My story - what kind of writing?

“Writing” is a very broad term and there are many different specialties. I knew I wasn’t interested in poetry or scriptwriting. I tried fiction writing a long time ago. I even finished a novel (and parts of several others) and sent it around to publishers. I got “good” rejections from it. A good rejection is a personal letter from an editor rather than just a form response. Every personal response listed the same problem – my characters were too flat. I came to the conclusion that I just can’t write good characters. Plus, I suspect that fiction writing is harder to make money from, though I have no evidence to base that on.

I see three areas of writing that interest me: articles, technical writing, and content writing.

Articles I think are what most people think about when they think of freelance writing. You think up an idea (or five), find an appropriate magazine (I’m pretty sure Guns & Ammo doesn’t accept articles on cat care, but they probably get queries about it), send off a query and, if they are interested, send off the article.

Technical writing is a fairly broad field. I’ve written software documentation and quality assurance reports so those are the areas I will focus on. However there are other kinds of technical writing such as scientific articles, business plans, and educational writing.

Content writing means writing for a website, either your own or someone else’s. That, again, is a very broad subject and I will do several pieces on all the ins and outs of content writing.

I am going to expand on each of these subjects and talk about what I’ve learned about each field.