4 Steps to Reinventing Your Freelance Writing Career

Did you have a nice long weekend?

Good. Now back to work.

If you’re like me, though, work may be slowing down for you. Summer is nearly here (aren’t we already in the mindset?), and client work tends to drop off a bit from June through mid-August. At least, that’s been my experience. The change is palpable a few days before July 4th. You can still find client work, but it’s a little tougher to get them to focus when they’re dealing with vacation season internally.

So what are you going to do with that free time you have right now?

You still have to earn money — that’s a given. But you have more hours than you have work to fill those hours. So now what?

You’ll keep marketing. But maybe you need to hear what I heard not long ago from my significant other, who is known for stating simple truths that are so obvious I miss them myself. I was earning just fine, but getting nervous because spring was getting long in the tooth and summer is usually tougher marketing.

He gave me one bit of advice, which was this:

If you could do anything at all, go any direction, why not try that right now?

Jaw, meet floor.

So I started down the list. Only, I hadn’t made a list. So I started on one thing, dabbled, then jumped to another, dabbled, then jumped to yet another …

Yep. All over the place with no clear direction.

[bctt tweet=”Reinventing your #freelancewriting career can benefit from a little direction.” username=”LoriWidmer”]

Okay, so that wasn’t working. After about a day of that, I was a crabby, frustrated mess. Time to put some parameters around my day.

Here’s how I got my shit together and actually started to reinvent another aspect of my freelance writing career:

Made a project wish list

My list was pretty simple:

• Focus much more on poetry — writing, editing, and submitting
• Take a masterclass course in poetry
• Research a new area of concentration (and decide if it’s somewhere I want to go)
• Haul out the book manuscripts and make time to revise

That was my “I really really REALLY want to do these things” list. But I still have to eat, so I included these things on a separate, more business-y list:

• Examine my marketing pieces, my social media use, and create a better plan for both
• Finally redo the website
• Save up for the logo design

Prioritized it all

Lists are great, but they only work for me if I get off my backside and do something with them. So I prioritized what I really want to do. Poetry. That means the second thing to focus on is the masterclass (and with Billy Collins teaching it, I’m not missing it). So I signed up.

The other two are still priorities, but lesser in importance to me than shifting direction completely and going with a poetry focus. So I’ll include them maybe once a week in my schedule, but they’re not going to be a primary focus

Established a schedule

Yep, I scheduled it. Poetry is a daily activity anyway, but I’ve given it more of a front-row seat than it’s had. It now takes up my morning (before I actually start working), an hour in the middle of my day, and evenings. What it entails:

• Reading poetry and jotting down ideas
• Spending “work time” writing/revising
• Spending evenings reading more poetry/taking the masterclass

Did it/Continue to do it

That’s the key to reinventing, isn’t it? Getting off your ass and actually doing it is the entire secret to success, and it’s not all that secret. But don’t we search for the magic bullet? It’s called hard work, study, and practice. For me, reading poetry is enjoyment, but it’s studying craft, too. I’ve mimicked styles, played with alliteration, and picked up thoughts from other poems.

If you’re thinking it’s time to start writing novels, maybe your enjoyment in reading those best sellers is figuring out the formula or the elements of the story that the author used that made it so successful. I’m a big proponent of self-study, particularly if you’re wanting to make a successful transition into a new area of writing.

What happened to those other things on my list? You know, the not-so-sexy everyday stuff? They’re part of another hour of my day, or in the case of the book manuscripts, a few hours I’ve planned per week. If I find that I’m enjoying it enough to increase that time, I will. For now, I can just dabble.

But it’s dabbling inside a schedule, which keeps me from feeling adrift and lost in my own sea of ideas.

Writers, what aspect of your career would you love to reinvent?
If you could go in any direction, do anything right now, what would it be?
What will it take for you to make that happen, starting today?