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Jody Mace tagged me for this six word memoir challenge.

It is time to take a small break and have a little fun with your writing. Here are the rules to the tag writing game.

• With just six words, write a title for your personal memoir.
• Go publish your title creation on your own blog.
• Include a link back to the blog of the person who tagged you.
• Now go find five more blogs to tag.

That’s it. Are you ready to play? Here’s my six word memoir title:

I’ll eat chocolate and be A-okay.

Whenever I get stressed out, I just have to eat some chocolate. It mellows me out.

Okay. It’s your turn. I tagged you. Go write your six word memoir on your blog. If you don’t have a blog, you can still play. Just write your own memoir in a comment on this blog. Have fun.

We are all familiar with the saying “Practice Makes Perfect.” That saying definitely applies to a freelance writer. The more you practice writing, the better your writing skills will become. I have read that truth in every single writing book I have read. Many expert writers declare writing practice to be essential for success as a writer.

But practicing isn’t always easy. The hardest part is getting started. How many times have you sat down to a blank piece of paper and found that your mind was equally blank. You couldn’t think of a single thing to write about. Believe me, you are not alone. Ask any teacher who ever gave her students an assignment to write about anything they wanted, how many just sat there staring at their papers. As adults pursuing a writing career, we can find ourselves in that same position. The fountains of creativity just do not seem to be flowing for us at the moment. It’s a horrible feeling, but not an impossible situation.

Creative writing prompts can fuel your imagination. At the very least, they can provide a starting point for your writing. They give you an initial topic. You may write on that topic or find yourself steering into a different direction from the starting point, which was the prompt. It doesn’t really matter whether you stick to the topic or adjust it to a new angle. The important thing is that you end up writing. And that’s the whole purpose of creative writing prompts. They inspire you to practice your writing skill. Some of the writing that you do in response to creative writing prompts may actually end up as marketable articles.

Creative writing prompts are available in different forms. There is one web site that provides a one word writing prompt. It is located at http://www.oneword.com . Other writing prompts may be phrases or complete sentences. There are many books available that provide creative writing prompts. One such book is the Writer’s Book of Matches. This book inspires fiction writing and will definitely help you combat writer’s block.

Another good book for creative writing prompts is The Write-Brain Workbook: 366 Exercises to Liberate Your Writing. The exercises and games in this book will help you shut down left brain thinking and release the right brain flow of creativity.

There is one more book of creative writing prompts that I thought worth mentioning because it is unique. Instead of using just words as prompts, it uses pictures accompanied by a word prompt to inspire your writing. The name of the book is A Picture Is Worth A 1000 Words: Image-Driven Story Prompts and Exercises For Writers. Many of the prompts focus on a specific point of the writing, such as openings, descriptions, or character developments. That allows you to work on areas of writing that you feel need improving.

Any of these books have good creative writing prompts to get you started practicing your writing. Or you can head on over to OneWord.com each day for a one word prompt to kick you into writing action. Whichever you choose, just write, write, write!

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a list of examples of writing errors to avoid? After you finished a rough draft of an article, you could scan over the list to make sure you didn’t make any obvious errors. Well, there is one resource online that will help you avoid some of the most common writing errors made everyday.

The yourdictionary.com web site has a list entitled “100 Most Often Mispronounced Words and Phrases in English.” It is located at http://www.yourdictionary.com/library/mispron.html . Yes. That is a list of mispronounced words, and you are writing not speaking. I know. But if you cannot pronounce a word correctly, you have a good chance of misspelling it. So I thought it was a good list for a writer to have. For some it will be a list of examples of speaking errors, but for us, it can be a list of examples of writing errors to avoid.

A query letter is a very concise pitch of an article or book idea. Authors use query letters to line up assignments before they even write the article. But many professional writers do some preliminary research and gathering of reference materials before writing and submitting a query letter to a magazine, newspaper, publisher, or literary agent. In fact, the query letter may be one of the key signals that the submitting author is an experienced professional. Most new writers compose articles and then try to find a market to sell it. Seasoned professionals come up with an idea and pitch it to secure an assignment before investing any time in writing the article. They have learned to work smarter by using a simple query letter to line up work.

Some editors will not even read submissions of full articles or manuscripts. They require authors to pitch their ideas through query letters. The query letter makes it easier for editors to go through piles of pitches. In a few paragraphs included in the query letter, the editor will discover your topic, your writing skill, and your writing history. The editor will be able to quickly decide if your idea is a match for their publication or publishing house by spending a few minutes reading your query letter.

For information on writing a query letter that gets noticed by editors, check out a copy of The Renegade Writer’s Query Letters That Rock .

You may be asking yourself “How do I become a freelance writer?” Do I need to go to college? Well, the answer is no. That would be great, of course, but unnecessary. There are many writers who never went to college. Some didn’t even graduate from high school. So a freelance writing career can be yours without a college degree.

To answer the question “How do I become a freelance writer?”, I have listed a series of steps you will need to take.

1. Develop the proper mindset. You are beginning a journey. You will need to set some goals to work toward, and you will need patience and persistence. A freelance career takes time to get out of the starting gate. The whole process of writing for magazines and newspapers can be very slow. You may send off an article to a magazine and not hear anything for months. Then your article could be rejected. Even if it is accepted, it can be many months until it is published and more months until you are paid. There are ways to improve this system, but you will need time to learn better methods.
2. Improve your grammar and writing style. Get yourself a good grammar reference book. Even if your grammar is pretty good, you may want to buy yourself a book on writing tightly. I am currently reading a good one entitled “Write Tight” by William Brohaugh. It will really help you whip your writing into shape. Another good reference book is “The Elements of Style” by William Strunk, E.B. White, and Roger Angell. This one was required for Creative Writing class back in college, and it is still popular today.
            

3. Get something to record story ideas as they come to you. It can be a notebook, a laptop, a mini recorder, or a palm assistant. But carry it with you everywhere. You don’t want to lose a good idea that pops into your head at the mall, the park, the beach, or anywhere else.
4. Line up one or more proofreaders. Do you have a friend or relative that could proofread your articles? Sometimes a second pair of eyes can spot mistakes you miss.
5. Join a writers’ group. You can go to http://meetup.com to find an organized group of writers in your area. Sometimes, the local library has a writers’ meeting at least once a month. You can also go to one of the larger writing web sites online to join a forum where writers hang out.
6. Read often. Study other writers to see how they put there words together. Which writing styles hold your attention?
7. Study the publications that you hope to be published in.
8. Practice writing often. The more you write, the better your skills will become.
9. Get organized and keep records. You will want to record the date you mailed a submission to a particular magazine or newspaper, so you will know when to follow up. Record if the article was sold or rejected. As you sale articles, move that magazine and publisher to a file you keep of those publications with whom you have a working relationship. Once you have proven yourself to this publisher, send them more query ideas or articles.
10. Be prepared to market yourself. You must always be looking for new ideas and new markets.
11. Be disciplined. Make time for writing and marketing.

Follow these guidelines, be diligent, and don’t give up. Soon, you will no longer be asking “How do I become a freelance writer? You will sell your first few articles and be well on your way in your new freelance writing career.