Writing – Page 12

Seeking a Source? Turn to SEO

Like many of you, I belong to a number of writing communities online. I often see posts from fellow writers asking other writers for sources. That could be fruitful, but there are plenty of other ways to find sources. And if you’re on deadline, the last thing you want to do is wait on a community of other writers who may respond with some vague connection to a potential source.

Case in point: Recently, a writer in a forum I follow asked the other writers if they had any sources that had some pretty specific expertise. She mentioned she needed the source ASAP to meet a deadline.

I thought, Why waste valuable time? Her request was so specific. By the time others saw it, her deadline may be over. And I doubted many of them had the connection to a source with the specialized background she sought.

Though there are many ways to find sources, one of your best bets may be as simple as using Google.

Use Quotes, Add Titles

There are different tools you can use on Google, and my best tip is to befriend quotes. And titles.

For instance, if you’re looking for an expert that specializes in treating broken bones in children, you may want to type something like M.D. “pediatric orthopedic.” In doing that, you’re keeping targeted words together, and you’ll probably pick up a few links of doctors who have researched or specialize in working with children who have orthopedic issues.

Don’t be afraid of trying “broken bones” M.D. either, or adding a geographic location. Sometimes when I want leading medical experts, I type in a big city name—Houston, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles—because they tend to have specialists in big cities.

Of course you could go through some sort of trade association or ask the hospital PR rep who you’ve worked with before if you’re trying to find a medical source. But in finding the source directly, you can look up their expertise and then contact them directly. (Really in a pinch on time? Try the direct route by contacting the source and also hitting up his or her communications team.)

Looking for a non-expert? Why not type in a few keywords—again grouping those that imply specifics—using quotation marks? Seeking a cancer survivor to share their story about BRCA testing? Try “cancer survivor” BRCA or “my BRCA test” cancer. Sometimes, adding the word blog or blogger into a search is a great way to find a personal source.

As journalists, we have to be a little SEO-savvy to find sources, even when we are not in a huge rush. Befriending search engines can connect you to specific sources that can add valuable expertise and perspective. It’s come in handy when I’ve had to interview someone who has researched something pretty specific.

Search in a Cinch

Next time the clock is ticking and you’re tempted to ask your writer friends for help, you may want to rethink it. Do your friends really know a psychologist who specializes in geriatric depression, or an obstetrician who only treats high-risk patients with multiple pregnancies? Finding a specific source requires a specific search. Your colleagues may very well have these connections, but you don’t want to rest all of your time betting that they do—especially if your name is on the line.

While there’s no harm in asking around, be sure to maximize your time by hitting up a variety of avenues. And make sure one of them is Dr. Google.

Kristen Fischer is a copywriter and journalist living at the Jersey Shore. She worked as a reporter and copyeditor for Gannett before launching her full-time freelance business in 2005. Her work has been published in Parents, New Jersey Monthly, Prevention, Woman’s Day, SheKnows, and Healthline.

Surviving as a Freelance Journalist

Tuesday, March Post a comment

My webinar for NAIWE on surviving as a freelance journalist is today. The PowerPoint is ready, I’m about to get caffeined up, and I’m thinking. What did I miss in my outline? Nothing really.

But it’s more of the intangible things I’m ruminating over. I’m thinking about what survival means.

I think you have to go through times of surviving. For those doing this as a career—and those who need the money—you go through bouts when you’ll write just about anything to pay the bills.

Then you go through periods of thriving.

But somehow, when you’re on your own—independent, self-employed, what have you—it always comes back to survival. Even decades in.

Why survival?

Because if you stop working at it, there’s no cushion to save you.

Some people in traditional jobs may not mentally show up every day, but they still go and their job is still there. Their company is still there. There are other companies to go to if one doesn’t work out.

For the journalist, if you stop doing it, there’s no other company to go to if you want to be self-employed . . . you’re it.

I am nearly 15 years in. Sure, I don’t go through times of no work, but I have gone through lean times. When I felt like I was surviving. Or starving like I was 15 years ago. This is okay. (If nothing else, it keeps you on your feet so you know where you want to head next with your business.)

So don’t think that if you’re feeling like you are in survival mode that you are a failure . . . especially if you’re experienced. We all have to keep hustling to stay in business, and self-employed businesses ebb and flow. You’ll start hustling again. And if you are and nothing is happening, it will.

Just by sticking with it, so long as this is what you want to be doing, you’re surviving.

Kristen Fischer is a copywriter and journalist living at the Jersey Shore. She worked as a reporter and copyeditor for Gannett before launching her full-time freelance business in 2005. Her work has been published in Parents, New Jersey Monthly, Prevention, Woman’s Day, SheKnows, and Healthline.

Should You Earn More by Working Longer Hours?

Sunday, March Post a comment

There came a time, early in my career, when I was faced with a difficult situation: I needed to earn more money. But since I generated my income from publishers and others, there was no simple way I could get them to pay me more for the same volume of work I was already doing.

My choices seemed to boil down to the following:

Work longer hours
Leverage the work of others
Lower my professional standards to spend less time on each piece
Automate my work to produce more material in less time
Speed up the internal processes involved in writing.

I spent many weeks contemplating the details and ramifications of each strategy and came up with the following thoughts and conclusions.

Work Longer Hours

At first blush, this seemed the simplest answer to my problem. If I could earn (in the old days) $100 working an eight-hour day, simple math told me I could earn $125 by working a ten-hour day. What could possibly go wrong?

But as I dug into the details and implications, I began to see some of the problems this strategy would entail.

For example, I was already working as many hours a day as I comfortably could. Working longer hours would reduce the time I could spend with my wife and child. I wasn’t sure it was worth the extra money to cut back on the most important parts of the life I was working to build.

Working longer hours on paid writing projects would also leave me less time and energy for the unpaid writing projects that were dear to my heart and possibly stepping stones to a better career.

Even worse, working longer hours would require more effort, and that would tend to leave me even more tired at the end of the day. If not immediately, then eventually this additional fatigue would cause me to think and write less well. I would inadvertently begin to allow more errors—not just typos, but errors in thinking and in factual accuracy and depth—to creep into my writing. Perhaps my stylistic flair and creativity would degrade as well.

I wanted none of this to intrude into my professional life.

Leverage the Work of Others

This approach is the basis of success in the world of business. After all, Henry Ford did not build Model-Ts with his own hands. Nor does Elon Musk actually construct the cars, rockets, satellites, and other products that are the foundation of his businesses—and his incomes.

In the old days, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, and other Great Masters relied on students and apprentices to do much of the work required to move their masterpieces a long way toward completion, and today writers like James Patterson do much the same with the written work they crank out.

So it made sense for me to try to hire other writers to do at least the initial parts of some writing projects that publishers and others wanted to buy from me.

However, this strategy never worked for me, partly because I could rarely find suitably talented or skilled trainees and apprentices to work for me. But even when I did, I invariably felt that supervising their work took more of my time and effort than simply doing that same work myself.

Because leveraging others didn’t pencil out for me, I stopped thinking of this as a viable way forward (although I have continued to hope I’d find someone suitable).

Lower My Professional Standards to Spend Less Time on Each Piece

This is one of the classic approaches to success in American business: lower production costs as a means to increasing profits.

However, lowering my standards was something that proved hard for me to abide. This is probably because—at least to me—writing professionally is only partly a business. It’s equally—perhaps more so—an art form, a product of my creative energies, and even a reflection of my personality.

Delivering work that is only “B” quality when I could have pumped it up to “A” quality not only conflicts with my personal values, but also causes me emotional and psychic pain. For whatever reasons, I feel deeply there’s a minimum standard of writing that satisfies me, and when my work fails to meet or exceed it, I just feel bad.

Automate My Work to Produce More Material in Less Time

Back in the 1970s, I hung around with people who were experimenting with hobbyist computers. I was hoping that these early computers could provide a degree of automation to my writing that would reduce the total time required for me to complete at least some of the work I had on my professional plate.

But that was a pipe dream—at least until 1979, when I discovered that dedicated word processors were on the market, and for the most part, they worked pretty well. Later, I found that home computers could run word processing software powerful and reliable enough to help me write better and faster than ever before.

I jumped on that bandwagon and have never looked back.

Speed Up the Internal Processes Involved in Writing

Logically, this is a sensible way to try to earn more. Because of the way my mind works (I’m always looking for ways to do things faster, better, and easier), this approach has long been in either the back or the front of my mind. Why not apply this same brand of thinking to the internal processes of writing?

The problem was—and remains—I don’t really know how to do this. I’m pretty certain that I have done it, but I don’t know how.

I have some thoughts and feelings on how I manage to write much faster today than I did in years gone by, but I can’t swear they are true, or that—if true—they will work for anyone else. However, I offer them here:

I research what I am writing. The less I know about a subject, the more hesitant my writing becomes. Pounding away at research eventually gives me the confidence—and the knowledge—to write freely and quickly.

Having fed the process through research, I allow what I’ve learned to ripen in my mind. I don’t try to force my writing. The best way for me to write faster is to hold off until I feel ready to write. I’ve become confident that when I’m ready the words will gush out of me quickly and well. So far, I’ve been right about this.

I get a first draft done. Some writers claim they agonize over every word, phrase, sentence, paragraph, and page. They can’t move on to the next word, phrase, sentence, paragraph, and page until every word they have already written is perfect. This has never worked for me. My method has been to write all the way through the end—using whatever words seem okay at the time to get the thoughts out of my head and onto paper (or screen). I’m going to polish the material anyway, so I find little value in holding up the flow of thoughts just because my first attempt is not perfect. My writing mantra is essentially: “We’ll fix it in post.”

I have several projects in mind and in progress at once. When I bog down on one, I simply switch over and try pushing forward on a second one. Or a third. I trust my subconscious to be working on my projects 24/7 without my awareness. It’s another angle on number 2 above.

So while my title to this piece about earning more from writing asked whether to work longer hours, my answer is firmly “no.” Once I’m working as many hours as I comfortably can, I have found it’s better for me not to try to increase my income by throwing more hours at my projects. It’s better to find some other way.

Robert Moskowitz is an award-winning independent professional writer who has written and sold millions of words in just about every format over five decades. He instinctively sees the big pictures, breaks each one down into coherent slices, meaningfully prioritizes and sequences those slices, and then executes the tasks inherent in each slice in very productive ways. Put more simply, Robert knows how to succeed as an independent writer, covering all the bases from soliciting assignments to delivering polished work, from pricing jobs to budgeting and managing personal finances, from organizing a conducive office environment to establishing and following sensible guidelines regarding life, work, and productivity. Having done all this, and having paid attention to how he did it, Robert is now in a position to pass along what he knows to others.

Daily Scheduling

Thursday, March Post a comment

One of the keys to professional writing is to crank out a lot of good work. And to do that, you’ll need to put in a good deal of time.

The best way to guarantee that you’ll have the time available to accomplish a lot of good work is to develop and follow a daily schedule.

There are several elements involved in creating and adhering to a daily schedule. Let’s look at each of them in turn.

Identify Your Best and Worst Times of Day

In the late 19^th century and early 20^th century, there was an ancient idea revived and developed by Wilhelm Fliess that proposed a person’s physical and emotional states fluctuated around 23- and 28-day cycles, respectively, starting on the day you were born. Later, a psychologist named Hermann Swoboda and an engineer named Alfred Teltscher expanded on this idea to include a 33-day cycle of intellectual or mental capabilities.

These biorhythms were thought by many to be so important and powerful that anyone should be able to predict days when a person would be particularly strong, happy, or smart and other days when a person would feel weak, down hearted, or befuddled simply by counting the number of days since birth and calculating where that person would be on the cycle of their relevant biorhythm.

There may be some truth to this notion, but that’s not the main point here. What’s undisputed is that you almost certainly do have periods of time when you can perform at a higher level and other times where the best you can do is not quite as good as that.

This is the main point: you can and should take advantage of your natural ups and downs by tracking them, noting on your calendar, for example, the times when you feel your best and the times when you feel your worst. Once you see the pattern, you can begin trying to use your periods of higher performance to do your best writing.

Whether biorhythms work or not for you, the cyclical nature of high and low performance often breaks down to something as simple as:

Being a morning person or an evening person
Feeling better writing in bed before you go to sleep or in the afternoon after taking a nap
Waking up early and getting in some solid hours of creativity or staying up late to record whatever wonderful thoughts you have been accumulating during the day.

Identify Your Most Productive Patterns

Another aspect of this timing technique involves recognizing and exploiting the length of time at a stretch you prefer to work. I have found that I do better working three, four, even five hours at one sitting—the longer I go, the better my writing becomes. Other writers I know like to dash off a few paragraphs as soon as they come to mind, then do something more routine until another flash of inspiration hits them.

There’s no right or wrong here, no absolute better or worse. All I’m suggesting is that you discover the times of day, and days of the week, when you are at your best and do at least some of your writing during those periods.

Break Down a Project into Separate, Simple Tasks

Once you know the best times to work on your writing, take the next step and figure out what you ought to be working on.

One of the best ways to do this is to have a plan for what you’re going to write, whether it’s a novel, a play, a poem, or anything else. At a minimum, it’ll have a beginning, a middle, and an end. It might have five acts. You might envision 20 or 30 scenes, seven key images, or 10 important moments.

No matter how you have conceived the project at hand, if you know each of the parts you want to include in it, you can have the next part in mind as you sit down to work, and even before.

Knowing what comes next is helpful because not only it eliminates the blank-page problem that so many writers dislike, but also it allows your subconscious mind to be working on the project during the interval between your last writing session and your next one.

Develop a Productive Working Routine

One way that has helped me be a productive writer over the years is to reserve certain times for writing, and nothing else. During my self-scheduled writing hours, I don’t allow myself to straighten my desk, sharpen pencils, answer the telephone, read, doodle, or anything else. I’m there to write. If I feel stuck or can’t muster the energy to work, my only alternative is to sit idly until I can start working on my project.

I have found that sitting idly during these intended writing times is so unpleasant and boring that I quickly start my writing engine and begin putting words on paper.

Another trick that many writers use is to stop writing in the middle of a passage that’s coming easily and feeling great. The idea is that later, when you come back to the project, you’ll find it relatively easy to pick up where you left off and start producing good material right away. The corresponding fear is that if you finish that great passage and then stop writing, when you come back to the project later on you’ll face a difficult time getting started again.

Either of these ideas may or may not be true for you, but there’s no doubt that if you regularly sit down to write during your high-performance periods, you’ll produce better work than if you work at random times or—worse—when your performance level is on the downswing.

Follow Your Schedule

Any or all of this may seem great, but I can assure you that it’s helpful only to the extent you actually put it into practice.

If you don’t have enough self-discipline to follow your self-imposed schedule, understand that becoming a professional writer requires more of it.

Stay Flexible

Having said all this, I want you to remember that creativity should never be a chore, never a drag on your time or energy, never a task to get through so you can do something else that’s more fun. Creativity should be your most enjoyable activity.

That’s why it’s important that your working schedule—no matter how carefully laid out and how many great techniques and ideas it incorporates—should be more of a guideline than an implacable routine.

Developing a Business Plan

Friday, February Post a comment

If you want to be a professional writer, then you should seriously consider treating your work as a business. And that means developing a business plan.

As a newbie to the professional writing industry, you probably won’t need a complex plan; you may even be able to scratch out a totally adequate business plan on the back of an envelope. But if you’ve got some experience under your belt, or you have major ambitions, you’ll benefit from a more robust, comprehensive, and heavily detailed plan.

Either way, having a business plan gives you a road map for what to focus on, what to do next, what to expect in the future, how to handle the unexpected, and how to assess the progress you are making toward your goal of becoming a successful professional writer.

What Will You Do?

The first part of your business plan should contain a simple but complete, high-level statement of your planned professional activities:

What products and services will you offer?
To whom will you offer them?
How will you make yourself known to these potential buyers?
What performance milestones will you aim for?

Do some clear thinking as you write this part of your plan, but be ready to come back to it with refinements after you figure out the details in the sections to follow.

Products and Services

In this section, try to describe the work you expect to be doing in more detail.

Start by naming and characterizing each of your products and services: scripts, novels, booklets, plays, speeches, etc. Then specify the relevant details, such as word lengths, audiences, and formats.

While you’re at it, try to identify the benefits of your products and services. What’s special about you and your offerings? Why would someone want to hire you or buy from you? What differentiates your products and services from those of your competitors?

Incidentally, if you think you don’t have any competitors, you’re almost certainly wrong. You probably haven’t found them because you haven’t done enough research into the market(s) you plan to enter.

Sales and Marketing

In this section of your business plan, try to include all the important details about how you will obtain paying clients.

How much will you charge for each product or service?
Will you advertise? Where? How often?
Will you participate in trade shows or display at conventions? Which ones?
Will you mail or email sales and marketing materials? To whom? Saying what?
Will you make personal connections within your network? Where? When? How?
Will you pay for sales and marketing help from an agent? A publisher? A collaborator?
Will you develop a web presence? How? With what sales and marketing messages?

Try to list, describe, and specify enough details so that you could—if you wish—simply hand off this information to a sales and marketing agency and afterward feel confident that they will implement your plans as you intended.

Practical Matters

When starting a business, it may be beneficial to work through several practical matters that will effectively translate your dreams and rough ideas into a tangible business entity. Such matters as:

Where and when will you work?
Who will do your billing? Accounting? Taxes?
What will be the name of your business?
How will it be organized: as a sole proprietorship, a limited liability company, or a corporation. And what state will it be registered in?
Who will own the business?
How will you ensure compliance with applicable laws and get answers to the inevitable legal questions?
Are you a party to contracts or agreements (non-disclosure, non-compete) that limit your ability to do what you are planning? If so, how will you handle these limitations?
Where will you obtain start-up capital?

Management and Decision-Making

Who will run your business? You alone, or you with others, or just these others? What authority will management have, and not have, to impact your everyday work and your ability to make deals (and other business arrangements)?

Will you have any advisers, partners, or collaborators? What influence will these people have on your work, deal-making, and business activities?

Growth

What’s your plan for growing this new business? Will it always be just you, or will you bring in others as contractors, employees, partners, coaches, or people in other roles to help you grow your business?

How will you measure your business’s growth? In terms of income? Number of people doing the work? Number of items sold? Some other way? Remember to measure what is important to the future of your professional writing business.

Include goals in your business plan that emphasize the success you’d like to achieve as a professional writer.

Finances

In the financial section, project the amount of money you will need to operate your business. These will be yearly projections for the first five years.

Once you’ve calculated these expense figures, add up the money you expect to earn as a professional writer. Take into account the prices you will charge and the quantity of products or services you expect to sell each year. Since you can’t nail this down to the exact dollar, work with a range of likely minimum to likely maximum income for the first five years you’ll be in business. Also list cash on hand, loans, investor capital, and equity.

Now compare your anticipated income against your anticipated expenditures. How long will it take until you break even? How long after that until you recoup the money you spent and make a profit and also save for retirement?

Be cognizant that your new business might accumulate significant value as it grows. For example, any assets it owns might become valuable, including its contracts, its relationships with solid customers, its inventory and unspent earnings, its real estate or other property, and so forth.

All this work to develop a business plan can be fun, as you run through all the possible scenarios and contemplate your potential success as a professional writer, as well as meaningful.

If you don’t get the business plan right, you’ll be depending on luck for your success. And it’s highly unlikely you’ll be the one in a million writer who lucks into success as a professional. If you do get your business plan right, though, your chances of success take an immediate leap into the realm of the possible, the do-able, and even the likely.

One Final Thought

Many people make the mistake of thinking that just by stating a goal, or writing it up as part of a business plan, that you must achieve it. Totally untrue. Any goals you state—and intend to achieve—are simply distant milestones to help guide your direction. To achieve them, you must actually do the necessary hard work and do it as well as you can.

Help! My Source Bailed and I’m on Deadline

Wednesday, February Post a comment

Tick, tick, tick.

Sometimes you can almost hear the clock ticking down until your deadline. As much as we try to work ahead, journalists are often in a pinch.

And it really stinks when a source bails at the last minute.

What can you do when a source backs out and you’re on a deadline? Not all hope is lost. Here are a few tips to help when your article—and your job—are on the line.

Breathe—there are other sources. Unless your source is highly specialized, there are other people with expertise that can comment. It’s just a matter of finding them. And once you get a name, you can use your journo skills to make contact.
Use a trade group or private company. Sometimes, the best place to get a source is from a fellow media team. They understand tight deadlines and can often point you in the right direction. When I write medical news, going through a hospital’s communications staff can be perfect because they pinpoint the person needed and tell me who’s available. Let them do some of the work—that’s what they get paid for.
Explore other articles. One of my favorite ways to find sources is to look in articles that have covered similar topics. There, I can often find people who have commented that have the right credentials. Plus, they typically work well with the media because they’ve done so in the past. From there, you can Google the contact and get in touch.
Google away.Speaking of searching for sources, one of my best tricks is to use a few keywords and add the associated credentials. If I need to contact a doctor who specializes in diabetes, I’m using phrases such as “diabetes M.D. contact” or “diabetes M.D. email” and going from there. You could include a certain location or region to narrow things down. Another tip is to use your keyword and “media contacts” in the search form because there are often tip sheets or organizations that have compiled experts in a specific field. So if I want to find a source that knows about groundwater contamination, I could use “environmental groundwater media” or “groundwater contamination media source” or “groundwater contamination expert.” Play with the keywords. You’ll be surprised at what comes up. And if it goes to a journal or report, such as a PDF, dig in there for applicable names.
Go academic.Colleges and universities are great places for sources, and they have highly specialized folks who can deliver a comment in a pinch. Try the school’s media department as well as the individual; if one person is busy, they can likely find another.
Seek a source database. A service like ProfNet or HARO can be a heaven-sent when the clock is ticking. Just look through experts using their search network. These people are familiar with tight deadlines and speaking to the media, which is an added bonus. (The last thing you want on a deadline is to have to explain to someone not familiar with the media about how the media works!)
Think press release.Another place to find awesome sources familiar with a topic and working with the media is via a press release. Use a database such as Businesswire, or type in a few keywords and put “press release” in parentheses and your search will bring up sources who have commented in a press release. From there, grab the name of the source or the public relations person. (I tend to stay away from PR agencies when I’m in a pinch, especially, because they may take longer to find a source or want you to include their product or pitch in the story . . . not cool when you’re looking for an objective comment.)
Be nice.The source that bailed may be useful in the future, so don’t burn the bridge. In turn, inform the new source that you are on deadline up front so you can determine if he or she can meet your timeline.

Kristen Fischer is a copywriter and journalist living at the Jersey Shore. She worked as a reporter and copyeditor for Gannett before launching her full-time freelance business in 2005. Her work has been published in Parents, New Jersey Monthly, Prevention, Woman’s Day, SheKnows, and Healthline.

The Best Writing Tip I Ever Received

Wednesday, January Post a comment

After graduating college, I believed I was well prepared for my first real-world editing job at a national magazine. I’d been corrected and coached by wonderful teachers over the years—but somehow, it ratchets things up a notch when you’re being paid to perform a task that was previously a matter of As, Bs, and Cs on a report card.

I’ll admit to being a bit shaken the first time a story I’d written came back from a grizzled old editor, soaked through the page with red ink. As I read through the comments, though, I realized he was absolutely right. About every darn thing.

The best writing tip this editor gave me sticks with me to this day: In most cases, you can chop the first and maybe even the second paragraph of your first draft. There’s a lot of throat-clearing that tends to go on when you’re first formulating your thoughts. Quite often, all it does is delay your readers from getting to the good stuff.

So, the next time you’re struggling with getting a lede paragraph just right, consider uncapping your red pen instead—and putting your readers right into the action.

Jake Poinier made the leap into freelance writing and editing in 1999 after a decade of positions in the publishing industry, giving him key insights from both sides of the desk. As the founder and owner of Boomvang Creative Group, he has worked with a diverse array of Fortune 500 and small businesses, consumer and trade magazines, and independent authors. Jake is committed to helping freelancers improve their businesses and shares his knowledge and experiences frequently as a speaker at industry conferences, through webinars, and on his blog.

Pricing Your Work

Saturday, January Post a comment

One of the most difficult questions you’ll ever be asked about your work is: “What’s it worth?”

Unless you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth, the road to becoming a professional writer involves navigating the intricacies and trade-offs of this difficult question and coming up with answers that lead to advancement toward that goal, rather than retreat.

The intricacies of that difficult question involve issues that are practical, economic, competitive, and emotional. Let’s take a look at each of those issues:

Practical Issues

The first set of issues you encounter when setting prices for your work involves practical matters:

How much money do you have on hand?

How much do you spend each month or each year?

How much money is coming in?

The bottom line of all this is simple: How long can you stay in the writing game before you run out of money and must quit writing to put that time and energy toward other means of earning a living?

Pricing is one way to directly change that bottom-line result. If you can adjust your pricing to increase the amount of money coming in, you can stretch out the time remaining in your career as a professional writer. If you can increase the amount of money coming in substantially enough, you can keep writing professionally for the rest of your life.

Most times, to increase your writing income you’ll need to raise your prices. But this calculation can lead you to lower your prices, too. The point is to maximize the income you generate from the combination of two factors: the amount of work you sell and the price you earn from each sale.

For example, suppose you’re now selling ten pieces of writing per month at $100 per piece. That’s $1,000 income per month. If raising your price will not lose too many sales, you might be able to sell eight pieces at month $150 per piece. That would earn you $1,200 per month total income.

On the other hand, if lowering your price will result in extra sales, you might be able to sell 15 pieces per month at $90 per piece. That would bring you $1,350 per month.

A great many factors go into determining the most lucrative price point for each item you sell. Sometimes, you won’t know the best price point until you experiment. But the basic fact is that changing your prices is the first, and often most practical, way to increase your income as a professional writer.

Economic Issues

If you lived in a vacuum, or in a static world, you could raise and lower your prices however you wish and expect to receive a mathematically calculated result. But you live in an economy that has its own ups and downs independent of you and your wishes.

That’s one reason professional writing can often be a case of “feast or famine.” During good economic times, you might sell all the work you can produce at prices you enjoy. During bad economic times, you might struggle to sell any of your work and have no choice but to accept prices you wish were higher.

Your pricing decisions should, therefore, recognize and take into account the current economic climate in which you are operating. You should be alert not only to current economic conditions, but also to upcoming changes in the economic climate. Looking ahead, you can strive to position yourself—by means of pricing changes (and perhaps other ways, as well)—to take maximum advantage of the economic hand you will soon be dealt.

Competitive Issues

Just as you live in an economic climate, you also live in a competitive climate. If you’re the only one capable of writing a particular piece of work—say a Katy Perry song or a best-seller on White House intrigue—you can pretty much write your own ticket as far as income from that work is concerned.

However, if you are cranking out the same kind of boiler plate that’s available from ten thousand other writers, it’s hard to price your work outside of the competitive range the market has established for such work.

This has two implications for professional writers:

Don’t expect to earn more from highly competitive work than the vast majority of your competitors are earning. Your prices and to some extent your income will be tightly constrained by the market.

There are major advantages to stepping out of the competitive rat race and into some niche where competition is relatively scarce and where your natural talents help you become a leader—or even a “one of a kind.” There are lots of genres and markets out there. Which one fits you better and offers you a greater chance to earn the living you want as a professional writer?

Emotional Issues

So far, we’ve covered three practical, objective, external issues that tend to influence how much you can earn from your work. But the most important issues are internal:

If you don’t feel worthy of big bucks for your work, you won’t ask for them. And if the market nevertheless insists on offering you those big bucks, psychology tells us you’ll find ways to screw up, or even to lose hold of those big bucks very quickly after they are forced on you.

If you don’t work at improving your pricing, you’ll set your prices at less than optimum levels. The result: you’ll leave money on the table, money that could have been yours.

If you don’t build up the psychological strength to withstand the inevitable stresses, losses, and—yes—even failures you will experience not only on the road to becoming a professional writer, but more generally in life, you will burn out, quit, or otherwise settle for less. Without sufficient inner resilience, you’ll be far less likely to last long enough to accomplish any of your most important goals.

The road to becoming a professional writer is much easier to travel when you realize that however large and unyielding the external barriers to success may seem, the barriers that are most difficult to surmount are the internal ones.

Having said all this, I recognize and understand that you may not make the same choices on pricing as I make. But I still challenge you to price your work as close as you can to its full value. It’s a difficult challenge to meet, and a continuing one. Yet optimum pricing is a central aspect of becoming a professional writer, and also a key element in earning a good living from your skills and your craft.

How to Harness the Power of Your Dreams

Friday, December Post a comment

Aside from the actual craft of writing, one of the best ways to improve your work (and generate more personal satisfaction and income as a result) is to harness the power of your dreams.

In this context, let’s use the word “dreams” to include those stories you tell yourself while you’re sleeping, of course, and also your waking daydreams, your fantasies about how life could or should or would be, plus those many “what if” scenarios you dream up in response to real-life situations that strangers helpfully play out in front of you.

All of these ideas, scenes, set pieces, snippets, and snapshots may be sparked by external reality. But they nearly always feed off some of your innermost feelings, drives, and desires. As such, they are normally connected to strong emotions that, when woven into your writings, will tend to attract and captivate others much more powerfully than the relatively dry stuff that spills out from your comparatively cerebral creative processes.

It has often been said that if you are not crying while you are writing, you’re not doing it right. Starting with material from your dreams will make crying—and other high emotions—a more commonplace part of your writing process.

Here are some tips to help you harness the power of your dreams:

Keep Track of Your Dreams

The first step in harnessing the power of your dreams is to capture as much of this raw material as you can. This requires you to keep a “dream journal” in which, every morning on first awakening, you immediately note what you can remember of any dreams you’ve had during the night. At first, you might remember just a few disconnected snippets of your dreams. But as you continue with this practice, you’ll get better and better at remembering the details of what you dreamt the night before.

But don’t stop with nighttime dreams. Carry some kind of note-taking mechanism with you—scrap paper and pencil, a bound journal, your smart phone, a tape recorder, or anything else you can comfortably tote all the time—and use it frequently. Record random thoughts, complete ideas, simple stories you make up during the day, human interactions you witness, and any other fodder for writing that you encounter as you go about your daily business.

Don’t try to vet these items for quality, relevance, or any other virtue. Capture them all as they come to you. Later, you can decide whether a particular note has enough merit or potential to warrant further work.

Brainstorm on Your Dreams

You can think of dreams that pop into your head as “first generation” material, because it comes unbidden to your mind. But equally valuable is the “second generation” material you intentionally manufacture using your “first generation” material as starting points.

There are many rules to aid in brainstorming, the full range of which I won’t bother to discuss here. But I will cover just two: free writing and pyramiding.

Free writing is a simple exercise designed to uncover lots of ideas that your native internal editor would normally try to keep hidden. It consists of starting with an item of first-generation dream material and then writing whatever comes to mind, without stopping or thinking or editing, for 20 or 30 minutes at a time. If you have nothing to say, just write “I have nothing to say” over and over again until you do have something to say. The result of this free writing exercise is to “clear the pipes” and uncover subconscious material that often reveals additional thoughts, feelings, memories, and ideas tied in with your strong emotions.

Pyramiding is a more conscious process in which you start with an item of first-generation dream material, then intentionally and logically build on it. Say you originally dreamt of an umbrella. You might pyramid on that idea by thinking of umbrella uses, such as shielding a person from rain or sun. You might think of other items that are reminiscent of or associated with umbrellas, such as awnings, tarps, tents, and porch roofs. If you start with an item of clothing, you might build to whole outfits or trending fashions. If you start with a snippet of human interaction, you might pyramid from there toward an entire play.

The discipline and practice of brainstorming applied to your first-generation dream material is helpful because it produces further raw material on the basis of which you may later write something wonderful.

Refine Your Dream Material

Although your first- and second-generation dream material provides the valuable ore containing hints of golden promise, you extract the most value from this raw material when you refine it into ingots of first-rate creative expression.

To do this, sift through your dream material in search of nuggets, grains, or even flecks of worthwhile story material. Look for elements like a great line of dialog or description, a powerful conflict, a memorable character, a captivating visual, an exciting journey, an enthralling plot, or something better.

Collect and organize these as the basis for the most “writerly” part of this process.

Edit Your Dream Material into Story Ideas

Here’s another place where we separate the “wannabes” from the professional writers. Anybody can think of a great line of dialog or an enthralling plot. It takes a professional to craft such elements into a complete idea for a story.

Take, for example, Proof of Life. It’s a compelling film based on a magazine article prompted by the actual practice of gaining freedom for hostages taken by terrorists. Lots of people knew about the practice; thousands more read the magazine article. The raw material was sitting out there in public view, just waiting for a professional writer to do the work necessary to wrangle the raw idea into a story.

Steps one through three, above, will regularly provide you with a treasure trove of raw dream material chocked full of powerful elements from your own life, mind, and unconscious.

From that point on, you will have endless opportunities to use your writing chops to crank out a great story. Or more than one.

What Are Your Writing Strengths and Weaknesses?

Friday, October Post a comment

No matter what the field, what the profession, what the skill set, everyone who strives to accomplish specific goals brings to the effort a variety of strengths and weaknesses. This is no less true in the field of professional writing than anything else.

But while it may be lamentable that you are not great at everything you try, this simple truth need not be a source of unhappiness nor a one-way ticket to failure.

One of the most important distinctions between a highly professional writer and a lesser one is that the former recognizes her strengths and weaknesses, while the latter is to some extent blind to them.

Here’s how you open your eyes to your strengths and weaknesses, and begin to incorporate them into your work:

1. Assess

First, the professional writer continually assesses his or her talents, skills, and capabilities. Each new effort, each new finished piece, stands as a milestone from which the professional writer can look back at his or her body of work and try to understand the patterns it contains.

For example, perhaps you can write a snappy poem, but your efforts to pen a political essay often fall short. Maybe you can craft a compelling short story about a young person coming of age, but that novel you’d love to write about an aging couple with regrets over past relationships eludes you. It’s possible you can describe an article of clothing in terms so soaring that you drive sales higher than the designer’s expectations. But that’s no guarantee you can write a meaningful review of the newest video game.

Strengths and weaknesses don’t manifest themselves simply in terms of whether a certain project is easy or hard for you to complete at a high level of proficiency. There are other factors, such as your willingness to work at honing a difficult passage, your satisfaction with your results, and – of course – how other people react to your output.

Most of us want to rely on our own judgments about our capabilities in various styles, genres, topic areas, purposes, audiences, and formats. Fine. Go ahead and make those personal assessments. But it’s helpful if you check your judgments against those of others, at least once in a while, to make sure you’re not just spinning fantasies about your abilities that won’t hold up in the world of impersonal market-based judgments.

2. Map

Consider both your strengths and weaknesses in terms of the kinds of material to which they relate. If you’re great at explaining actions in step-by-step fashion, that’ll be useful in writing “how to” articles and revealing what’s behind the scenes of complex current events. But it won’t be much help in writing dialog in a bodice-ripper.

On the other hand, if characters you imagine instantly come to life in your head and heart, then you’ll find it easier to tell intense personal stories that keep various audiences turning your pages. But you might not find it as easy to cover a news event or write a compelling press release.

By the same token, if you tend to lose track of where you’re going while writing procedural dramas, there’s little point in beating your head against the wall by trying to draft a spec script for “Law and Order.” Yet that deficiency says nothing about your ability to accomplish other writing objectives.

Take time to evaluate the talents, skills, and capabilities that normally go into creating any category of writing that interests you. Then carefully compare what you actually can do best against what you probably need to be able to do if you expect to excel in a specific kind of writing.

3. Execute

All this effort should result in a list of styles, genres, topic areas, purposes, audiences, and formats that feel very comfortable and interesting to you. These are the categories in which you will do best to concentrate not only your writing time, but your efforts to learn your craft.

Make it your top priority to work on the ones that best match the strengths and weaknesses you bring to the table. Those where you measure up less accurately you can relegate to a back burner or earmark for more concentration later, when you have more time or after you have grown as a writer.

If you’re like most of the writers I’ve known and mentored, you’ll find that the closer you stay to your wheelhouse, the easier and better your professional work will become.

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