A guest post from Sean Platt of Writer Dad
As a professional writer, my job is to saturate my days with words and ideas, filling screen or page with sentences designed to inspire. When I first started blogging I actually wondered how I would possibly manage to produce a fresh topic every day of the week. It’s now seven months later and I’m writing on around ten topics per day as my words are sprinkled from dot coms to dot infos all across the Internet.
The amazing thing about blogging, besides the instant access to a global population, is the inordinate amount of writing you must do just to keep your blog in orbit. Before starting Writer Dad, I wrote for only myself, my thoughts merely spun into sentences from within the desert of my own mind.
I sat, wrote, and pondered. Then I wrote some more.
Blogging is different. Writing for a blog means there’s a ticking clock always behind you. Within a month of my first post, the mood had changed to something more along the lines of: write, ponder, publish, repeat.
It isn’t just about writing the posts. Being an active blogger means you also have comments to answer, an inbox to sort through, and a reader full of other people’s thoughts to meditate and possibly remark upon. Thought fuels further thinking. A few months into Writer Dad and I realized how deep the well ran.
Our brains will keep on giving. So long as we’re willing to feed our creativity, and give our muse her rest when needed, there is no shortage to what we will see return. By the second month I had found my flow. By the third month I was almost on auto pilot, writing now taking the tone of conversation rather than the labor of construction.
At first I started to craft content for sites outside my own, then I began to help friends and colleagues polish copy. By the end of the year, I realized I was effectively writing five or six articles (minimum) day in day out across an unbelievably wide spectrum of topics.
Just like a freelance writer.
Ghostwriter Dad was born. I swept the floors and opened shop. The same tools I had been using to effectively blog seven days a week had provided me with a razor sharp toolset to deal with anything that fell on my plate Monday through Friday without ever having to feel the flutter of failure.
Lawnmowers, DUI, graphic design, vacation rentals, pet grooming, and bar-b-que grills. Those are literally the first six subjects that bounced into my brain when I decided to list just a few of the subjects I’ve been asked to write across the last couple of weeks.
If you can speak, you can write. If you can write, you can blog. If you can blog, you might be able to blog yourself into a steady career living as a freelance writer.
Sean Platt is a fantastic father and a gifted ghostwriter who also tweets.
