Setting Up a Blog For Writers

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Quips & Tips for Freelance Writers.

Hope to see you there, fellow scribes…

establishing your writing habits

I’m on a Julia Cameron kick, even though she’s not my all-time favorite writing writer. Don’t get me wrong, she’s great – but I like reading practical stuff about writing, like how to write query letters and how to take all those old ideas and twist them into something new. Morning Pages never really did it for me.

Anyway, on to Julia’s advice about artists and trainers…

Writing quotation: “In order to succeed as an artist we must have two well-developed functions: our artist and its trainer. The trainer is steady and adult. It keeps its eye on the course and the long run. It coaxes, wheedles, begs, cajoles, and occasionally disciplines our artist, which Westie-like, proceeds in spurts and sometimes not at all,” Cameron says in Finding Water: The Art of Perseverance.

“The trick is setting the jumps low enough that our artist can be lured into action. If I am writing nonfiction, I set my goal at a modest three pages. Almost anyone can write three pages of something and my artist knows that.”

Writing tip: Julia Cameron's writing habit includes 3 pages. Yours can be 3 paragraphs or 3,000 words. Or, you can write for 3 hours – or just 30 minutes. The trick is to do something every day that moves you forward.

I’m a freelance magazine writer, and right now I have 5 articles due (yay!). The deadlines vary from this Friday to two months from now – and I get scared. Insecure, and anxious, and pressured. I want the articles to be fantastic, and I want to keep my editors happy.

What works best for me is to work a little on each article every day, whether it’s writing the sidebar or emailing sources or researching or finetuning the lead. My ideal goal would be to spend an hour a day on each article – but I tend to get lost in the article I’m working on and I run out of time for the others.

What works best for you? It doesn’t matter how I work, or how Julia Cameron writes, or how Mark Twain wrote. What matters is finding what works best for you, and making that a habit.

And tossing back a shot of espresso or whatever suits your fancy every once in a while never hurts, either.

Inspiration for freelance writers

I tell you, I’m actually getting used to sending out 147,258 queries for every article I sell. It’s just part of the job – but what keeps me going is tracking my long-term success. This week, I’ve got articles due for Woman’s Day and Reader’s Digest. In a couple weeks, I have a deadline for Flare.

So even though I get rejected all the time, I am hitting it every now and then. And, boy, is it sweet! That's what keeps me going.

Writing quotation: “Is freelancing hard work? Sure – damned hard. But it’s not harder than any other profession. Like every job, it requires a combination of skill, thoroughness and dependability,” says I.J. Schecter in the 2008 version of Writer’s Market. “The difference is you don’t have anyone defining the parameters of the job for you or providing incentives to succeed.”

Writing tip: You have to define your own parameters when you’re freelancing. That means setting your goals, staying disciplined, and taking risks. Above all, it means NOT waiting until you feel creative before you get to work. Freelance writing means NOT waiting for inspiration to strike.

Instead, you have to hunt inspiration like the beast it is.

Elmore Leonard’s writing advice

Writing quotation: Novelist Elmore Leonard disapproves of “Thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them. What the writer is doing, he’s writing, perpetrating hooptedoodle, perhaps taking another shot at the weather, or has gone into the character’s head, and the reader either knows what the guy’s thinking or doesn’t care. I’ll bet you don’t skip dialogue.”

Writing tip: I’m not 100% sure what “hooptedoodle” is, but I can guess. Elmore Leonard is talking about those neverending paragraphs of prose that don’t add much to the action and that lose most readers fairly quickly. Instead, dialogue and short bursts of information should weed our writing so only the most important, vibrant stuff remains.

The above paragraph probably has 20 unnecessary words. Though my blog may not show it, I have learned to write tightly through my magazine writing. When they give me 200 words to summarize a long-term scientific experiment that described multiple important findings and a list of possible implications as well as future plans, I had to learn to write short and snappy prose.

Again, the above paragraph has about 20 extra words. The best way to apply Elmore Leonard's writing advice is to edit until you use one word instead of three to make your point.