[Moon-dæg] Finishing Off on Freelance Writing

Introduction
Musings
On Organization
The Teaching Alternative
Closing

{If only he could speak from 1893. Image from public-domain.zorger.com}

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Introduction

This is the final piece in my four part series on freelance writing. It's also written in a more freewheeling style, though a logical order is still loosely imposed. You've been warned.

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Musings

Freelance Writing is it? The sort of thing that requires a quick mind on the page, and in the checkbook. It'll keep you sharp, but it can tear you apart, too. Academics have GoogleScholar to figure out how many people reference their research, but to think of how many people could see your writing if you had hundreds of articles, stories, and clips circulating about. That just adds to the rush.

Teaching can impact a room, but the written word can impact an audience severed by space, and even by time.

Writing in general seems to have more of an impact than teaching - though teaching might have the potential for a deeper impact.

Freelance writing doesn't need to be something you go broke for, either. It's just about keeping up on the jobs. And with stuff like content farms out there now - forget about it. If you can take the pittance they pay when times are tight, then those times will be loosened just enough. Of course, that's if you've got the time - or will.

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On Organization

Signing up for all of those sites takes a lot of organization, too. You need to keep all of that account information straight, and then you need to figure out how best to keep them all checked and responded to.

Yeah, being a freelance writer is maybe more possible now than ever, but it also seems to require more organization, too. Makes you much more of an entrepreneur when the whole damn internet could use your article. Not to mention the few offline publications still afloat and hungry for words.

The offline ones (and those "e-zines") pay better, too. Then again, with the old procedure of query, draft, submit, you deserve extra. Not like write, submit, pass, get paid. Gee-zus.

Anyway, all that organization's needed up front. Being a freelance writer isn't like becoming a cop or a getting into med school program. You need to plan your specific moves much more carefully if you want to be successful right out of the cage.

You need to know how much you'll charge, how much you can do in an hour, what sort of work you want to concentrate on, how many hours you can work a week, what sorts of outlets you'll use to look for work in the first place. So much more organization, and all up front. None of this dicking around with training and learning in a place separate from the real thing, only to be faced with something almost entirely alien when you finally get to the job itself.

No, as a freelance writer you know up front what you're getting into or you just don't make it. Some might muddle their way in, but they're the ones who learn quick. Real quick.

Quick learners get ahead as freelance writers, too. They know just what it is they need to do for a client, they can see it in their job offer, smell it in the proposal or description. Then it's no problem to just go with it, and run along with all that cash flow pushing you on.

Yeah.

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The Teaching Alternative

Back to that teaching alternative - if you know enough to write things, you know enough to teach things, right? - it's not entirely a sure thing anymore. Anywhere local, anyway. Even according to the recent Transition to Teaching Report, only 21% of graduates say they've got full-on teaching work within their first year after graduating (in Ontario). Shit. That doesn't look good. But writing, that's always gonna be around. As long as you get a good start, find your stride, it'll just keep going.

Y'know, more than anything, writing's more liberating, too. Teacher's can keep their summers off, freelance writers are doing what they love and what they love's not work to them at all. But teachers college is like a band-aid being used in the place of gauze and surgical tape, a temporary solution that might help in the long run, but that just doesn't stand up to the potential in writing.

Still, I plan to accept one of the offers I've gotten for teachers college and to see where writing takes me in the interim. Writing and teaching might be like feuding brothers in my mind, but they're still kin.

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Closing

Watch this space for Wednesday's piece on the newest news, and check back Friday for a review of 2011's I Am Number Four.

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