Words on a page

Time to take a trip down memory lane …

As you probably know, I’ve been writing professionally for quite a few years. In the early days, I gathered together quite the collection of rejection slips. Far more rejections than assignments, by a wide margin. It was, at times, disheartening but I soldiered on.

Over the years, I’ve met more than a couple of people trying to get their freelance writing careers off the ground. Most of them ran into the same problem that I encountered back in the early 1990s. And many of them continually lamented that they couldn’t get assignments or gigs, or get their unsolicited manuscripts published.

read more »

Earlier this year, I wrote a pair of posts on giving up and embracing failure. For some, those are depressing topics. But they’re topics we all have to face at some time or another.

You’ll notice that I don’t write much about success. Mainly because success has become an all-or-nothing proposition. Sadly, we live in a world in which extremes are the norm. You either fail or you succeed. Far too many people discount the middle ground — a partial success is too-often deemed a failure. But it shouldn’t be.

While you’re not going to be successful with everything you try, you’ll probably have just as many (if not more) partial successes than you’ll have so-called successes. And definitely more of them than failures.

read more »

Every so often, someone (usually someones) ask me about what they’d have to do to become a freelance writer. With the economy doing some strange gymnastics over the last 18 months or so, I’ve been asked that question a bit more. So, I started to plan out a series of posts on this subject.

Then I remembered that my business partner and I put together a set of blog post about this last year on the company blog:

• Becoming a freelance technical writer
• Getting set up
• Getting to work
• Marketing
• Educating yourself
• Rendering unto the tax collector

The posts are aimed at technical writers (seeing as how our company focuses on that area), but there’s quite a bit of information in there that I believe will benefit freelance writers of all stripes.

Take a read and let me know. Either leave a comment on this post, or on any of the posts that are listed above.

I’m usually not one for marking anniversaries or epochs. But last week while at a conference, I was talking with another attendee and I happened to mention that I’d been writing professionally for 20 years.

Twenty years. Wow. It doesn’t seem that long. I won’t say it seems like only yesterday that I’d started putting words on pages (and later on screens), but the years since 1990 have gone by quickly. Far more quickly than I’d like them to have.

While I’ve actually been writing for longer than 20 years, and have had work in print since the late 1980s, it was only in 1990 that I turned my Smith Corona word processor to earn my living.

In a number of ways, I’m fortunate that I started writing professionally when I did. I saw, and took part in, a number of changes to this wacky profession. And, of course, there were a number of changes into the way in which and what I write.

read more »

Actors, artist, musicians, and writers all have one thing in common: when they’re starting out, many of them can’t make a living doing what they want to do. To pay the bills, they need to get the dreaded day job.

For writers, this can be an easier proposition. There are, arguably, more jobs out there that require the skills we have than, say, the ability to play classical guitar.

Over the years, I’ve talked about this with a number of other writers and the opinions have been mixed. Some have said that if you need to get a day job, you should do something outside of writing. Others have said that a day job that involves writing is fine, but with a few caveats.

Here are my two cents (and a bit more) on the subject.

read more »