Starting a Writing Career
How to encourage younger writers while being blunt about how difficult it is.
Writing is easy. Anyone can and should be able to do it. It is the basis of communicating data and emotion and ideas. It is one of the core arts schools should always teach. Now being a professional writer is much much more difficult. One of my sons expressed an interest in journalism recently. In the past I would have stressed taking classes at a prestigious school, getting the MFA, writing in peer reviewed journals, and working your way up. Nah…
A lot of people want to write.
A lot of people want to write but can’t seem to get started because they want instant gratification. If so you can have a career writing. Facebook and Twitter have made it easy to write if you want to write. You need no discipline or talent all you have to do is write.
Now if you want to be a PRO writer that is different. It takes a long time to learn the craft but you do it by writing. A lot. Quantity over time yields quantity. You learn how to play with words and sentences. You learn how to identify a core audience. You learn what niches work for YOU.
But young people want to do it like a PRO. So here is the reality. Most professional writers have a career in something else that pays the bills. Even really successful writers work in addition to writing. Now you CAN work full time as a writer but the odds of success are bleak. Many many many writers end up on food stamps and other assistance. There are quite a few who couch surf to stay afloat. Your odds are much higher with a job.
Very few authors get signed. Period. Your first books are usually self published which is GOOD. You need to learn how the process works beginning to end and this is the best way to do it. You will need to hire an editor to review your work. Do you have to no?…But your book will suck. You will need someone to format your book. Do you have to no?…But your book will look cheap. You will need cover art. Can you get freeware covers? Hell yeah but they will look cheap and they will kill sales. I made all of these mistakes. You have to have professional help and that costs money.
Luckily sights like Fiverr can help you find good talent cheap…or expensive depending on how much is in your account. The book I got help with sold. The one I didn’t sold 1 copy. My fault.
Now there are a lot of YouTube channels that tell you how to make millions. If they were so good they wouldn’t be sharing their secrets with you. Literally in this case those who can do. Those who can’t teach with one exception. Copywriters. The marketing community is a close one and to learn the craft you have to spend some time with the online conferences where the masters of the craft give it away because the is so little good talent available.
Writing is not something you can pick up and put down and pick it later. I went through a nasty divorce and put down writing for 8 years. When I came back to it i was basically starting over again. While I was gone the industry went on without me! Its like any other endeavor. You have to focus on your craft daily to succeed. You don’t have to write daily but it will take a long long time to learn the craft.
So how do I do it?
Read
I read a lot. And I read everything from technical manuals to novels. I find that reading a lot is quick way to improve my skills in areas I am weak in. When I wanted to start writing articles I read everything from CNN to Popular Science. I wanted to learn what it should look like first.
2. Copy
I try to wholesale steal the writing style of my favorite writers. I will literally copy a text from a book or article. I will follow that author and do it over and over and eventually I pick up the style and I pick up the word counts and I pick up the voice. This is critical because in some areas of writing there is a corporate voice and they look for similar writers. You can tap that market by learning how to write in that voice.
3. Blog
I blog to work out ideas. I blog to play with my ideas. I blog to put things into my voice. I blog to confirm that I learned a concept or style I have been working on. When I wanted to write a novel I blogged chapters. This gave me quick feedback and it created an audience that followed my work. Many read me here at Medium today.
4. Write Daily
I don’t recommend this as a fad. I recommend this because you are in business as a writer and that is your job. You hopefully don’t skip work 3–4 times a week. If you do you will get fired. Same with writing. If you skip work people will stop reading you. And writing is a numbers game. For every hit there are 50 duds. No writer…no writer is immune from this. You have to sit and do it. I started by writing 500 words everyday. No matter what. It forced me to write something. After a week I learned that it didn’t matter what I wrote as long as I got somewhere. I usually keep 5–8 projects in process and will come back to them as I have something to say.
5. Publish what you write
DO NOT WAIT FOR PERFECTION! What you think is perfect may suck. My best pieces were crappy for me but my readers resonated with it. I accidentally posted the wrong eBook version on Amazon. I didn’t realize it for several weeks and I eventually put the correct version up…which didn’t sell. Turns out the horrible version while not edited was more conversational and easier to use than my edited version. I put the older version up and got another 3 months of sales. I recommend publishing everything you write because the more you publish the more hit potential you have.
These are the core basics to me.This is how I become a top writer, how I published books, and why I get published in publications. But you have to be disciplined and focused. You have to not worry about failure because writing invites failure with every typed word. Be courageous but be productive.