Writing careers suffer from the same problem as all the others; to get a job writing, you need experience. But you can’t get experience without a job. It’s a catch-22 situation, and it stops a lot of people before they’ve even started.
In this article, you’re going to be given some great ideas to kick start your career, fill your portfolio and get a ton of writing experience before you ever get a job as a writer. What’s better, you’re going to ignore the “work for free” advice that you’ll get given by a “careers advisor” and earn some money.
Your goals are going to change based on what sort of writing you want to go into, so I’ll try and cover them all in minute detail. Here’s one piece of advice that I can’t repeat enough though: If you’re a writer, your job is to write.
If you get paid to write, who cares what you’re writing? I’d encourage you to write whenever and what you can. You’ll get better at the act of writing if you challenge yourself and break boundaries.
Most writers will spend years trying to get their novel published. They’ll never try to write a sales letter. They’ll never write a fake review. They’ll never build a website, or work with a business on their emailing list. Their bank balance will reflect that, and their writing skill probably will too.
Why You Should Ignore Careers Advisors, Other Writers and Pretty Much Everyone – Especially Employers
I’d written for years by the time I left University and decided to write professionally. In fact, I never even planned to be a writer; I was just reasonably good at it.
Despite those years of writing experience across the board, I was told I had too little experience. “Experience at what?” I thought to myself. Anyway, realizing I was just a fresh-out-of-University graduate, I figured those people must be right.
The 2007 recession hit. Suddenly, changes occurred in the job marketplace. They wanted even more experience. They wanted people to work for less. You started seeing jobs appear that were “Entry level” yet simultaneously demanding “5 years’ experience.”
If you were an editor for a project, you’d demand that those sentences were re-written, because they don’t make any sense. Still, that’s the way it was, and the way it still is.
Of course, the ceiling to entry is high. Everyone loves the idea of being a writer. If the ceiling was high and that was the only problem, you could understand it. But it wasn’t. Jobs appeared during the recession across all sorts of fields that were voluntary. You’d get paid in experience.
Of course, your living costs weren’t provided, you’d be working full time and people would be profiting from your words (which would never be good enough, let’s forget,) but you were lucky to “get on the ladder.”
By now, this article is rambling. I’ll condense this section into four words: Don’t work for free.
A career advisor will tell you you’re working for the experience. Ignore them. You’re getting experienced at devaluing your own work.
An employer will tell you to work for free so you can learn a lot, develop professionally or whatever. Ignore them. Tell them you’ll work for free if they promise to not make any money themselves. They want devalued labour. Don’t give it to them.
Other writers will give you all kinds of professional advice. Ignore them too. The writer subculture tends to have a “Starve for the art” attitude. It’s not helpful, it’s not productive. If someone says, “I had to work my way up the ladder and do my time before I got paid,” ignore them as well.
Along the way, there’ll be all kinds of people who want you to work for nothing. If you were a builder, you wouldn’t do it. If you were a doctor, you wouldn’t do it. Writing is a technical skill that takes time and energy to develop. Treat it as such.
So, How Do I Get Experience If I Tell People To Stick Their “FREE EXPERIENCE” Where The Sun Don’t Shine?
Writing is a pretty awesome skill to have. Provided you are well-rounded, you can apply the skills you’ve learned writing to pretty much any business or market. By well-rounded, I mean able to write fiction, non-fiction, sales materials and general writing for a variety of audiences and purposes. Not stuff you need a hundred post-graduate degrees in or fifty years’ experience.
Once you have those skills, you can apply them however you see fit. If you want to be a fiction writer, then the best advice I can give you is to do it. Don’t worry about a publisher. Don’t worry about editing. Don’t worry about anything else. Your goal for the month is to write a novella, publish it to Amazon and see what happens.
“But what about this objection I have?”
Don’t care. Write under a pen name. Write in a different genre. Forget worrying about spelling or grammar errors.
I can already tell you what will happen, because it happened to me. I sold about five copies of my first self-published novella in the first month. The world didn’t end. It was (and still is) full of errors that I keep meaning to get around to fixing. The production is naff – I used Microsoft Word and the contents page doesn’t work properly.
It hasn’t got any negative reviews based on that. It hasn’t got any negative reviews at all. Nobody has done an under-cover investigation into who wrote this terrible piece of fiction. Nobody cares, except the people who bought it. Even they haven’t refunded the story, so it can’t be terrible.
If you do this, in a month’s time you’ll be able to demonstrate that you:
- Can finish a reasonable-length project.
- Can edit, format and publish a book.
- Can put on your CV you’re a published writer.
- Can put on your CV you run a publishing company. (This one is a stretch, but so is every job description you’ve ever read. Don’t feel sad about exaggerating.)
- Have made money as a writer. (If it makes a dollar, it’s profitable.)
You’ll also have intangible skills that will have made you a better fiction writer. You’ll discover those for yourself. Who knows, you might even make some money and decide you don’t need a job anyway.
If you want to be a How-To/Non-Fiction author, then I want you to go to reddit or some other site where people have problems. Then, pick a particularly whiny looking problem. It doesn’t matter if you’re interested in the subject or not. In fact, it’s better if you have no interest in the subject. It hones your skills.
In one day, I want you to brainstorm all the different ways you could help this person. Is the problem big enough for a book? Is it big enough for an article? What about a 26-DVD Video Step-by-step guide?
Then research the problem. Write out all the solutions, and work out how best to deliver the information.
Then do it.
Create a blog post. If you don’t have a blog, get one.
Create an e-report. Give it away for free in exchange for an email. (Get a free mailchimp email list.)
Create a YouTube video if you can.
Do all of those things. Your writing will be less than 3000 words for that whole project, and you’ll have solved a real world problem. It’ll take you a handful of hours, and you’ll be able to demonstrate research skills, delivery of information and actual writing prowess with a real world example.
Those five hours are probably worth more than my BA degree.
If you want to be a copywriter, I’ve got some good news for you.
Everyone needs copy. Go to a freelance site and work for $2 to get experience. Ta-Da! You’re a writer. You didn’t need a Master’s Degree for that.
If you want more hands-on advice, I want you to go to Amazon. I want you to buy something that costs less than $5, and is really boring. The blander it is the better. The less you know about it, the better. I don’t mean a dry book. I mean a disposable razor. Or one of those moulds people use to shape cupcakes.
Buy that item.
When it comes, make notes. How does it arrive? How long does it take you to unpack it? What does the box smell like?
You’re going to write a review of this boring object, and it is going to make you a better copywriter.
If you really want to take it to the next level, write the review in the style of a long-form sales letter that Internet Marketers love. Write two thousand words, a video script and take pictures of a silicone cupcake template. It’ll make you a better writer. Write about it in that Trial-By-Fire style, “I used to be a LOSER who wanted to KILL MYSELF, but then I discovered this LITTLE KNOWN PRODUCT that changed how I felt about life FOREVER.”
The last bit is optional. However, write a serious review. Publish it to your own website, and wait for that affiliate money to roll in. Try not to spend all $0.20 in one go. You’re now a copywriter, affiliate marketer and a connoisseur of whatever you reviewed all in one go.
If you want to be a journalist or something similar, the glass ceiling doesn’t exist anymore. You could do a two-year internship in New York or London, but you shouldn’t. Old media is dying – superseded by the democracy of information. Start your own website, get a camera, and start doing what you need to.
Working as an investigative journalist is just a case of putting your boots on the ground and getting the real information that matters. You can do that as a single writer better than a multi-billion dollar industry can. You don’t need to sell your soul to work at Gawker penning not-so-poorly-disguised propaganda and clickbait in order to be a journalist. You just need to be able to get the facts across in a convincing way and have a legitimate interest in the cause you’re writing about.
Getting Paid As A Writer With No Experience
There are hundreds of avenues by which you can get paid.
Put together a portfolio of the projects above. Create a media pack to send to people you could potentially offer your services to.
As a writer, every project you undertake can be its own unique business. You could write a novella a week, put up a review of a product you’ve been using and write a niche site for people who love watching red panda videos. You can do this whilst working on Elance or Fiverr, and gaining professional experience that way.
All of those things will build experience. All of them are potentially profitable enterprises which you can specialise in. All of them are more spiritually, physically and financially better for you than a) working an internship at an agency that’ll drop you as soon as you demand enough to live on, and b) sitting around suffering from entropy because your dreams of being the next great novelist aren’t coming to fruition.