What it really means to be a writer

by Joelle Steele

To make your living as a writer, you have to get over any high-falutin' ideas you may have about what it means to be a writer.

Writing is a job. Period. It doesn't matter what you write or how much you love writing. It's work. It requires planning, goal-setting, organization, focus, self-discipline, and imagination. It also requires a certain amount of honest self-criticism as well as the ability to accept criticism from others and learn from it. To actually make any money as a writer, you need to learn to write all kinds of things for all kinds of clients. That's where the money is and that's where you hone your skills as a writer.

Articles. I started out writing magazine articles about art, photography, and music when I was 22 years old. They say you should write what you know, so I picked topics in which I had a lot of knowledge and experience. Over the years, I fed my brain with more knowledge and used it. Freelance writers must be constantly learning in order to be successful at their trade. I wrote about astrology, cats, birds, computers, forgery detection, face recognition, horticulture, ecology, writing, publishing, antiques, web design, philately, and a host of small business topics.

Repackaging Articles. In many cases I did what other freelance writers do, which is to re-package and re-sell articles to publications that didn't have big overlapping readerships. To date I have had 800+ articles published. I have written books on those same subjects and have also used many of them as background material in my novels. The more you write, the better you write.

Ad Copy. Yes, it sounds like such a hack job, but writing ad copy pays extremely well if you know how to do it. I read books on writing ad copy and marketing materials. I got many interesting freelance jobs with great clients by writing ad copy. It is a good way to learn how to be flexible and creative in writing the same thing in several ways to attract customers for your clients. An added bonus is that, as a writer, querying publishers is a big part of the job, and this is where I honed my skills at querying and learned how to market myself, my writing, and my other skills.

Web Pages. I got my first Web site in 1992 – still have it today. I learned HTML code and CSS and was writing web pages for clients as well as for my own Web sites – I've had as many as 19 websites at a time, but have downsized to two. I wrote about everything from design to content and, again, I had lots of interesting and well-paying clients. Writing web pages taught me the value of the keywords you use and how they might be used in selling my books and my services online.

Contracts. I took several classes on the Constitution, legal writing, and torts so that I could write contracts and sell them to forms houses. Later, with the introduction of the World Wide Web, I started creating forms myself and selling them on my Web site. I later made them into customizable Word doc templates, and offered more than 100 of them on one of my websites. If there's one thing I learned from writing contracts it's how to be thorough and how to  organize my thoughts.

Miscellaneous. I never turned down a chance to write whatever came my way. That included letters of all kinds, as well as descriptions for items in catalogs, directories, travel guides, contributing chapters, co-writes, etc. I also wrote several advertising jingles and specialty poems for use in advertisements, event brochures, and other author's books.

There is no end to the kinds of things about which you can write. And, in the end, it will all expand your knowledge base, enrich your writing, open more doors for you, and improve your creativity and writing ability.