Writing professionally: Do you really want to?

I get a lot of emails from a friends, colleagues, acquaintances, or random strangers asking me how to get started writing. Since the question comes up a lot, I thought it might be worth a post here. Maybe it will help some of the people who haven’t asked yet, or at least it’ll give me something to link to rather than composing a custom response each time someone asks.

The first step: Deciding if you really do want to be a professional writer. Let’s start with a series of questions that you should ask yourself before considering writing as a professional activity:

1. Do you like to write, or do you need to write?
2. Can you write 2,500 to 3,500 publishable words a day, every day? (Or more?)
3. Can you generate topics quickly that you can write about quickly?
4. Can you hit deadlines reliably?
5. Really?
6. Do you like having your writing criticized or changed by others?
7. Are you good at marketing yourself?
8. Are you ready to run a small business?
9. Do you want to work in a field with intense competition and not enough work for everybody?

If the answer to question one was “I like to write,” then game over and thanks for playing. No, really. People don’t succeed as writers long-term because it’s something they sort of enjoy doing — for the same reason people who enjoy drawing or painting don’t become famous artists, people who just sort of enjoy playing guitar don’t become Eric Clapton. I promise you that if you don’t need to write, you’ll go from sort of enjoying writing to hating writing.

Take a weekend and see if you can do 2,500 to 3,500 words on Saturday and Sunday, each. Yes, while everyone else is out having fun. Repeat that for a couple of weekends. In a row. If you can generate 10,000 words of publishable work in a month, you might be a candidate to be a professional writer.

Topics — if you’re born to write, or have had it beaten into you somehow, you’re going to see topics literally everywhere. If you’re a subject matter expert in one or more areas, you’ll be able to nail down topic ideas from the basics to the more subtle areas of your expertise. If you’re a generalist, you ought to be able to think of topics you’d send to everybody from Reader’s Digest to Make Magazine. (Maybe not those specifically, but if you’re going to be a generalist freelance writer, you have to have a very wide net.)

This isn’t a problem for tech authors, necessarily — if you’re lucky enough to be on staff as a tech writer, the topics will be assigned to you, but I don’t know many folks who’ve landed tech writing jobs without a portfolio.

Deadlines: Can you hit them?

Criticism: Can you take it? This is something I see trip up a lot of first-timers. If you don’t have a really thick skin, or if you feel that your writing is so special that it just can’t be changed… you are not a candidate to be a professional writer. Editors will change your work. Sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse, and sometimes just because they need to whack 200 words to squeeze your manuscript into a space. (Assuming you write for print…)

There’s a word for writers who don’t accept changes well: Unemployed. The editor assigning the story and the client writing the check get final say, and you should have very little ego about this.

That doesn’t mean that authors have to accept every change or allow their work to be published under their byline if it’s not something they’d be proud to put their name on. If an editor changes something and the result is a piece that’s factually incorrect or something you’d be embarrassed to put your name on, stand your ground. But too many authors huff and puff because of trivial changes or because the “voice” of the piece has been changed a bit.

If you’re lucky enough to work with an editor that does provide feedback, accept it gracefully and gratefully.

Next — are you good at marketing yourself? Unless you are very, very lucky, building a decent client list requires aggressive marketing and pitching to publications and clients. If you’re not good at this, you don’t get work.

And are you ready to run your own small business? Because that’s what freelance writing is — running a business. You need to do the whole thing: Pitch the work, make the sale, close the deal, actually do the writing, do customer service with clients, have meetings, be the accountant, do the invoicing, handle collections if you’re unfortunate enough to have clients who are slow to pay, and so on. You have to read contracts and decide how much you need to make per hour to make a living — factoring in that you’ll only be able to bill for time you’re actually writing. Spending 40 hours a week working isn’t the same as billing 40 hours per week.

Good rule of thumb: Expect to see checks roll in 30 to 45 days after the work is done. Sometimes even more slowly. This means you need to have a decent cushion for clients who don’t pay quickly. If you’re about to go into freelancing, I recommend a cushion of no less than three months, and six months is actually a better idea. You want a long runway if you don’t land a lot of work right away.

Finally, realize that it’s a very, very competitive field. A lot of people want to write for a living, and you’re going to be pitching for the same publications and clients as a lot of other writers. And there are outfits like Demand Media that are consistently lowering the bar on quality and pay, making it that much more difficult to eke out a living when many clients and publications will settle for a low-quality content-like substance.

It might sound like I’m trying to discourage people from freelancing. Mainly, I just want to give a realistic view of what writing for a living entails. It’s nowhere near as easy as most people think it is. It does come easily or naturally to some people, but it doesn’t to most. Simply being a decent writer isn’t the same thing as being ready to be a professional writer. If it’s not something that you are fully committed to, you’ll probably fail, and you’ll certainly hate it.