What It Is to Be a Freelance Writer: Basic Functions
Freelance writing can become a wonderful career but it’s better to know what it involves before you try it yourself. Here are two definitions that can help you understand what you’re looking into:
- Being a writer
- An ability to structure language well
- An understanding of the subtle rules of grammar
- An appetite for the work of other writing professionals
- Being a freelancer
- A degree of versatility
- Resilience
- A good reputation
Writers put words together artistically to create content in all sorts of settings. This includes novels, textbooks, essays, blog posts, love letters and just about any type of written language you can think of. To succeed as a writer, you should possess the following:
This means that you can construct beautiful, hard-hitting or instructional phrases with little effort. You most likely would have had this skill since childhood.
A good speaker may be good at creating sentences that are pleasant to hear aloud but without the ability to proofread and recognise written grammatical errors, his or her work will always fall short. Some writers have the benefit of working alongside editors but many do not and this lack of knowledge soon becomes apparent.
By reading the work of others, writing professionals add to their arsenal of skills and this makes them more valuable to potential clients.
Freelancers operate without bosses by hiring their services out to people with available jobs. This is a means of working that has been adopted by many different service providers from writers, to singers and landscapers. What all these professionals would have in common is:
Freelancers who specialise are more vulnerable to the whims of the market. If their skill goes out of style unexpectedly, a backup skill could put food on the table temporarily.
Starting out can be tough so only the most resilient freelancers make it past the first few weeks. Once this is the path you chose you need to be aware of the massive failure rate and resolve to not add to it.
This needs to be built up over time but having a good reputation means that people will begin to request your work even though they’ve never met you or interacted with you one-on-one before. With a good enough reputation, a freelancer becomes a brand and not a person.
By combining these two concepts seamlessly you can begin to understand the role a freelance writer plays.