Tag Archives: freelance writing

advice

Four Essential Components for Finding Your Freelance Zone

CleanWellLighted

Although there are many paths to freelancing success, as ho-hum as it may sound, developing a routine is the keystone of a successful freelance writing career. Foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, but wise consistency equals profitable productivity. With that goal in mind, it is also imperative that you set up a quiet, comfortable, efficient workspace and spend as many hours as possible in it.

A Clean, Well-Lighted Place: The first step in establishing yourself as a successful freelance writer is to create a place of your own in which to ply your craft. Your workspace should be convenient, inviting, and absolutely off limits to everyone except you. While this may be impractical or even impossible in many households, anything less will only create chaos and conflict. Although not ideal, your creative space could be something as simple as a lap desk and a comfy chair in a corner of the living room, a roll-top desk in your bedroom, or even a cozy cubby in a spacious closet. No matter how humble or small, stake your claim on a few square feet of the family real estate and hang up your ‘No Trespassing’ sign.

First Thing in the Morning: Once you’ve marked your territory, it’s time to get started on your routine. As soon as you’re awake in the morning and put your feet on the floor, your private workspace should be the first place you go; although a small detour to the bathroom, with a brief stopover at the coffee maker are perfectly acceptable. Just be sure you don’t get sidetracked along the way. If you have children who begin vying for your attention first thing in the morning, then it’s important that you wake up a few minutes before they do, to focus your mind and get your day started. Even if you don’t begin writing right away, that first focus will set the tone for your whole day.

The Hours: For many if not most freelance writers, time management is the most crucial yet difficult element of their lives. Chances are, unless you fit the perfect stereotype for a freelance writer (you’re single, childless, live alone, do not have a close-knit family, and you’re not romantically involved), life can be both hectic and complicated. And as a freelancer, the people in your life may tend to view you and your workday as endlessly flexible and available to accommodate their every whim. This can be a huge disruption and a source of conflict. But if you truly hope to make a living as a freelancer, carving out several hours a day to focus your undivided attention on writing is an absolute must. Of course, everyone’s schedule, lifestyle, and creativity patterns are unique, so each individual freelance writer will have to arrange an ideal routine. Maybe your best time for writing is during the day while the children are at school. Or maybe you prefer doing your errands and physical activities in the afternoon, and your writing in the evenings when it’s quiet and the cares of the day are behind you. Perhaps you need long, uninterrupted blocks of time and can arrange your lifestyle accordingly. Or maybe you are adept at multi-tasking and can write for a couple of hours between bursts of phone calls and household chores. Whatever suits your creative temperament is perfectly acceptable, as long as it allows you to be abundantly productive.

Last Thing at Night: The last piece of the puzzle is a few quiet moments at the end of the day to develop tomorrow’s agenda. This is the time for setting goals, making lists, jotting down ideas and looking back at what you’ve accomplished today. Waking up with a clear map of where you’re headed each day is a surefire way to facilitate your success as a freelance writer. So, sit down for a few minutes before bedtime each evening and make a to-do list for tomorrow.

*Content for this article is adapted from Celeste Heiter’s Amazon Kindle ebook Turn Your PC into a Lean Mean Freelancing Machine.

advice, editorial, social networking

Wanna Be Headhunted?

Joe-Wallace-Vinyl-Collector-and-authorby Joe Wallace

I’ve got a super-busy schedule these days; my writing gigs have increased exponentially, I’m enrolled in the Recording Arts program at Tribeca Flashpoint Media Academy here in Chicago, and I’m working the post-production end of my short film, 45 RPM.

So naturally, I have absolutely no time whatsoever to consider the gig that was offered to me today via e-mail; a digital managing editor slot for a startup near me.

I didn’t apply for this gig–far from it–it came to me in my inbox today from a creative placement agency. I didn’t have to wonder how they found me, as I’ve got a little strategy to help me track where my random e-mails come from and how I’ve been discovered on the Internet.

My resume site for my work in multi-media has a site-specific e-mail address. So does my writing-specific resume site. Ditto for my vinyl blog Turntabling.net and my filmmaking blog Now-Sound.com.

The headhunter found me, oddly enough, via my multimedia resume page. So it’s likely the headhunter did a keyword search for a set of specific terms and my site wound up in the page one or page two results.

If you want to be discovered this way, there are plenty of ways to do it–mine includes having a resume page that’s been online at the same address for a very long time, using SEO-optimized resume writing techniques, along with plenty of images also with SEO optimized filenames. But none of this is my point, really.

If you really want to open up some additional freelance options for yourself, I strongly suggest you check out the creative temp agencies in your market. They can be an important source of income for a creative freelancer. Some of my highest profile and best-paying work has come from agencies, and I did some good work for these household name-type companies.

If you’re frustrated with a lack of work, a creative temp agency might just open up some new income potential for you. I have no time whatsoever to consider the position e-mailed to me today, but maybe YOU do.

Joe Wallace is a writer, editor, indie filmmaker, multi-media artist and time management fanatic. He has many projects going at once, and has finally realized he’s not truly happy unless he’s beating deadlines, rushing for trains, calculating the amount of remaining natural light, editing video, and planning his next recording session all within the same day. He blogs about filmmaking at Now-Sound.com.

advice, editorial

Team Collaboration For Creative Freelancers

Filmmaking Film production freelance sound designby Joe Wallace

Over the summer, I decided I wasn’t busy enough and enrolled in the Recording Arts for Film program at Tribeca Flashpoint Media Academy. The program began this week with orientation and on Day Two, we got right into things with a team-building exercise designed to help people understand just what they are getting into at the schoolhouse.

I am certainly not the only non-traditional (read, “older”) student there, but as we divided up into teams it was clear that the experienced students were spread around the room, giving us ample opportunity to make choices about how to proceed with the first team building exercise–a video project that required a quick bit of writing, some video capture, sound design and editing.

I’ve got boatloads of experience in these areas, but rather than dive right in and start organizing the team I was assigned to, I thought it might be slightly less egotistical–and a lot more educational–to simply wait for someone else to volunteer to take charge, take direction from them, and watch the team dynamic evolve.

And did it ever! We made some of the classic newcomer mistakes–letting one person take the lead (not me) for writing, directing, and producing and then sorting out the mayhem when that started to go awry. What was really great was watching the youngest team members–some right out of high school–begin to find their leadership legs when it was clear that nobody was going to jump in to save the day. (Not that they expected someone to do that, mind you….)

If a more experienced student had herded the group down the “right” path, none of that would have gotten to happen. It would have been easy to say, “You do THAT because you have experience with THIS, and you go take care of A and B in the script while WE undo problem C and D.”

Instead, the group evolved and team leadership roles developed organically–you could literally see the changes in attitude start to happen as the problems got fixed, the issues worked out, and the players finding their collaborative legs.

When you’re on a freelance creative team with many newcomers and new-to-the-field people, there’s a time to steer the ship with more experienced hands, and there’s a time to let people stretch beyond their comfort zones. The trick is knowing which is which. Leading a team of creatives–freelance or not–means finding the balance for the benefit of both the project and those working it.

Tribeca is a media arts academy, and while some might not see the relevance in any of this to the freelance life, I should point out that they tell you in orientation that a great many jobs waiting for those who graduate this two-year program are freelance by nature rather than staff positions. So for me, at least, this adds a whole new dimension to my work and my writing about the freelance life. Expect more multi-media musings from me here as they relate to freelance work, the coursework I’m involved with at Tribeca, and etc.

–Joe Wallace

advice

Recycling Your Own Content

By Mandy Smyth ConnorImagine Book

Jonah Lehrer, hugely popular author of “Imagine; How Creativity Works,” admitted last month to falsifying quotes from Bob Dylan. After further research, it was uncovered that his facts were flimsy at best, totally incorrect at worst. Finally, it was revealed that he had re-purposed and recycled a large amount of his previously published work, essentially receiving payment for work that he stole….from himself.

This raised a huge amount of controversy regarding Lehrer and other journalists in the field, and the lynch mob formed outside his door. Yet as the story developed, something remarkable happened – many supporters, and fellow journalists, demanded sympathy on Lehrer’s behalf. Supporters called upon others to show compassion for a young journalist who painted himself into a corner where he felt pressured to write another successful book with a turnaround time that would come hot on the heels of his previous successes in the publishing world (“hot on the heels” by publishing standards.)

In light of this controversy, I initially took up a torch and sided with the lynch mob. How could he possibly misquote Dylan?! DYLAN IS STILL ALIVE! Anyone could simply call up Dylan’s people to verify the quotes! And his falsified “scientific reasoning” based on neuroscience could obviously have been (and was) dis-proven by authorities in the field. Anyone with access to Google can search for his work and find duplications. So how then could he have been so brazen as to think that he would not be caught?

But over the past few weeks, I’ve found myself feeling more compassion as I realized that I too have used my own previous work as inspiration for blog posts, articles and speeches. Now, I am no a professional author, nor am I backed by a hugely successful publicist and publishing house. It’s easy enough for me to validate having used my own work in a recycled fashion because there is such limited exposure to what I write. But at what point have I committed a crime? Does a writer owe it to his readers to publish work that is original in thought and execution at all times? Or have you, like Lehrer, ever found yourself using previous work as inspiration for future work? And no, I’m not talking about cutting and pasting exact text, but I am talking about repurposing writing and thoughts.

I’m not asking you to show compassion for such blatant laziness in reporting. I am asking you to look back on your own writing, when it was midnight, you were under deadline, behind schedule and totally devoid of inspiration. Have you been guilty of this crime, if only to a lesser extent?

Share your opinion on this. We’d love to hear from you.

advice, editorial

Today’s Writing Tip: From Worse to Worse

sig2010I’m surprised at how often I see the phrase “from worse to worse” in print. It doesn’t make any sense. It’s a lot like the term “I could care less.” Neither one says what you want them to say.

Let’s reason this out. If I am number 10 in line in the grocery store and I move forward one spot, I become number nine. If I move back one spot, I become number 11. In either case, there is a sense of motion and movement. Something changes.

If I go from worse to worse, nothing much changes. I am still number 10 in line at the grocery store – or maybe I’m 10 1/2. I have to go from worse to worst in order to see a significant change.

An easy way to remember this one is to think of the opening line in A Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” Thus, you want to go from worse to worst. Although of course, you don’t really. That is the outcome that most of us are hoping to avoid.

As a postscript, I will add that the correct way of saying I don’t give a damn is “I couldn’t care less,” because if you could care less it means that you already care. If you couldn’t care less, you care so little that your interest in the matter is currently negligible. Thus, it couldn’t become any more unimportant to you; hence, you couldn’t care less.

Sigrid Macdonald is the author of three books, including Be Your Own Editor http://tinyurl.com/7wnk5se and two erotic short stories, which she wrote under the pen name Tiffanie Good. Silver Publishing just released “The Pink Triangle,” a tale of friendship, lust, and betrayal. You can view her story here: http://tinyurl.com/6v65rgr

blogging

Freelance Multitasking From Hell: The Blog?

1 Comment

Joe-Wallace-Vinyl-Collector-and-authorby Joe Wallace

Sigrid Macdonald’s post this week about multi-tasking resonated with me in a major way because I’m about to dive headfirst into multi-tasking hell. Earlier this year I went round and round with a decision about going back to school and finally decided to take the plunge and dive into the Recording Arts For Film program at Tribeca Flashpoint Media Academy in Chicago.

The TFA program features an immersive, hands-on approach, and it’s not your traditional pick-your-classes-and-attend-when-it’s-convenient schoolhouse. Instead, your schedule is chosen for you based on your career choices and you put in an eight hour day. Which necessitates me having a night shift for freelance work.

Yes, I decided to stay freelance with my current work load, keeping all my current clients, shifting my work to the evening hours instead of first thing in the morning the way I’m used to working.

I won’t accept any new projects after Saturday, when the first official TFA event happens (a student/faculty mixer, but official nonetheless), but my current clients will never notice any difference in deliverables, quality of work, etc.

How do I know? Well, it’s simple really–I’ve done all this before. AND worked a second job on top of it. None of my clients ever realized I was doing anything BUT working on their projects. And that is the way I like it. It’s as it should be.

All this is terribly self-promotional–or at least it sounds it–but there’s a reason why I share any/all of this. I’m going to be blogging about the whole experience here as it unfolds. I may have done this before, but there are always new lessons to be learned, especially when you’re multi-tasking at such a type-A workaholic level. It can be done. In my case, it WILL be done…and I’ll write about it all here on top of everything else.

A freelancer’s most important asset is his or her flexibility. If you can’t bend with the circumstances, your skills are pretty much useless in terms of earning a decent living. You might be able to scrape by with a rigid, uncompromising approach to your work, but you’ll never get off the treadmill unless you can master the Judo of freelancing.

And that’s what I intend to explore once again in my experiences at TFA, in addition to all the film audio work I’ll be doing and learning. Foley, field recording, sound effects, game audio design, dialogue looping, post-production…a whole universe of sound and plenty of opportunities for a freelancer to move ahead in a different–but related–field.

In fact, even before classes start, I’ve found some interesting freelance fodder in the textbooks. One entire textbook is a guide for audio engineers on how to carve out a career as a self-employed person. Substitute your discipline of choice–writing, editing, marketing, coding–and this book still resonates. I’ll be running a review of it in the near future, but for now, suffice it to say that my journey begins here, on the threshold. I’m happy to bring you along for the ride.

Joe Wallace is a writer, editor, multi-media visual artist, and now a student again. He may be the only one in his classes outside the faculty who remembers Gerald Ford as President, but at least he still has most of his knee cartilage. For now. Wallace blogs about multi-media production and indie film making at www.now-sound.com and vinyl records at www.turntabling.net.