Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/12/19/this-training-bundle-might-be-your-ticket-to-a-new-career-as-a-freelance-writer.html
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I never had problems writing. I just could, I assume it comes from reading a lot, so you pick it up through osmosis.
I don’t think of myself as a writer, writing is merely my language of choice.
But having something to write may be more important than knowing how to write. The internet is full of people who can rehash things they’ve seen elsewhere. A good writer has new ideas or a different perspective, or for journalism, the skills to get the story from raw sources.
I publish on an amateur fiction site. There we learn that while, of plots and story arcs, only a finite number (varying with commentator) exist, we can tell tales in infinite ways. A “new idea” may only be a fresh approach to an old warhorse. One can probably live well by mining material from tvtropes.org
Nearly fifty years of pro-level writing here, half of it as a freelancer. (Academic writing is a walled garden.) It’s damn hard to make anything resembling a living at it, because producing decent copy is only the start. You’re always pursuing the next assignment, and the most successful operators I observed had figured how to make the work pay off in more than one way, whether by repurposing and repackaging research or by some kind of syndication. This is not unlike the pressure on self-publishing fiction writers to constantly market their wares. It’s an endless hustle, and I long ago noticed how many “freelancers” turned to producing how-to books on the secrets of successful freelance writing.
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