What Does it Take to Be a Good Writer

Have you ever asked yourself "Can I be a Good Writer?" I ask this question to myself quite often. The answers have always helped me to find solutions to change my approach to building up my freelance writing career. Self-evaluation is the cornerstone for developing a strong professional existence and the eventual realization of our goals.

Based on my personal experience of carrying out this process of self-evaluation, I have listed down five points which I believe will help anyone to keep a track of our attitudes and temperament towards a freelance writing career:

Can you work with regular supervision: When you decide to take up a freelance writing career the first and the foremost fact to remember is that; there is no supervisor breathing down your throat. Getting clients to trust you and give you work is very difficult. And if you are to break their trust due to your failure to deliver on assignments as expected, you will soon be losing out on clients. In the freelance world it takes a lot of effort to build trust among your clients. You have to keep asking yourself whether you have the right attitude to work without being regularly monitored. Remember you are the boss and you will be left to suffer the damages of your own shortcoming. If you do not have the focused ability to work without supervision you will have to build that temperament in that direction, only then can you survive in a freelancing world.

How often and how long do you read? Reading is the harbinger of knowledge. You know what you read. Do you have a habit of reading at all and if yes how often and how long do you read. Your ability to succeed as a freelance writer is directly proportional to the efforts you make towards reading. When you read you learn something new. Your mind thinks and understands new happenings, concepts and facts. The more you read the more you know. If you do not have the habit of reading you will soon find your knowledge drying up.

How often do you feel distracted while writing? Let us put this simple and straight. How long can do you think you can sit at a place and write. During the course of your writing how often do you feel like getting up and doing something else? How often do you feel distracted by the happening around, the TV switched on or your friends and family talking around you? If you wish to survive and succeed as a writer it is important that you build the ability to concentrate as part of your writing. Concentration is a discipline which you have to nurture and once you have achieved it there is no looking back.

What is your span of attention? Following up from the point discussed above, another pertinent aspect of building the right temperament towards a writing career is to find your span of attention. As a writer it is very important that you are able to focus on the work at hand. If you need to survive and succeed you need to build the skill to focus on your work in hand. As mentioned above, as a freelance writer you are on your own. You do not have any supervision breathing down your throat. Your focus on work will have can make or mar your career as a freelance writer. Measure your span on attention and then focus on building it even further.

How often do you feel possessed by an idea? Your creativity is your bread earner. How often do you feel possessed by an idea? Your success as a writer depends on your ability to communicate your ideas to your readers. Your ideas may be your own or it may be that of your clients. All you may have from your clients is a short description of what they what. It is your skill to transcribe the idea on paper, the thought into a readable form that will define how successful you are. The seed of idea germinates from the knowledge that you possess and are nourished by the reading that you do.

The pointed mentioned here are not all inclusive. There are many more aspects to building up your skill as a writer. Success in a freelance career begins with your ability to build a strong temperament as a self-employed person. These questions are aimed at enabling you to ask yourself some of the most critical questions that will define your attitude towards writing as a fulltime freelance career.