot of writing -- and the last thing I wanted to do when I got home at the end of the day was WRITE. The same will be true if you are a freelance writer and you're getting lots of assignments for articles -- and you'd like to find some time to work on your novel or whatever. By the time you get done with your "work" writing -- the writing that you get PAID to do -- the last thing you'll want to do is "writing for pleasure." So think carefully about where you want to be as a writer in, say, five to ten years -- and whether freelancing will help you achieve those goals or hinder them.

But if the goal really is to find a way to use your skills and interests to bring in some much-needed income, I can't think of a more enjoyable way to do it than freelance writing!