Reading this article by Duncan Riach entitled
How to Become World-Class at Anything made me think about my journey to becoming a paid, professional writer
.
My path to writing for a living took twists and turns. In the article he talks about regular practice without focusing on the result (in my case I don't focus on the result until it's time to share the work with my clients).
Years of this type of practice freed me up to write better.
I've been writing professionally for 5 years. At the beginning, I was a solid writer who could do research, assimilate ideas and construct sentences without errors. I created coherent articles. Yay for me!
Yet if I compare my writing from 5 years ago to my writing now, there's a significant difference. I've refined my process, found a style and discovered a voice all while improving my mechanics.
One of the best resources, which I've featured here a few times, is
Elements if Style. The book contains immensely helpful advice like
Omit Unneccesary Words and
Focus on the Unit.
More than any advice, method or how-to, my improvement as a writer largely came the old-fashioned way - through practice, repetition and hard work. I've spent many many hours stringing together words. I've spent many more hours reading books with a critical eye towards things like sentence structure, phrasing, word choice, punctuation and many more things.
I love writing, but love isn't enough. Like any relationship, I want my partner, in this case my writing, to be as great as it can possibly be. That's why I continue to practice and consider my writing skills a work in progress.
In September 2014, I did a series of ghostwritten articles for Rezitech, a technology services company based in California. Ghostwriting
is doubled edged sword - on one edge is me getting paid for the work,
and on the other edge is someone else taking credit for my work. But
like I always say, at least I got paid!
There's a great site called Hubpages where writers can post pretty much anything, as long as it is original and fit for public consumption. 
One of my best clients over the years has been Duncan at Solar Events. I have done tons of work for him, including this article (7 Signs You are Awakening Spiritually).
I interviewed one of my oldest friends Scott and his wife Amber for Backlr.com about how they store photos and videos of their kids. Give it a read!
I recently began writing for Backlr.com and now have several articles live on their site. Check them out here.
A few days ago, I wrote a short tips list for aspiring freelance writers for HubPages based on my own experiences over the past few years. 
