#16 - On Freelance Writing: My Three Big Mistakes—Exhaustion, Exploration, Fear
There are so many guides on becoming a freelance writer online that I almost don’t want to write this one. But I will, because I’ve read hundreds of those guides and in none of them—at least as far as I can remember—I found the lessons that I’ve learned over the last year and a half as a freelancer.
The fact that this is the first draft of an online book will make this “guide” different from the others. Firstly, the basics are mostly similar and other people have explained them in much more depth, so there’s nothing I can add. Secondly, because this book is online—I never planned to publish it as a physical book—I can take advantage of that to simply link to those useful resources. (Maybe in that case I should simply call Kadambari a writing blog, but blogs don’t always have an end, like books, and I wanted a project with an end goal to work towards.)
What follows, then, are lessons that I hope will help you avoid the mistakes I made and save you time that I wasted on things that bore no fruit and therefore gave me a lot of stressful days because I wasn’t earning anything.
Which is related to one of the main drawbacks of being a freelance writer—you have to discipline yourself. You’re accountable to no one, so you have to make yourself stay focused.
This I both failed and succeeded at. When I first started, I was of course very motivated. I spent almost the entire day in front of the screen, understanding the field, making notes, planning things. Then after a while I found myself exhausted (spending so much time in front of the screen does that to me).
Exhaustion led to discouragement, but I was also desperate, which propelled me forward. This led to some work, which motivated me further. But here I made my second and third mistakes. (The first was plunging into it headfirst and exhausting myself.)
The Second Mistake
If I had to reduce the process of freelancing to its barest bones, I’d put it thus: you have an idea that you flesh out into some sort of structure, you pitch it to the editor of a magazine or website where your idea will fit the best, and, if the editor likes the idea, you do the rest of the research and write the draft and submit to the editor. You go through some edits, the article gets published, you get paid upon submission of the draft or on publication.
If you have never written anything in your life before and have no web presence whatsoever, but you’ve done your homework right, you can get your first accepted pitch this way. It has happened to other writers.
But if you go to websites devoted to teaching people how to become full-time freelance writers, there’s a lot of information there, telling you to do a lot of other stuff to—setting up a website, writing a few pieces if you don’t have a portfolio, joining groups where calls for pitches are posted, etc.
And all of those things do matter, especially when you’re planning on going full-time. But the core of it is the process I mentioned above. Everything else is (mostly) secondary.
Where I erred was in prioritizing these other secondary activities—building my website, putting together my portfolio, looking for newsletters that will deliver the latest pitch call roundup to my inbox, going through those roundups and spending hours organizing them by priorities, etc.
I spent a lot of time on getting organized and doing my homework, when all I needed to do was start small. I was already familiar with several online publications because I loved reading what they put out. I could try writing something for those. You have to start somewhere.
But no, I got too obsessed with shortlisting the right markets, then reading dozens of articles published by them, then brainstorming ideas and looking at research and getting discouraged, then removing the said market from my list and moving on to the next one.
If I could somehow prevent my past self from doing this, I would have done so. I’d have stood behind her and sternly warned her every time she spent time “discovering markets” rather than pitching something to the ones she was already familiar with.
Don’t do what I did—start with the platforms you know. You might get rejected, but that’s a given thing when you become a writer of any kind. The more time you spend doing the things that don’t directly lead you to getting published—and therefore getting paid—the more desperate you’ll get, especially if you don’t have any other source of income at that point.
(This wasn’t a mistake for me since I had some savings left over and I wasn’t the breadwinner for my family, at 22. My family supported my desire to explore. But your circumstances may be different. Either way, start small, get some momentum going, save for at least a few months, depending on your responsibilities, and only then switch to full-time—and only if you really need to. I’ve found that I am better off working a day job, which is what I’m going for once my MA is over. There’s a lot more to say about this, but that’s best covered in another essay.)
The Third Mistake
“Freelance writer” is a pretty broad term. You could be an SEO writer. You could be a copywriter. You could write for newspapers and magazines. You could be a blogger. You could write for LinkedIn “thought leaders”. This world runs on words, so if you’re good at them and ready to try new things, you could be any of the above.
Common freelancing wisdom says it’s best not to be all of the above, because clients would prefer specialists, but don’t take my word for it. If you can make it work—go for it. It’s not for me, past, present, or future.
The more I looked, the more possibilities I found. And while I’ve always encouraged that, in this case, it didn’t serve me well because I was desperate. And when you’re desperate, you feel like you can do this and this and also this because you need to know that deciding to be a freelancer wasn’t a bad move, or because there are EMIs to be paid.
So you keep looking for more things you can do and think you can do them all—better several sources of income than one, because what if A doesn’t work but B does? It would suck to only try A. Best to try several things so that something works.
But when you do this, you spread yourself thin and it becomes overwhelming. You can’t focus on anything and nothing gets done—you spend too much time learning and planning and preparing your website and tweaking your bio than pitching, which is the main thing that matters.
And because nothing gets done, no pitches are sent out and you don’t make money. The desperation grows. It gives way to discouragement. And if you’re an overthinker like me, it’s going to increase your stress.
So there’s no positive outcome to this (unless you’re really smart and really productive and really optimistic and really lucky, all at once).
During my gap year, I’d briefly explored freelance writing and decided it wasn’t for me—nothing about copywriting and SEO appealed to me. So when I went freelance this time around, I knew I wanted to focus on writing for (online) magazines and websites. I loved reading them and I liked the idea of writing for them. My focus should have been on pitching to the editors of the platforms I’d been reading for years.
Instead, my desperation drove me to look for new websites, new magazines I’d never heard of, niches I barely knew about but thought I could write in if I tried hard enough. I wasted weeks of my time on this “research.”
Rejection is Unavoidable—So is Its Fear
What I wish my past self would have done is this—stayed focused on writing for magazines. Narrowed down, stuck to it, and pitched even if she felt unprepared and scared of rejection. She knew, as I do even know, that rejection is inevitable. No one ever gets only acceptances and if you fear getting rejected, you’ll never send anything out. (I highly, highly recommend this article by Kim Liao on rejection. I reread it often.)
That fear is strong, overpowering. If you’ve never worked as a writer, never been rejected, it will feel even scarier. And it doesn’t get much easier. Even now, I have essays waiting to be sent out because I want to submit them to magazines I really like and I’m really afraid of hearing a no from them. But never submitting means that I destroy not only the possibility of being rejected, but also the possibility of having my work accepted.
The only way to get ahead, to be a freelance writer is to pick one thing and pitch/submit. It’s the fastest way to make it work, to get out of that desperate state, because you’re working with a focus, because you’re sending stuff out. No amount of research or organizing will give you those results. There’s nothing you can do that can prevent your work from being rejected. It happens to every single writer.
So it’s best to accept that fear—easier said than done, I know—and put stuff out. You will get rejected, and you’ll think that it means you picked the wrong publication or topic or niche, and that you should focus on that other magazine or topic you were thinking of.
But every time you switch, you’re derailing yourself. You’re going back to square one. Doing things will make it seem like you’re making progress, but all you’re doing is walking backwards.
It is easy to tell yourself that this research matters, that what you’re doing is increasing your chances of getting accepted, but you’re not. The only way to increase your chances of getting accepted is to pitch/submit more. Nothing else will get you published. All those hours won’t matter because you’re spending them on the unimportant stuff.
In retrospect, I can see how I did everything I mentioned above, and how much stress it brought me. Deep down I knew I must pitch above all else, and I even wrote in my diaries and notebooks, at the end of the day, about how I’d pitch this or that topic to so-and-so publication. But again, merely writing something with force, big letters and double-underlines does not make it come true. You have to do those things. You have to do it, even when you’re afraid. There’s a reason I’m not the first (and won’t be the last) person to say so.
It's scary, but there’s no other option if you want to be a freelancer. You work even when you’re afraid, not when you’ve gotten over it and it’s a thing of the past. Fear—fear of rejection—is never a thing of the past. It’s always there. Ignoring it doesn’t make it go away, neither does doing something else.
Choose. Pitch. Get rejected. It’ll hurt. You’ll be stressed, desperate, discouraged. But go repeat. It’s the only thing that has worked for me.