Freelance writing to make money

You love to write but aren’t ready to take on a full-time job. Maybe you like living in the country but all of the jobs are in the big city. Whatever your reasons for not being a full-time, “employed” copywriter, there are plenty more good reasons to make your money as a freelance writer by applying for freelance writing jobs.

First, you enjoy the flexibility of being able to work when, where and how you like with freelance writing job. There is not commute, no dressing up for board meetings (at least seldom) and no nine-to-five grind. Some freelance writers, it is true, do visit their employer’s offices on occasions to take part in brainstorming sessions or client input meetings, but those events are not regular and far from common. This sort of flexibility is bound to appeal to anyone with a creative personality.

Secondly, you can work on any sort of writing you enjoy. If you like writing travel articles, you can find a publication or other buyer who’ll snap up your work. If you prefer fiction, you can contribute freelance to publications or submit works for anthologies. Maybe it’s poetry, gardening how-to essays or any other sort of writing genre. Entities that publish in any of these areas will need good freelance writers to keep their reader’s happy.

So, don’t take that full-time job and face rush hour commutes. Kick back with your PC and kick start a career as a freelance writer. It could be the smartest move of your writing career.

Travel Writing

Travel writing is fast becoming one of the most popular fields of modern research writing, both for short work (articles, etc.) and for novelists. Since travel is a subject that fascinates most readers, the writer endeavoring to enter the travel writing market, needs to be aware of their market audience.

The travel reader is usually an intelligent person who either plans to travel extensively or may already have done so, or they are not in a position to travel and so use their reading as a substitute. Either way, knowing your material is essential to sell well in any travel writing market. Many guidebooks, travel web pages and other sources who utilize travel writing, require their writers to actually have visited and have first-hand knowledge of the area about which they write, in addition to having done extensive research.

While travel writing is essentially factual, it can be stretched and pampered a little with the use of colorful descriptive wording and allusions to activities that might be undertaken in the destination. This allows a writer room to stretch their vocabulary as long as they keep it within the limitations of fact obtained from an honest perspective. It’s no different to the academic approaches to critical essays at online universities or on-campus colleges – you’re writing for an audience that want to gain knowledge, but don’t necessarily want it delivered to them in a haughty, over-factual manner. Thus, it behooves the travel writer with less experience to refrain from using excessive first person statements and stick closer to their research.

Say It with Pictures

A Picture, it is said, is worth a thousand words. So, add a picture to your narrative, to produce the maximum impact. It can be a simple stock photograph that shows any aspect of life or historical importance for the place. A Festival celebration or some comic scene in the midst of solemn celebrations, etc. makes a usable picture. Even a plain sunset over a hill or in the distant marine horizon can be a good image.

Carry a camera with you as you travel. Make a plan to photograph every part of your town or village, in every season. Begin with an ‘aim and shoot’ camera, but as you get paid for your articles, invest a part of your income on buying a reasonably good digital camera. Make this purchase only from the income specifically earned from the hobby .This will help you to focus clearly on making the writing and photography a serious occupation. Once you have finished photographing your village /town, arrange the prints in a logical series like” Sunset at…. “,“the bridges in….” etc. Find out if there is a stock photographs dealer in your place or some where close by. You can negotiate for sale of the organized collection of photos, and get a good offer. In these days of Internet, you can explore the World wide market too.

File the photographs in ready to search files, so that you can access them at short notice. Every time you start an article, search for a related picture and keep it in front of you till you finish the article. This is one sure way to make your writing vivid. If you do not have one ready, try getting one from the ‘Net.

Making the Travel Article Memorable

How can we make an article memorable from the point of view of the reader? Any work of creative nature touches a reader through the emotions it generates. When a reader browses through the article, he will get fascinated if he finds some references in it to what he had felt about the place or had picturised in his mind about it. Even if the description is quite contrary to the perception held by him, he would still read on.Thus, with a view to attract and hold your readers’ attention and stick to his memory, you have to make sure that the articles address the basic human emotions. Link the narratives to these, and you are on your way to becoming a successful Travel writer.

The next important factor that makes a Travel Article memorable is to use word Pictures. Use words that paint pictures of what is described. Colours, shapes, flavours, sounds and smells, are to be described and not just alluded to. A ‘Golden red sky’, better paints the Sun about to set over the horizon, than ’red sky’. The early dawn is better described by the sound of the Cocks heralding the day, the cows mooing in the barns, the little birds merrily chirping in welcome, and so on. A busy market is best described by the cacophony of the vendors, the babble of the customers and so on.

The eerie silence of the grave yard is well painted through the absence of several usual sounds at such a place, that of the bats, the owls, a stray jackal, etc. Here we are actually playing a double game: we are arousing images of the sounds in the minds of the reader, and then referring to the absence of those images in the place under narration.

Getting ready to become a Travel Writer

There is a rustic tale of an innocent villager who was told to get ready to go to the city the next morning. Come next morning, and every one was searching for him, but to no avail. By evening the poor chap was back, exhausted from walking back all the way from the city. When confronted as to why he went alone, he replied that he did not know the way and wanted to find it before actually going to the city! We know this is no way to find information we do not have. But there is a valuable message in the story; never venture into unknown expeditions without proper preparations.

The first requirement for becoming a Travel Writer is that one should have a keen pair of inquisitive eyes, always on the look out for things that offer a unique perspective. How do people at the new place live? What are their eating and dressing habits? How is the climate at the place? Is it generally uniform as happens to be at many of the World’s Resort Stations? How are the lodging facilities? Are these expensive, or “Value for money”? Are there any special Tourist Seasons for this destination?

Begin by keeping a diary of all the observations. Don’t be in any hurry to write your article in jiffy. First, collect more information about the place than you might care to put in a Report.Thereafter, arrange the points in some logically meaningful sequence.After your first draft is ready, sleep over it for a day and then attempt to cut into half the present length. Do not exceed 500 words in an article, unless it is an entire Report for the whole expedition. Interest is best sustained with articles of three hundred words or another fifty. Longer pieces tend to bore the readers.

Opportunities in Travel Writing for Beginners

A beginner in the field of writing is faced with the question: why am I writing? To be simple, it is because I need to say something. Grannies used to tell the kids in the olden days: ‘don’t open your mouth unless you are really hungry or you have something urgent to tell.’ The threat that if you open your mouth unnecessarily, insects will get into it, was sufficient enough to stop blabbering kids from disturbing the peace of the house. But how do we stop the grown up persons who ramble on about nothing? Get them to do a small errand: visit a corner of their own village and give a two hundred words description. Demand that factual data should not be missing, any colourful aspect of the place should not be left out and no meaningless words to find a place in the report.

You will open a new way of life for that person, by giving a purpose for his /her communication. But you will be the first to benefit. A person you thought of as an incompetent communicator will be showing you that given a purpose, all of us are good communicators. In other words, no one is useless in the world, and no place in the world is uninteresting. It is the communication that can become faulty or boring.

We are happy to introduce this new series of articles on Travel Writing for the benefit of those who are as yet undecided on the right genre of writing to pick for a career, and also for those who are ready to launch themselves into Travel writing as a vocation The first article in the series deals with the tools of the trade. Enjoy!