When interviewed about Dan Brown’s DaVinci Code for the three hundredth time, Umberto Eco - the man who mastered and modernized the genre in which Brown became a millionaire - said:

“I was obliged to read it because everybody was asking me about it. My answer is that Dan Brown is one of the characters in my novel, Foucault’s Pendulum.”

You can read the whole interview with Umberto Eco in the NYT Magazine.

I receive questions every now and then, whether in my comments or directly to my email address. It comes with the territory. Any beginning freelance writer knows how hard it can be to get into the field and when you find someone who appears or claims to know more than you, you ask them questions…lots. I’ll never claim to be an expert in the field, but I’m going to start posting some of the more frequent questions I receive here to share a little of the advice I feel I can offer as someone who has already been through the beginner’s gauntlet.

I received the following question from a user on Helium, following a recent spotlight on an article I wrote for the site:

I  write a few things but I would like to expand my range and write full time.  Have you any pointers for breaking out into other markets? This is the thing that is holding me back at the moment.

This is a question that I have come across time and again in forums, in blog comments, and on countless writing websites. It’s a great question and not one I necessarily have the “right” answer for.

What I do have though is a bit of experience in expanding my markets and taking on new projects, styles and ideas. After all, I didn’t start as a copywriter. I studied fiction and creative writing and found myself drawn to this field much later, mostly after I realized I could make a living from it. Here are some of the more useful tips I’ve found along the way:

• Practice Constantly - Every time you see a project, job, or opportunity that interests you but you are afraid to apply for because you lack experience, practice it. You do not have to take on a paying job to learn how to complete it.
  I’ve preached the importance of sites like Helium and Associated Content in the past repeatedly - not just as money making chances, but as ways to practice new forms. You wouldn’t write your first article as a paid job, would you? You would write it for a website that will allow you to get feedback from fellow writers and learn from your mistakes.
• Ask Questions - Every time you feel confused or lost on a new topic, concept, or project, look for somewhere to ask questions. There are plenty of websites that provide information about how to write a sales letter or an interview. Read as many of these as you can and if you don’t find what you need, email the author or find another writer who can help you.
• Be Confident - If you write well, you will almost always write well. That talent translates into thousands of different subjects, styles, and methods - it just takes the necessary information and practice to allow your talent to shine. If you’ve never watched a Hockey game in your life, your first hockey article might be a little dry, but if you research and get to know your topic, you’ll find that the same talent you used to write compelling fitness articles translates to hockey.
• Take it Slow - Just because you want to strike out into different fields does not mean you should tackle five or six at a time. Choose one new topic, or if you have the luxury, allow the topic to choose you. Then, focus your attention on learning as much as you can about that topic and becoming an expert. Only then should you jump to something new. With time, you will start learning faster, picking up new techniques and tricks, and digesting new topics at a quicker pace. For now though, be patient and willing to take the time needed to learn.

There are plenty more tips I could throw at you - things like: don’t lie to someone about your expertise in a subject to get a job, and don’t give up if you fail once or twice (we all do…more times that I can count last I checked). Hopefully that gives you a good starting point as to jumping on board new styles and methods of freelance writing. After all, the more you can master, the more jobs you can perform, and the more successful you can be.

I found this article on Salon.com, an excerpt from the new book, “The Fall of the House of Bush” by Craig Unger. Basically, it’s a look into the life and times of George W. Bush and how he managed to go from ambling drunk to president in 20 years and then back into the margins of near-obscurity again. I’m not saying I dislike George Bush….wait, yes I am. Here’s my favorite part of the article:

When the younger Bush got to Alabama, however, he continued drinking, according to Allison, often ambling into work at midday, boasting about how much he’d drunk the night before. One night at a party, she saw George W. urinating on a car in the parking lot. He reportedly shouted obscenities at police officers, and trashed a home he rented, leaving behind broken furniture he refused to pay for. “He was just a rich kid who had no respect for other people’s possessions,” a member of the family who rented the house told the Birmingham News.

I’ll be completely honest. When I started college, I didn’t have a specific thought that told me I was going to become a freelance writer. In fact, I started school by studying computer science and hoping to become a programmer. It didn’t take long to realize just how much I hated calculus and physics and so I soon changed my focus to English and spent the better part of the next three years trying to figure out what I would do with the degree.

Fast forward a few years and I have managed to maneuver my way into a fairly successful freelance writing career. I could not have expected this as a result and truthfully spent almost a full year after graduating college working in a grocery store before I found this path. So, what correlation can I honestly claim between school and my career?

It’s a tough question, and one I’ve heard from a number of young writers wanting to write professionally, along with my family members and siblings. What do I study to become a freelance writer?

Technically, you do nothing. I didn’t need a degree in English to become a freelance writer. However, it sure as heck didn’t hurt. While I couldn’t seem to find a traditional office job with my degree, my decision to become a freelance writer was almost entirely accidental, born of a few successful jobs I picked up at random on Craigslist while looking for more traditional work. I’ve never shown a client my resume or C.V. and haven’t once needed to supply my diploma or any school related information to pick up work or make money.

But, I definitely could not have been successful as a freelance writer without the training I got from college. So, the real answer to the question is a little more complicated. You don’t technically need a college education to be a freelance writer, but it definitely helps, and in certain cases, it does not hurt to tell potential clients that you have a degree in writing. Not to mention the vast amount of information you learn just from writing essays, receiving group feedback, and having writers with a lifetime of experience guide you through the process.

I don’t regret having spent four years in college. I do wonder at times what might have happened should I have started my freelance writing career a few years earlier (even while in school), but I can’t complain now as I have enjoyed a moderate to decent amount of success as a result.

Apparently Borders feels that the books they built their business around are not enough to keep people in the bookstore anymore and have started adding 37-inch TVs to their store fronts to display news and weather for people to watch while they are shopping. I think I may have to stick with Barnes and Noble - they may not offer the frequent coupons in my email inbox, but at least they give me silence to shop in. Read the whole story here.

The National Book Award Winners were announced yesterday. I have not read any of these quite yet, but Tree of Smoke has been sitting on my bookshelf waiting to be read for a few weeks now and I’ve been a long time fan of Sherman Alexie (I attended the University of Washington where he frequently teaches). I’ll have to pick his latest up, even if it is a children’s book.

• Fiction: Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson
• Nonfiction: Legacy of Ashes by Tim Weiner
• Poetry: Time and Materials by Robert Hass
• Young People’s Literature: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie

A recent Forbes feature, asking some of the top science and science fiction writers of today to postulate on the same basic idea graced my inbox this morning, so I thought I would share it with you. The article starts with this premise:

What happened to the future? Weren’t things supposed to be cooler by now, smarter, safer? Raised on a steady diet of science fiction, overzealous politicians and corporate hype, Americans expected to be living in The Jetsons — but instead find themselves stuck in a scarier version of The Waltons.

The truth is that people simply aren’t very good at predicting the future. It was only two centuries ago that we began to think we could do it at all, and we’re still learning. Hindsight may be 20/20, but foresight remains largely blind.

The feature then goes on to include a collection of great, creative non-fiction, including a few articles by the likes of Arthur C. Clarke and Quentin Hardy, along with five short stories by writers like Cory Doctorow, Max Barry, and Warren Ellis - all impressive fiction writers in their own right. You can find the whole feature here.

I was a huge fan of Kelly’s first film, Donnie Darko and it has been a long time in coming for his second. Unfortunately, it’s looking more and more like it might be a monumental flop. I’ll have to wait and see though - I seem to remember the original theatrical Donnie Darko release being a bit of a mess too, and it didn’t matter. Here’s an excerpt of the review from SpoutBlog:

“Could any film ever hope to overcome a festival drubbing like the one that greeted Southland Tales at Cannes 2006? Screened in competition, in an early incarnation clocking in at 2 hours 40 minutes (director Richard Kelly later claimed it had been a rough cut all along, but that’s apparently not how it was billed to the press at the time), Kelly’s follow-up to the slow-burning cult hit Donnie Darko was roundly, emphatically, infamously booed. Sometime after the first shockwave of bad buzz hit the States, a handful of critics rose to defend Kelly’s vision. The rest of us sat back and waited a year and a half to get a look for ourselves…

“In the film’s press notes, Kelly says he set Southland Tales in Southern California’s cultural sewers in an attempt to live up to the film noir’s seedy tradition, and oddly, if there’s one high-ish cultural mode that his characters are familiar with, it’s noir–judging by how many times it pops up on TV screens here, Kiss Me Deadly is the only film that survived the bomb. But with Kelly taking so many shots at various facets of rancid counter-culture, I wonder if he’s not aiming to shatter the post-Darko cultural suppositions foisted on him against his will. Kelly, a former frat boy, has always seemed a bit bewildered that Darko became a sensation amongst hipsters, goths, and countless youth cults. Southland Tales may fail on a lot of levels, but it’s fairly successful as an epic satire on the very notion of “alternative” culture. In practice, the Darko faithful may be the only viewers who will have patience enough to deconstruct Kelly’s vision, but I suspect that he’s not playing to his base so much as trying to shake it.”

Right now the flick is sitting at 41% and the more respected critics actually seem to be sticking up for it. I suppose I’ll sit back and wait for now and see what comes of the whole spectacle, but I’m hoping it’s not as bad as they seem to think it is.

One of the greatest things you can do as a full time freelance writer is to supplement all of your fulltime work for hire projects with work that only gets done in your free time. I’ve mentioned this form of quasi-relaxing a few times in the past, with blog writing and projects like NaNo, but I’ll reiterate it here – you have to make sure you don’t burn out too quickly with all of the random topics flooding your inbox every week – it gets overwhelming.

So, before I even started taking on freelance writing jobs, I started this blog and made sure to take as much time as I could every week to post a few random thoughts, some updates on my work life, and ideas that may or may not amount to anything (usually not).

Fast forward a few months and the blog is still up and running – albeit with some massive gaps in productivity – and I’m trying to make sure I don’t write for work 11 hours a day. It’s some kind of twisted form of balance, but it’s necessary if you want to succeed as a freelance writer.

So, yes – you should start a blog. Start it as soon as possible and don’t feel as though it absolutely needs to be related to your new freelancing career. It can be about anything – in fact it should be about something else, preferably something that allows you to relax a bit and forget about the rounds of work that have been flooding your desk.

Start the blog early – a Blogger account is perfect for getting started – and spend a little bit of time getting acclimated to the atmosphere of blogging. I’ll try to go into more detail later about the various aspects of blogging you can use, such as ways to make money with the blog or how to promote your blog, but when you first start, here are some good tips to build some readership and feel as though you are connecting with people:

Technorati – Sign up for a Technorati account early and start following how well your blog performs in search rankings and how many people favorite it. If you can, sign up for a few other services such as Ice Rocket or a pinging service that will automatically ping your blog across the Internet whenever you post. Blogger actually does this on a basic level now, but you can always supplement your exposure.

Google Tools – Google has a ton of great tools such as Analytics, AdSense, and Webmaster Tools that allow you to keep track of how well your blog is performing. Track your visits, the keywords used to reach your site, and which positions you show up in the search engines at. Even if you decide early that you do not want to do a lot of SEO work to raise your search ranking, these tools can help you get more involved in the writing and promoting process, which pays great dividends later on.

Comments – Comment on other people’s blogs. This is the same as being active in writing your own blog, except now you can get to know your fellow bloggers, write a bit about them, and receive the same treatment in response. It grows your readership and helps you become a better write – plus it’s social.

Generally, try to remember that even as you are writing on your blog, you are helping your freelance writing career. This is a two way street though. If you attach your name to your blog, keep your writing occupationally friendly. That means you should not write anything a potential client will be offended by. If you do attach your name, use your blog as a chance to show off your writing talent. I’ve had dozens of clients choose me over the competition because they found my blog posts interesting after searching for my name.

If you use the blog correctly, you can not only grow your exposure, experience and skills in writing, you can have a bit of fun. Blog early and blog often.

Launching late last year, PayU2Blog is another new entry in the growing realm of sites and programs that offer chances for bloggers to add sponsored posts to their blog for a decent payment. While it was not the first or necessarily the best of any of these type of sites, it has become a very popular option because it is simple, doesn’t impose a wide array of different restrictions on its bloggers.

Signing up for PayU2Blog is fairly simple. Upon visiting the site at PayU2Blog.com, you’ll find a few options. The website features a FAQ for those new to writing blog posts for money as well as a company blog, testimonials and all the usual website features such as contact links, about us pages, and a forum to discuss the site with other bloggers. Basically, PayU2Blog wants to make sure you always have all of the information you need to know that they are legitimate. It is a good step above the features offered by many sites that have popped up in recent months.

After signing up and having your blog approved (it takes between 2 and 5 days to get approval, depending on the back log of sites), you will gain access to the members area of the site. In this section, you are immediately shown your assignments, a list of keywords and URLs that you must integrate into a blog post of at least 100 words, a very easy task most of the time. Depending on the page rank and quality of your blog, you will be given a variable amount of assignments each week, usually between 1 and 5 per blog you add to your account.

The set up is simple, payment is done every two weeks through paypal, and the keywords can be integrated into posts in whatever manner you want (occasionally there are rules attached to a project, but very rarely). Payment is $5 per post and with an average of 3 per week or more, that’s a quick and easy $60 a month you can make for writing about 1200 words on your blog - something you’ll aready do. You don’t have to mark your blog as being sponsored and you do not have to write about a specific topic - just integrate the keyword and link.

Among the bevy of services like PayU2Blog, this one is a good choice. It doesn’t offer the highest pay or the most options in your account, but it is solid and consistent and a good way to supplement income over time.