Strike a Foul
Daring to do
The sun is wearing a lingerie this afternoon. Little Miss Hottie. Yellow ball in the sky, frying the roof. I can hear crackles as the sheets expand. The air is cold and gentle, breezing through every corner. I am perched atop a chair, a pair of glasses sitting on the bridge of my nose, and my eyes affixed on a screen.
Somehow, I feel wise. I feel like I have been here before; like I have walked through this world. I imagine what I could have possibly been in my past life. A girl, maybe. I don’t know. But I know for sure that I just had to be a hater. One who took pride in pushing boundaries and enjoying life as though life is merely an icecream cone one buys by the roadside.
It’s been around 5 years since I began to truly freelance. In these five years, I have learned that new skills are learned by practice and not by theory. It is great to get yourself a course on Udemy or Coursera, and stack certificates on your LinkedIn like it’s some shoe rack. But, nothing beats practice. And not just practice. Practice on your own enterprises.
Life is unfair. Too many people are out there looking for underpaid labor. The target? Freelancers with little on-hand experience. Garner on-hand experience for yourself by putting your passion and effort into your own business. It promises to be a win-win for you. First, with the chance to make mistakes and relearn without feeling pressured, you get better at what you do, and then you become more confident in your own future as a talented person.
Before I became a freelance editor, I ran a magazine (still do, just that medicine is on my neck). It is called Fiction Niche. Prior to establishing this magazine, I had no skills except writing. But even then, my writing had not been so good. Merely average, and only because I was born with a gift for storytelling. When I was 9, a young first-time mother came to visit my family. She held her baby in her hands, as I told her stories. All lies. My brother had been in the room, listening. He ambled in later, looked at me, and laughed. “You sabi tell stories sha.”
I bought the domain to Fiction Niche using a laptop hot enough to iron clothes. It belonged to my elder brother and was fatter than our plasma television. It croaked and jittered whenever too many pages were loaded on its only browser, an Internet Explorer so old Dora would do a better job than it exploring anything. So I stuck to two pages at a time. With every step, I saw at least four minutes of YouTube videos. The hosting of that site took at least four hours. I had never heard the terms DNS Nameservers, Host ID, PHP, etc. When I was done hosting it, I took a break only to notice there had been a mistake in the domain name.
The story is longer than I can tell in such a short piece of writing. The point, however, is that I had to buy a new domain and painstakingly build that website from scratch without any help. By the time the website was done and began to run, I had become a WordPress beginner. I knew what themes were, how plugins could tweak a site, how pop ups could be edited into theme CSS. I knew enough, and practically so, to run the site without any help.
But that was the site. Running a web magazine was something more difficult. I was new to the idea of submissions, vetting, publishing, and of course, sending newsletters. It took a while to get used to it, but over months, there became an evident improvement in my editing and email copywriting.
And so, serving myself, I would become an editor, publisher, Wordpress designer, and email copywriter. I would also become better with database management. Of course, I use Microsoft excel and Google Sheets to plan publications. I soon gathered a team of editors and began to oversee their work. That was that. Team manager now. From ironing-board-laptop storyteller, to team lead.
Running a magazine also really improved my writing. There is something having access to stories in their unfinished form does to a writer: it shows the writer where mistakes happen, and where to close up loopholes. This makes the writer become more conscious of what good writing should be. Anyways, this isn’t some writing fellowship, so I will pass the chance to talk about writing. I’m not even as good as I want to be yet, even though there have been more publications than days a two month old has seen.
All of these skills came to prove invaluable when I got my first real job as an editorial team lead in a news agency that published Pan-African stories. I won team lead of the month almost every month spent there. No one could have guessed that all I did, was practice on my enterprise.
What I am saying is: while waiting for a job, be your first employee. If you want to become a tech writer, start putting up tech articles on your Facebook and Medium pages. If you’re going to be a photographer, get yourself a good phone or camera (or begin where you are) and document your immediate surroundings. Do it for you, and for as long as it takes to become good enough to do it standing before a crowd.
If you invest in yourself long enough, you’ll become rich and successful enough to not care about how to make “enough money”. You’ll also become bolder, and boldness in itself is a currency only the experienced seem to trade.
