The Freelance Creative

The Writer’s Desk: Making a Living on the Keyboard

I don’t think I’m good enough to call myself a writer. Still, there is no denying I spend at least eight hours a day in front of a keyboard, writing. Nothing too imaginative, mind you, certainly nothing resembling what a fiction writer or essayist can put down.

I find it remarkable that someone with plebian talents can actually make a sort of living doing this. That’s good, because at this stage of my life I am fit for little else.

I start every day the same way, brewing tea for my bride of 36 years and myself. I work on a laptop that I store near the bed at night so that I can start writing as we sip our tea. I split my work between custom blogging and article writing.

My background in finance gets me a few cold inquiries each week, which when coupled with topical articles lets me eke out a reasonable living. Certainly there is enough work to keep me busy all my waking hours, and it is sometimes tempting to slip in just one more article. This always results in a headache.

If you’d like to pay the bills by writing, please dive in. Write like crazy and then write some more.

My route to writing started with computers. What can I say, I love keyboards. Over the years, I collected a couple of graduate degrees and a lot experience analyzing systems and then businesses. For those of you who function well in an office environment, I send you my sincere admiration. It wasn’t my employers’ fault, I am simply temperamentally unfit for the corporate life. Only took about 30 years to figure out.

Which is to say that I cannot tell you how much fun it is to work my own hours, pick my topics, and make the local coffeehouse my de facto office. Perhaps from insecurity, I spend way too much time on each piece I write, and yet I wince when I come across one on the Internet. Every flaw, every piece of sloppy grammar or misplaced comma keeps me humble. Very humble.

Blogging is a roller-coaster. When I blog for myself, I say exactly what I think and sometimes its coherent. My blogs cover finance, hedge fund crime, typography, content writing and the occasional personal incident. These, of course, are signed. My commercial blogging is about 50 percent published under my name; the other half is anonymous or is my client’s name. That’s all fine with me as long as the client is pleased. The topics skew towards finance and science, but I have done regular blogs about San Diego real estate, which I’m sure is lovely, alternative treatments for allergies, automobile repair, solar devices and student loans, among others.

I cannot tell you how much fun it is to work my own hours, pick my topics, and make the local coffeehouse my de facto office.

Until recently, a large chunk of time was devoted to single topic pages for customers, posted to boost their Google search results. If you cut up an encyclopedia into a million scraps, you’d have an idea of the range of topics for the pages. The takeaway lesson is that most of your freelance writing will not stem from expertise, but rather from research. I don’t mean Wikipedia, which I love but is often wrong. Research takes half of my time. Any more and I wouldn’t be able to publish my quota. Any less and my quota wouldn’t be worth publishing.

If you’d like to pay the bills by writing, please dive in. Write like crazy and then write some more. Pick a topic or two to specialize in, tempered by the knowledge of what’s in demand what is impossible to give away. Read blogs and join forums. Pay attention to your editors. Be grateful. Enjoy.

 

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