Being a professional writer
It’s quite a challenge to earn your living as a professional writer because you need to prove yourself again and again almost every day. You cannot wait for the muse to knock at your doors when the client is breathing down your neck because his or website goes live in two days and it’s only your writing that is holding him or her back. Although you writing does improve with practice and continuous work, words have their own attitude and sometimes they don’t heed to your commands. No matter for how long you have been writing professionally you often get into one of those moods when your brain simply refuses to work; not even a single sentence originates from your intellect. What do you do at those times?
You write.
Never let your writing or lack of it scare you or stop you from writing because this is the sure-shot way of ending up with no work done. Always remember that some writing is always better than no writing even if that "some writing" is total crap. Once you have words in front of you you have something to work on. You are no longer staring into the blankness. Manipulating the existing words is far easier than writing from scratch.
For instance you are writing for a local area network support company, a subject you are totally uncomfortable with. Your fingers refuse to move over your keyboard and your mind wants to do everything under the sun except for working on the project. A good thing to do is just write something about local area networks. Read about them on the Internet and whatever you read try to write it in your own words even if you sound totally stupid. If you can’t rewrite simply write whatever you are reading because this will give you some words to play with. then gradually start introducing your own words. Write something funny if you cannot come up with something that is relevant to the topic. You will be amazed how all of a sudden you start writing what you really need to write. You will have to do it in order to believe it.
Every writer goes through this phase every second week: you don’t feel like writing but you have to write because the client has played you and because you are a professional writer. Don’t let this situation intimidate you.
