Improve Your Writing Skills

When I first started out as a writer, I admit, I wanted my career to focus around my love for fiction and poetry. I wrote short stories, I had the beginnings of a novel (over 50,000 words) and 100's of poems that I thought for sure would be the foundation of a lucrative writing career. I felt confident that I could submit my work, get it in front of an audience and it would be smooth sailing from there.

Yeah right. To dream is a wonderful thing, but I had a reality check coming my way.

After the 100th rejection or so, I realized that this was not an easy business to crack. It was late 1998, I was frustrated and I was sure I'd never make it as a writer. I had to rethink my plan and swallow the fact that I had a lot to learn. It was time to get busy.

The first on my growing list of things to learn was: what sells? It was hard for me to listen to this bit of advice from a seasoned writer: fiction is marketable for some, but non-fiction is your best bet for building a sustainable career.

Why? Why can't I be the next great American novelist? Why? I had to accept the reality that there are hundreds of thousands of writers out there with the same dream I had and, in reality, I couldn't compete. That's not to say this is true for all writers, but it was true for me. It's not that I didn't have original ideas or well written material. The facts for me were that I needed regular income streaming in weekly and fiction wasn't going to get me there.

Now that I had an uderstanding of what to write, non-fiction, I created an idea file and maintained it regularly. A small notebook was kept with me at all times and organized into this file by topic. I regularly sifted through my files, making note of what could be fleshed out into an article and deleting what couldn't.

Okay, I had ideas and I could flesh them out into articles. Great! The hard part is done, right?