In response to my first-ever post here at WRA, our fearless leader Rebecca Laffar-Smith brought up a very important point: “If you don’t sit in your chair and put words to the page you’ll get nowhere as a freelance writer.”

Not only do you need to write to make a living as a writer, you must submit your work to editors, post it on blogs, or otherwise get it out there into paying markets. (I’m not going to address, here, people who write purely for the joy of it. While I respect that demographic for that decision, it’s not what I do.)

Sending off your finished work to editors – clicking the mouse over the send button on an email or, in rare cases, dropping a query letter or article in the mailbox — is not easy.  It is, in fact, the different between a professionally-published writer and a dilettante.

You’ll find all manner of advice about a freelance writing career on the Internet. My three basic tips can get beginners started.  But there’s more, too.

Writers must learn about market research, how to conduct interviews, how to stick to a writing schedule of some sort and – depending on your tolerance for disorder – even learn how to organize your work environment for maximum productivity. But none of those things, alone, will build a freelance writing career.

A writer could wake up at 6 AM every morning, research her dream publications over coffee and eggs, move to her clean desk in her Feng Shui’d office, and follow the plans on her daily calendar every single day for a year. A year later, unless those plans included writing an article and sending it off to an editor, this writer would still be unpublished and struggling.

At some point, that writer has to ask, “What’s keeping me from hitting send?” And we can look around our clean offices, immaculate homes, and piles of magazines neatly organized by genre and date, and realize we did all this as “productive procrastination.” (Doing something distasteful or scary to avoid doing something even MORE distasteful or scary.)

Hitting “send “is often the scariest part of our job. We may do anything to avoid it. We’ll re-read, proofread, re-write, proofread again. We’ll wash the floors. Scoop the cat box. Call friends. Find another source, interview them, and re-write our article again.

Sometimes writers need a helping hand. Sometimes, we need a friend to literally click the mouse button for us. Other times, we need a virtual kick in the butt to do it ourselves.

There’s a very supportive forum over at www.absolutewrite.com, where writers do exactly this for each other. We gravitate toward a thread called JHS, which stands for “Just Hit Send.”

I’m sure there are others. A friend just invited me to join a writers network called She Writes. I’m excited to see the possibilities there.

My point is, wherever you find inspiration and support – it’s important to have it! And the best writers’ network will remind you of the formula to build a successful freelance writing career.

Here it is. Read carefully.

“Write. Send. Repeat.”

In the JHS thread at Absolute Write, we check back frequently to let our colleagues know we did it and celebrations abound. We come back later, still, and share the outcome (an acceptance or a rejection). Rejections result in JHSing that idea to another editor, and a new, different idea to the first editor, again with the support of our writing pals.

If you’re serious about building a freelance writing career, I ask you:

Did you JHS today? If not, what’s holding you back?

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