“Hero” is one of those words that packs a lot of punch (no pun intended). Everyone understands it to mean the same basic thing: someone who’s admired for their qualities or achievements. But different people can have very different ideas about what actions or people they’d consider heroic, and just what promotes a figure to hero status within a society tells you as much about that culture’s values and perspective as it does about the hero themselves.
Hero also has multiple meanings in a literary sense. It can mean, among other things:
A character, often in mythology or folklore, who has superhuman qualities or a semidivine origin, and whose exploits or adventures are the subject of legends, epics, or myths.
The primary male character in a narrative, typically one who is identified with good qualities in a good vs. evil conflict.
The primary character in a narrative with whom the reader is intended to sympathize; synonymous with protagonist.
Writing great stories is all well and good, but for most writers that’s just the first step. What we really want is to have other people read them, and if you’d like that audience to go beyond your friends and family, odds are that will mean sending work to journals.
The process of submitting can be intimidating and confusing when you’re first starting to send work out, but it’s not actually complicated or difficult. If you’ve never submitted work before, this step-by-step guide will tell you everything you need to know. I’ve also included some links to resources that can be helpful for newbies and experienced submitters alike.
I wrote a post a couple of weeks back about the skills you need to freelance, and honing those will certainly help you to succeed when you start a freelance career. Writing that post got me thinking about some other things that either helped me when I was starting out, or that I learned along the way and wish I’d known from the beginning.
Just for some context, I started freelancing mid-way through 2015. I’ve been doing it full-time ever since and it’s currently my only gig (though that hasn’t been the case the entire time). In those 7-ish years I’ve definitely made my share of mistakes and taken on some clients who were walking red flags in hindsight. Some of those missteps I think are an unavoidable part of venturing out as linguistic mercenary into the wild world of words for pay, but hopefully these tips can help other new freelancers make the transition a bit more smoothly.
Language and culture are inextricably linked. Using other languages in your fiction can help to create a three-dimensional, fully-realized world for the reader, but it can also pull them out of your story and leave them bored, confused, or frustrated if you overdo it.
Like many aspects of fiction (and life), it comes down to finding the right balance. This tends to be especially difficult for those who write their own languages—and understandably so. It takes a lot of work to write a language and you want to show it off. The best way to do that, though, is to integrate it smoothly into your overall storytelling.
Freelancing is arguably the easiest way to start writing for a living. Freelancer platforms certainly make it look appealing, and while you probably don’t need me to tell you most freelancers don’t work at beach or on a lakeside dock, these ads promote a more pervasive misperception, too—that if you can write well, you can be successful as a freelance writer.
The truth is more complicated. Yes, you do need to have a certain level of writing ability to be a freelancer, but you don’t need to be a “great writer” and having that kind of advanced mastery won’t guarantee you success. There are other skills that I’d argue are equally important if you want to turn freelance writing into a sustainable full-time career. Based on my experience, these are the most important.
“What genre do you write?” On the surface that seems like a pretty straightforward question, but anyone who’s spent some time in the literary world knows it can get weirdly complicated—especially for those of us who write in the styles often shoehorned under “genre” (AKA anything that’s not literary realism).
One piece of advice new writers hear a lot is to avoid the passive voice. It’s right there in Strunk & White, rule number 14: “Use the active voice.” What many citers of this rule ignore is that they go on to say that, while the active voice is more “direct and vigorous” than passive:
This rule does not, of course, mean that the writer should entirely discard the passive voice, which is frequently convenient and sometimes necessary.
So when can you use passive voice, when should you use active voice, and why does it matter? Let’s start with the basics.