Life Of A Freelance Writer
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I’ve always had an appetite for reading. I devoured books, often reading two or three at a time, getting lost in the worlds unlike any I had known. It was this love of reading that first planted the seed in my mind about writing. My freshman year in high school, a friend handed me a book, “Midnight,” by Dean Koontz. Within the first paragraph I was hooked, and the seed that had been planted years before blossomed into a fully formed desire to create sentences that moved people. It’s been almost twenty years since I read the book that took me down the path of a writer. While the path has been long, and often times bumpy, I wouldn’t have changed any of it.
The last twenty years has been loaded with false starts. There were many times during this journey where I abandoned my writing, frustrated with the process. Putting down my pen, and packing up my journals time and time again, I would join the rest of my peers in the day to day grind of a nine to five job that I hated. As I continued to bounce from one unfulfilling job to the next, my desire to write grew. Over the years I would pull out different pieces I’d written and enter them into contests or submit them to various magazines for publication, but I never had any luck getting my work published.
About four years ago, I became tired of spinning my wheels with my writing, so I made the decision to go back to school to see if a formal education could help. While many of the general education classes, like Algebra, didn’t help with my writing, the studio classes took my writing to another level. The lectures, while useful, didn’t bring to light any writing rule I hadn’t already learned from the multitude of books that can be found lining the shelves of every bookstore. It was the work-shopping my pieces with my peers that showed me if you want to make a living as a writer, you can’t go it alone. I know, everyone sees writers as solitary creatures that only surface when they are sending in their manuscripts. But as it turns out, even the most gifted and talented writers have a group of their peers to work with from the beginning of the writing process to the end.
I can’t stress enough how important it is to have a group of fellow writers you trust, read over your work. This is especially important toward the end of the process. After working on a piece, sometimes months at a time, you get so tired of reading the same sentences over and over again you tend to skip over the editing part and miss spelling errors and grammatical issues. In reality, having a second or third set of eyes look over your work can be the difference between getting your work published and receiving another rejection letter.
Something else I had never thought about until I started back to school was how important it is to make a point of writing every day. This small concept, pounded in to my head every semester by every writing teacher I had, is so important to the process of writing. Because if you don’t write, how can you expect to make any money doing something you love? Your writing has to become like a second job. Even if you work eight or more hours in a day, you have to force yourself to write. This is something, even now, that I struggle with. It’s not easy coming home after work and sitting down at the computer to write. This is even truer if you sit in front of a computer all day at work. I don’t much care to write after a long day of work, so I carve out an hour in the morning and write during my lunch. Even this small amount of time helps me to keep my head clear and my pen flowing.
Being a freelance writer isn’t an easy life. It takes a lot of perseverance and a thick skin. You also can’t expect to write a best seller your first time out. It takes a lot of years to make enough money to make a career out of writing. But if writing is your passion, you have to jump in with both feet. I didn’t, and I haven’t had a single regret.
