Are you new to writing and exploring what type of writing you want to do? This eBook excerpt, How Do I Start a Freelance Career?, from the Beginning Writer’s Answer Book, covers everything from freelance writing to technical writing and writing for niches – such as comic strips, book reviews, and more!
In this post, we’ve picked a couple of frequently asked questions about freelance writing and making money. Enjoy!
For many years, I’ve had a deep-seated desire to write, and I’d love to break in to the field and make enough money to support my family. How much money can I make freelancing?
A lot of money can be made by freelancing, but most writers receive fairly little income while they perfect their writing and marketing abilities. There are hundreds of full-time freelancers who make good livings but who started slow—freelancing on the side while holding down a day job. Your best bet is to begin with magazine articles, since the market is large and varied, and fodder for articles is everywhere.
What are the advantages and disadvantages I might face as a full-time freelance writer?
There are many advantages to being a full-time freelance writer. You are your own boss. You control your working hours and, in a sense, the amount of money you make. You practice as a profession the thing you enjoy most. You may have much more opportunity to be creative than if you worked as a staff writer. You choose what you want to write about, and get paid for learning something new through research. You can work at home, and if you’re a parent, you can save on childcare expenses. In addition, the research involved in writing can bring you into contact with interesting, stimulating people.
On the other hand, most writers face innumerable rejections (and no income) before making their first sale. To avoid losing faith in yourself and your career at this stage, it helps if you are thick-skinned, self-confident, and persistent. Unlike a job in a company, freelance work does not bring regular paychecks in regular amounts. Further, you are responsible for collecting your own payments. You receive no fringe benefits, such as the insurance and retirement benefits that company employees receive. Being self-employed, you must spend part of your working time on administrative tasks like bookkeeping and filing income tax and social security forms.
Writers usually work alone, and this can be a disadvantage (depending on your personality), especially after a number of days without contact with your colleagues. If you’re married, it’s best to have a spouse who approves of your career and all it entails, since your irregular working hours and irregular income will affect him or her.
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Gene Weingarten suggests that winning a Pulitzer Prize is “pure luck.”
“The Pulitzer is a crapshoot,” The Washington Post feature writer/humor columnist says. “Your piece has to hit a few people the right way at the right moment.”
Easy for Weingarten to be modest: He’s the only two-time winner of the Pulitzer for feature article writing. In the first, 2008’s “The Fiddler in the Subway” (“Pearls Before Breakfast” when it first appeared in The Washington Post), Weingarten arranged for violin virtuoso Joshua Bell to play outside a D.C. Metro station during morning rush hour to see if anyone would notice. His 2010 winner, “Fatal Distraction,” recounts stories of parents who accidentally killed their children by forgetting them in cars.
Those stories and 18 others are collected in The Fiddler in the Subway, which includes an introduction that doubles as a superbly instructive primer on writing.
Here, the feature-writing guru offers the inside story on how he crafts his Pulitzer-grade prose.
What’s the one thing an aspiring writer must understand about writing?
I can tell you what it’s definitely not. It’s definitely not “I before e except after c,” because what about ‘either’”?
But seriously … is there one thing an aspiring writer must understand?
That it’s hard. If you think it’s not hard, you’re not doing it right.
One of the things I admire about your work is that you consistently prove that great writing begins with great reporting. Talk about the importance of reporting.
Well, let’s start with the maxim that the best writing is understated, meaning it’s not full of flourishes and semaphores and tap dancing and vocabulary dumps that get in the way of the story you are telling. Once you accept that, what are you left with? You are left with the story you are telling.
The story you are telling is only as good as the information in it: things you elicit, or things you observe, that make a narrative come alive; things that support your point not just through assertion, but through example; quotes that don’t just convey information, but also personality. That’s all reporting.
What distinguishes a well-told story from a poorly told one?
All of the above. Good reporting, though, requires a lot of thinking; I always counsel writers working on features to keep in mind that they are going to have to deliver a cinematic feel to their anecdotes. When you are interviewing someone, don’t just write down what he says. Ask yourself: Does this guy remind you of someone? What does the room feel like? Notice smells, voice inflection, neighborhoods you pass through. Be a cinematographer.
Do you have any particular writing rituals or techniques that would help other writers?
Until I got to the end of your sentence, I had an answer. Alas, I don’t think this would be helpful to many writers: After I report a story, I look at my notes carefully, then lock them away and don’t look at them again until I have a first draft. I find it liberating to write without being chained to your notes; it helps you craft an ideal story. Then I go back to the notes and realize what I wrote that I can’t really support, what quotes aren’t quite as good as I thought, etc. It can be hugely frustrating, but it also sometimes leads me to go back and improve reporting, to make the story as good as I thought it could be. Not sure this will be helpful to most people. It’s kind of insane.
You say all stories are ultimately about the meaning of life. How do you find that heart of the story?
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