How to Be a Writer Far From the Big City
Sometimes, it feels like the strangest thing about my writing career is that I live in a small city. While there are certainly people in this town who work in communications for their companies, the number of people whose full-time work is writing would probably fit on the one hand.
But that’s what I wanted to do — write full-time. I didn’t really want to do a job that was a combination of writing, website coding, meeting with people, and all-purpose other office things. So I went freelance… carefully. Slowly!
What I’ve come to realize is that it is still possible to be a writer far from the big city, but it is certainly difficult to break in. I figured out that five things could help to give me an edge to get the assignments I want, help me make a liveable wage, and grow my skills over time. Here’s what I learned.
Start on the Side
While many, many people launch freelance writing careers as side hustles, there is another direction I have witnessed a lot. People go through the journalism or marketing pipeline at a good school, get good internships, and land a highly demanding, low-paid salary job as a staff writer. They think ‘great!’ at first, but the path up in most publications is just as narrow and relentless as everything else they’ve done. So they take their know-how and their…
