SAHM Writer Blog

Myths of Freelance Writing

25th July, 2009 - Posted by admin - No Comments

I stumbled onto this awesome post about freelance writing from my new buddy Spike : )   (man, I want a cool nickname like that!… well maybe not that one in particular…)

He went through a top 10 list of freelance writing myths.

Make sure you go read it:

http://scrawlbug.com/2009/07/23/10-myths-of-freelance-writing/

It got me thinking about the top 3 myths I’d list:

1. Writers are broke… or else billionaires. There are tons of writers somewhere in between. It’s not a matter of either starving to death or being discovered and having your scrawlings turned into a blockbuster movie. Commercial writing is a huge and constantly-growing industry. The bigger the internet grows, the more prospective clients out there for all of us.

2. You’ve got to have a degree in something writing-related. Baloney! And if you have a prospective client who insists you’ve got to have a degree in English, Journalism, or anything else in particular… just keep looking. Savvy clients don’t care about your sheepskin – they want good writing, delivered on-time.

3.  You need to be a subject matter expert to work as a writer. This one kept me out of the game for years. I always heard, “Write about what you know” and figured I didn’t know about anything in particular more than anyone else did, so I shouldn’t bother. Granted, writing about what you know is a lot easier than having to do a ton of research. But you can absolutely stay crazy busy writing about things you know enough about to not need to do research. There are so many “off the top of my head” gigs out there that research and writing combined, you can write a quality article in 15 minutes or less.