Write What You Know: Still the Best Advice for Beginners

Want to launch a freelance writing career?

Four years ago, I wrote in Baby steps to a freelance writing career: Write what you know | Angela Booth’s Fab Freelance Writing Blog:

“Want to start a freelance writing career? Take baby steps, and start out by writing about what you know.

‘Write what you know’ is excellent advice which is always given to new writers because no matter who you are, and how much you know, or don’t know, you can always start where you are. There are always hundreds, if not thousands of people just like you, and you can write for them.”

Writers tend to want to be someone other than who they are, and this is disastrous — only YOU can be you. No one else has your experiences and the insights which develop from them, so don’t sell yourself short. Be YOU.

Of course, this is harder than it seems, because the challenges of writing get in the way. You need to write enough, so that you become a fluent writer.

I work with beginning writers, so I’m constantly coming up with analogies for writing. One analogy I use is that writing is like driving. When you’re a beginning writer, you write consciously. Then, over time, it becomes unconscious — just like driving.

Writing is also like learning a foreign language. You can’t become fluent in another language until you start thinking in that language. That takes practice.

So both driving, and learning a foreign language, are similar to writing. Both take lots of practice.

Practicing is easy and fun when you write what you know.

What do you know that you can share?

What do you love, and enjoy?

Share yourself — be you. When you do that, you’re writing what you know, and that’s the best advice for a beginning freelance writer.

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