by Marijoyce Porcelli

Created on: January 03, 2009

"Just sit down and start writing" is the best and the worst advice ever given.

If you want to be a successful freelance writer you need to practice your craft, daily if possible. However, just writing on a regular schedule is not enough to get your work sold. Writing is a skill and, as with any skill, you need to know what you are doing.

To sit down and write every day with no instruction on how to write well is akin to building a house without blueprints. Sure, you may eventually get the house built, but the foundation is apt to be shaky and the home could crumble at any time.

Bottom line, if you want to be a paid freelance writer, if you want magazines and other publications to buy your product, you have to learn to write well enough to get your work into that format of print. That takes work, and a lot of it.

If you don't have a firm understanding of good grammar or a good grasp on spelling, etc., chances are pretty good you are never going to see your freelance work in a larger publication. Editors are busy people and they already have loads of freelancers who know how to spell and so on competing for space in their published forums. They don't have the time or desire to act as an English teacher, correcting papers, as well.

If you need such instruction, beginning English classes, in fact, are a great place to start.

Don't just read every how-to book or article on writing. Read them and study them. Try whenever you can to put the rules and/or instruction into practice.

Take any writing class you can afford. Some will be good ones, some will be bad ones, but you can usually glean useful information from any such gathering.

Once you have a strong grasp on how to write well, think about marketing your work.

Don't just shoot off finished manuscripts to any source and hope for a random hit. It can happen, but it doesn't happen very often. Study the markets and gear each manuscript toward a particular market.

There are a lot of ways to find markets looking for freelance writers. One way is to simply type in "writers wanted" or "manuscripts wanted" in your favorite search engine (don't forget to use the quotation marks around the words to get web sites to come up with only that exact phrasing).

My favorite book, that also includes a lot of reliable how-to instruction, that also lists such market needs is Writer's Market issued yearly by Writer's Digest. This book can get a little pricey, around $30 in book stores. You can usually save money here by checking on eBay or amazon.com

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