First, while it might seem like overkill, do create an outline to follow. It can be a simple thing, but it is important that you have it. The outline starts at word one and ends at the last word allowed in the guidelines. If you lay out the concept using it, you will not only know the path the plot follows, you will be able to use the least verbiage possible to get from your introduction to the tale’s ending.

Secondly, be sure you spend more time on active statements than on passive ones. In a short story, a good adverb can be twice as effective as five adjectives. Keeping the plot moving along and the characters alive are essential to holding a reader’s interest. Too much picturesque prose in a short story will either send you over word limit or confuse the storyline.

Finally, write the entire story in your first draft. Go as far over that word limit as you want. Then, become the editor or, rather, the butcher. You want to cut away the fat and leave nothing but bones and lean flesh. This story needs to sizzle, but not with a lot of extra weight. It needs to be smooth and fluid and not one word heavier than the allowed count.

Of course, different genres of short story writing do require different approaches. Still following these three basic steps will help make any short story go the distance, no matter how short that distance might need to be. 

Perhaps you have a site where you sell old books, vintage and rare collectors sorts of books. You need to generate interest in your site, so you submit an article or entry to a popular on-line blog dedicated to the collector of antique books. If you word your article correctly, you’ll be able to draw readers from the blog to your site by generating those thoughts, ideas and actions that turn readers into shoppers. Whether you are subtle and simply settle for SEO content to pull them in through search engines, or you are able to lace the article with hyperlinks that will connect them directly to your site, these words are key to generating site traffic and, ultimately, sales.

Finding the right words, however, can be hard. That’s why there are so many on-line writing companies with professional writers ready to help. Securing their services can ensure you have the right words in you next article to start the word to action process moving in your favor.

As a freelance writer, you pick and choose which jobs you want with the understanding that, once you accept a job, you must follow the directives of the company or person who contracted the work to the letter. It can be challenging to meet deadlines and to learn to discourse in writing about unfamiliar subjects. It can also prove to be educational and fun, especially if you find a good contract employer who has a wide variety of writing needs for you to fulfill.

Where do you find the aforementioned fun, flexible and financially rewarding freelance writing jobs? You find them where you find everything else, these days. You look on the Internet. Just one quick search for a freelance writing job will turn up dozens of websites. Those sites are often simply clearinghouses that serve to match contractor with freelancer. Companies or individuals who need writers or work written will post their needs, and freelance writers can bid or apply to these ads.

So, brush off you grammar and polish up your spelling skills. There is a great freelance writing job waiting for you on the world-wide-web.

Step number one is easy. Don’t start all of your articles with the same introduction. A live television or radio sportscaster can have a signature intro speech for every broadcast and it can help turn them into pop culture icons. If a writer starts every news article, sports article, travel article or whatever-it-is-about article with the same routine introduction, they will lose their readers. This doesn’t necessarily mean simply that you start with the same phrase, but that the introduction follows the same format. For instance, if you start with a question every time and then provide some vague allusions regarding the answers that will be provided in the body of the work, before ending with a trite segue into the next paragraph, you are stuck in a rut. Change it up. You’ll enjoy your work more if you freshen up your angle and your readers will, too.

Next, refrain from the use of repetitive phrases. If you tend to use certain allegorical statements or draw conclusions with a particular introductory line, stop. Find a new allegory. Come up with a better line to lead up to that concluding point. You are a writer. Be creative!

The third step is to put a new coat of paint on the old vocabulary. You have a broad mental dictionary, but your words have been used so often they’ve faded. Find new words and make them your friends. There are books and websites dedicated to helping you broaden your language horizon. Use them.

The final step to putting a little of that old zing back into your writing is one you might enjoy. Take a break from it. If you regularly write articles about sporting events, see if you can arrange to spend some time writing about a totally different subject, like travel or art. If you normally work on short articles or filler pieces, try your hand at some fiction in either short story or essay form. You might not be burned out as a writer. You might just be a bit rusty. A change, at least for a week or two, could be just the lubricant you need to get those creative juices flowing again.

Remember, writing is not work. It is fun, at least most of the time. Many of us became writers because we enjoy the act of putting words together to create ideas. Don’t lose sight of that in the day-to-day grind of contract or article writing. These are just a few steps you can utilize to take your work from deadpan to stepping lively. The best way to keep your work fresh and interesting, however, is to always remember that you love what you do.

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.

The first step is simple. Use the key word or phrase somewhere in the title when writing articles for web. If you can use the entire phrase, pick out the most important world. If a search engine picks up the title and nothing else in the web article, a good title is enough to hook a reader. A hooked reader will then follow those subtle nudges toward the desired web sites for more information or to purchase a product.

Secondly, it is imperative that you don’t overload your writing with awkward insertions of the keyword or phrase. That means keep the usage to a minimum and insert it in a sentence or phrase where it sounds natural and not contrived. The readers are not stupid and will be able to tell an article written just for the SEO content and one that is well written and focused on the subject.

Step three involves the use of back links. Never hyperlink or back link a word or phrase to a client’s site unless directly authorized to do so. Many times the client will elect to handle that sort of thing without your assistance and your presumption might cost you the next assignment.

Finally, you must ensure that your writing flows. Instead of random facts or thought about the subject, it must follow a logical sequence or course, taking the reader from introduction to conclusion by following an interesting and informative pathway of words.

Following these simple steps can assist you in furthering your article writing career for on-line marketing purposes. By improving the quality of your writing, at least as far as its marketing value, you can enhance your prospects of landing more work and establishing yourself as a “go-to” source for this type of work.

First, you want to fall back on something you learned in high school. You want an outline to follow. An outline for a book will evolve as the story does. Some writers actually refer to their outline as a story map. These “maps” outline not only the plot, but can help you keep track of timelines, characters, events and even the name of the fictional cat. Your initial outline will be bare bones, but be sure you leave lots of room for scribbling in notes as the story evolves. In the end, some outlines are as long as many short novels.

Secondly, you will need to begin your book. If you are basing it upon past events, you might choose to include an epilogue that outlines those previous events and brings the reader up-to-date with your introduction. If no epilogue is required, you can launch right into your introduction. Unlike a story or a paper, your introduction is going to be pages, sometimes chapters, long. The first few chapters in a book are crucial. Don’t forget, these are what you’ll be sending to publishers or agents to earn their acceptance should you be so fortunate as to merit their interest. They should be interesting, intriguing and very well written.

In the third step, you will be following your outline to create the story. Many writers do three, four or even five drafts of a book. The first, or the rough draft, is simply the story without too much embellishment. Then, the second adds the extras that will flesh out the tale. Take as many drafts as you need. Yes. This is time consuming. Writing a book is not like penning a short story. It is a job and one that, until the book is published, often feels quite thankless.

The fourth step, upon the completion of your final draft is to seek out either a literary agent to represent you to major publishing houses, or to be bold and seek a publisher on your own. Be forewarned that many of the bigger publishers don’t read work by authors who are not represented by an agent. Before sending any of your actual writing to an agent or publisher, you’ll compose a query letter describing their book and attempting to interest them in your manuscript. Most will not actually want to read any of your work unless this letter piques their interest.

If you’re lucky enough to have your manuscript read by either an agent or publishing house, you still only have a slight chance of being accepted. Some agents might send it back with suggested changes or perhaps offering advice on a firm better suited to representing your type of work. Often, even works that are accepted require massive revisions and rewrites to meet the publisher’s criteria. If you think this sounds like hard work, then you are right. It is. Still, the dream of having your work published is enough to make taking all four steps worth the while.

The first step is acknowledgement. You might say to yourself (aloud if no one is around to question your sanity) something along the lines of “I hate this subject.” After owning up to your less than eager anticipation for the work, do the routine things like research and planning your lay out or outline. After all, you still have to write the article.

The second step starts once you are ready to write. Now try to put the subject, if not into an entirely new light, then at least slant the light from a direction that makes it appear a little less dull. For instance, if your assignment were something like, “write a three-hundred word article on making potato salad”, you could spice it up with finding some exotic types of potato salad or getting a quote from a famous chef on the subject.

If no light is going to make this subject look good, at least to you, then go to step three. Simply write the article from a purely factual angle. Write it quickly and worry more about getting your facts straight than your phrasing. Why? That would be because you are immediately going to re-write it completely. In the rewrite, you keep the facts but play with the phrasing. Where you find passive verbs, insert some action. Add interesting adjectives and adverbs and even a tricky prepositional phrase. Punch it up and make it more fun to read.

Finally, get advice from someone who might actually like the subject. If you hate cooking but your neighbor wants to be on the Cooking Channel, ask her for some ideas. Don’t use her as a source, but get a new look at the subject from the perspective of a person who is biased toward, not against it.

Whether it’s a four part series of articles on toenail fungus or a set of how-to articles on preventing diaper rash, these four steps can take the tedious subject matter and, with some effort on your part, transform the finished article by adding a passion and a life it might not have if you had written it in the “I hate” mode. Four simple steps take the article from passable to passionate, and can any of us really have too much passion?

Explaining writer’s block to a writer is simple. Explaining it to non-writers is tough. I would expect the best way to describe it would be as sudden onset vocabulary amnesia. As a writer, married to a non-writer, my husband will testify to the number of times he’s heard me exclaim that my mind has a hole in it and that everything I ever knew about writing fell out of it. He smiles and promptly gives me a different task. Being a wise man, he’s learned the trick that usually fixes the writer’s block is distraction.

Step away from the work. Take a walk. Watch a TV show. Or write about something else. Then, when you have gotten past that frustrated state induced by a block, you can try again. Chances are that it won’t be too long before your block dissolves and you are back on track. Writer’s block is a malady peculiar to the craft and its cruelty can only be felt and understood by one who has suffered through it.