Freelance writing is a very different proposition from working full-time in a newsroom. In an office environment, your organization provides structure to your finances, and your editor and peers usually provide structure to your ideas. But as a freelance writer, you’re expected to generate ideas and projects on your own.
Difficult? Yes. Impossible? No.
For anyone who’s new to the freelance writing hustle, read on for insights that will help you out during your first year or two as an independent journalist.
- You don’t need to have personal connections. If you already have them, then, sure, use them. But this is by no means a requirement. Editors are looking for surprising, insightful, powerful stories. And just because you’re their former roommate or whatever doesn’t mean that you’re the best person to track down a story for them. Be smart, be reliable, and, above all, be original; these qualities are as important as knowing the right people.
- Keep your bags packed. You never know when you’ll need to head out the door to report on-site. That means always being ready with your recorder, notebook and pen, laptop, and digital camera in case you have to head into the field at the last minute.
- Good writing requires lots of reading. Not sure why, but I’ve had a lot of students who want to write for, say, Wired but aren’t familiar with the sections within the magazine or the many,many great blogs they have. Do your homework. If you want to get published in a certain publication, SUBSCRIBE and read the magazine first. A bit of research up front will prevent you from sending off-target pitches.
- Rejection is part of the game. You’ll experience rejection at EVERY level. Even if you’ve been assigned a story for, say, The New Yorker or New York magazine, there’s still the chance that the story will get killed. This is good. This means that you’re writing for a publication that won’t settle for just any article. But it also means that, no matter how accomplished and lauded you are, your story may not make it to print. This is fine. The challenge is what makes this job exciting.
- Editors won’t always hand you ideas. Sometimes you do get assigned ideas that someone else came up with. But in my experience, I get more work – and more enjoyable work – when I come up with the concepts myself. I keep a running list in my inbox and in Google Docs of things I want to research so that, the second I file a story, I’m ready to develop another one.
- Relationships matter. This is why you don’t mass email editors, subtweet people you work with, or insult the magazine in your pitches. You want to convince editors that you’re pleasant to work with. So cut that shade out, OK?
- Tackling the blank page never gets easier. Even after years of writing, I still have to overcome that initial panic of having to create something new from scratch. Someone once said that being a writer is like being a rug maker: you make a rug, you sell it – great! But guess what? Now you’ve got to make another one. So if you’re not interested in the discipline of writing, you won’t last very long. As author Tom Bissell said, writing “is simultaneously the reward, the challenge, and the goal.”