Your writing career begins the moment you decide to write for a living. In the world of writing, it doesn’t matter if you are a freelance writer, a blogger, or a novelist. One thing is for sure, a writing career is cyclic, and requires constant work in order to ensure that you can actually live off of writing. Your writing career might be going extremely well at the moment, but that only means it doesn’t require a grand amount of work to enhance it. On the other hand, taking care to enhance and to improve your writing career carries plenty of benefits, but the best benefit is that you will have the certainty that you’re doing your best, all of the time. In time, this will bring forth better results, in the form of more readers, more credibility as a professional writer, which can have a great impact on your overall writing career. Below, you will find several tips to help you achieve this.
1. Analyze your career
Once you have decided to enhance your career, the first step is to analyze it. You cannot work on improving your writing career without knowing what you need to work on. This step can be really hard, because you will need to be quite brutal in your assessment. Being strict on yourself as a writer is necessary to discover what you need to work more on. If research takes a lot of time, you will need to find a quicker research method. If your books haven’t been getting a lot of attention, you will need to dig deep to discover the reason why. However, you must remember that improvement is your goal, and you have to be strong and not allow to become critical of your work, all of the time.
2. Create milestones
After the brutal assessment of your career, you will need to start improving it. Depending on your assessment, create small tasks for yourself which you will do with the goal of improving your career. Make sure these tasks don’t take up all of your work/writing hours. Just adapt your daily writing schedule to take care of them. Not all of the tasks will bear fruit in the immediate future – what you are looking for is the cumulative effect. When it comes to writing, you are always waiting for the cumulative effect of your hard work. The small steps you’ll take every day, the milestones of each week or month will have an effect. For example, if you need to increase your online presence, start small. Post two blog posts per week, instead of one. Look for other blogs where you can write as a guest blogger. Remember that you’re enhancing your career, and that writing is at the core of that career, so don’t create tasks which will take up a lot of your time.
3. Increase your contacts network
You need to think of your writing career as a small business. And a business needs networks. Writers need contacts, editors, agents, and if you are a freelance writer or blogger, you need a network of clients you will write for. There are plenty of online platforms and writing communities you can join and create more contacts, especially if you’re in need of a beta reader, or an editor. The more you communicate with your contacts, the more information you will have about the writing industry, which is why it is a good idea to set aside a certain time of the day where you will maintain and increase your contacts network.
4. Improve your writing
Take a very thorough inspection of your writing. As we stated previously, remember that you are doing this assessment with the goal of improvement, not discouragement. What you should look for is the quality of your writing, depending on how long you have been writing during the day. For example, if the quality of your writing wanes after six hours of writing, consider stopping at that point, taking a break, or simply focus on doing other tasks and then write for six hours the following day. This might get in the way of the daily amount of words you wish to write, but it will save you time in the process of editing your book if the writing after the sixth hour isn’t quality. On another note, you might consider changing your writing method – for example, if outlining and plotting a novel makes it difficult for you to write, or makes you write slowly, then consider writing with another method, like the seat-of-the-pants method, where you write as you go, or the snowflake method where you plot a little ahead.
5. Improve your daily schedule
Another aspect of your writing career is your writing, and your ability to meet deadlines (even deadlines set by yourself). Take a good look at your daily schedule. Do you find yourself working for a lot of hours because you have too many tasks? If you do, then consider changing your schedule. Small tasks which can be done in an hour can take a lot more time to get done if you are doing them when you are exhausted. When it comes to writing, you will need to juggle writing, and dealing with other tasks and projects at the same time. Consider creating a weekly schedule, in which you will delegate days only to writing, and days when you will focus on your other projects and tasks. This will make sure that you have days when you rest your brain from writing (which you absolutely need), and days where your other projects will be taken care of without you getting exhausted. Improving your schedule will help you improve your writing, and your general wellbeing, which will ensure that your writing career is also being enhanced upon every day.
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Georgina Roy wants to live in a world filled with magic. As an art student, she’s moonlighting as a writer and is content to fill notebooks and sketchbooks with magical creatures and amazing new worlds. When she is not at school, or scribbling away in a notebook, you can usually find her curled up, reading a good urban fantasy novel, or writing on her laptop, trying to create her own.