Tweet Talent can take you far in life. But hard work will push you further than talent alone. What I’ve learned in the last 6 years I’ve been freelance writing is there are other skills besides writing that can benefit the successful freelance writer. And that’s a good thing! This means that I don’t need to be as creative as Young House Lovers John and Sherry, funny as Martha Beck or as pushy as some go-getter writers to be successful. Talk about a load off of my back. If I had to be naturally talented like the authors I drool…
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Tweet I’ve always been uber shy. When I was a child, my mom bought me books where the protagonists are always shrinking violets. In elementary school, I took a failing grade because the thought of speaking up in public was more mortifying than seeing an F on my report card. It’s one of the reasons why I took so well to writing. I could create words on paper and express myself while keeping any verbal discourse to myself. Yet, somewhere along the line I realized that writing wasn’t just about sitting quietly and typing. I could write all I wanted,…
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Tweet Part of the gift and the challenge with being a freelance writer is not knowing what comes next. While you may be riding the wave of good fortune this month, you may be drowning the next. Although there is the rare writer who radiates an envious and endless optimism, most of us struggle day to day, typing along, hoping to be discovered and appreciated for the hard work writing requires. I’m of the more common variety. And after reading Julia Cameron’s Finding Water: The Art of Perseverance, I was relieved that even best-selling authors go through this too. It’s…
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Tweet Something pulled me from my warm bed and hour of mindless magazine reading today. I was thinking about my last post. I was thinking about how Walt Disney encountered a lot of bad people in the biz and still waded in his way through the slime and got to the other side. In fact, not just in spite of the greedy people out there but because he had resilience. There are many traits important in having a successful freelance writing business and I definitely think resilience is one of them. Resilience helps you keep going. It’s what helped Olympic…