Bin to Bestsellers: the Importance of Other People in your Writing Life

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Making money writing is the hardest job on planet earth, however, there are people who do it effectively and make a living out of it. Being not one of them is not your problem, but aspiring not to be one is.

Is finding a publisher the best option for you as a writer? Richard Bach once mentioned in an interview; it’s not a publisher a writer searches for, but an editor. This relationship is one that should last for a lifetime. An editor understands where the music of words has to be slowed down or where it must run faster. But to get one worthy enough, you must do a lifetime’s waiting.

As a beginner in freelancing and in professional writing, how do you get an editor whose service can be worthwhile? Beginners are always stuck with the same problem, lack of funds. This in turn hampers your look out for an editor. Good editors are sale items with relatively high price money. There are many writers’ communities that offer editing services. Even some literary agencies offer you with editing services. However, if you are a first timer and one without enough weight in you bank account, hiring an editor for your book or manuscript will not be, normally, easy.

The best way to tackle this situation is to find reliable and easy options for editors. One need not go much farther for this end. Just look around and you will find yourself to be blessed with many minds, gifted with the one serum of eternal life—love—around you, ready to help reading your manuscript.

Showing your manuscript to your friends and family or girl friend would be a better option. In such a case, the money spent would be much close to null on editing services. The best editors are those who actually care for our work. You must be open to their criticisms; however, in harsh criticisms you can always rely on their lack of professional experience as the hideout from humiliation.

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Stephen King, when he wrote his first novel, Carrie, did not think it would make up to the publishing standards and threw it into the bin. But his wife Tabitha King accidentally discovered the manuscript and read it. Thinking that it would be something worth of a quality, she put it back on the table and later helped King to rework on it. The novel went to become a best seller of its times and was made into a successful Hollywood movie.

This is one real life example from the life of America’s most celebrated and enthusiastic writer, Stephen King. This could be yours too. A relationship not just helps an individual to maintain one’s emotional health but the creative out put as well. Now wait your sweet heart to tell you where to put the period.

Sweat and Blood in a Freelance Writer’s Life

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Bosom elements of a writer’s intellectual life mostly overlap into the metaphysical world. Words when dry on a paper, the writer in you feels exuberant. No doubt this feeling corresponds to your expectations on what the piece of literature you endeavoured could achieve in the future. You dream about what it would be, not what it is. This has something wrong in its essence. It negotiates with reality and puts you in the mercy of an imaginary success. This is what I meant by the metaphysical world in the beginning.

This is dangerous. It makes you lame by giving you the false hope of transformation into a successful writer.

The first step and may be the most important one, in living a freelancer’s life is to quit planting the cornerstones of your success on an imaginary plane. The only way to scratch success out in writing is to actually commit oneself into it—to write. If you dream about writing a 5000 words long short story and are available for most of the time in the cozy quadrants of laziness, you are no way going to touch the finishing line to pose for the photos at the end. Only the one who completed his race gets the chance for the final camera pose.

The winner poses in front of the camera with a smile, this smile always contains the memories of sweat and hard work. Often we see the smile and never try to feel what it means to shed sweat and blood. In a writer’s life, especially, in a freelance writer’s life, the sweat and blood are the number of words he or she bangs out in the word processor each day. The more the better. You must exercise your brain muscles, those delicate and gifted cells that control your creativity, and keep your craft in check each day.

Debutantes or experienced, the tendency to incline towards a metaphysical success are similar. However, the more experienced the more accurate your predictions become about your work. For a beginner, the best way to hold on until finally success knocks on your door is to keep away from thinking what your work would achieve rather than what your work is.

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Your transformation must happen in and through your work. Just by imagining yourself to be a transformed writer can hardly get you where your real potential will. Your transformation into a successful writer must follow real work and not the ‘ought to be’ times. Transformation follows two different and distinct influences; influence without and influence within. It shouldn’t just be the influence within that carries a writer’s journey forward.  A combination of both can only strike the right balance for a writer to achieve transformation. And therein lays the secret of success.

Be the Well that Never Dries

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The mantra for a freelance writer is simple. Well, exclusivity is an issue indeed, but here, for anyone who is courageous enough to take the freedom and liberty one enjoys in freelancing and the risks that it brings along with it, this mantra will do quite enough.

“Be the well that never dries.”

Never let the customer wait with his wallet on your door step. Offer him his due seat and give him his work. A writer’s block has unfortunately no space in the freelancer’s world. He should always be ready with his never-ending stream of imagination, creativity and skills. Of course, the necessity of keeping one’s head cool is inevitably clear at this time.

Unless you find peace with your self and that restricting thought–whether I can do it or not—you can never achieve your perfect take off as a freelancer. Once you are in the air, the wind will do its job. It will take you to the vastness of the sky of success.

Limits are not made for a freelancer. The abundance of the water of words is possible only under the above mentioned norm; if you are able to take your flight. It’s a choice and a destiny. You chose to fly high and your flight, in turn, will enable you to keep your well full of water.