Freelancer, Heal Thyself... Dummy!

A freelance writer?

Our staff at the Antisocial Network is mainly composed of scientists and do-it-yourselfers, which is certainly why we almost never call out anyone for bad relationship or beauty advice. Keeping that in mind, it's pretty likely that there are few if any books of the self-help variety on our personal bookshelves and eReaders. We're mostly of the opinion that the only "help" most self-help books create is help for the author's bank account. With that in mind, we decided to delve into a peculiar corner of the genre, freelancers telling other freelancers how to make money. That's where we ran into Trisha Wright (aka dlwright or Trisha Faulkner), a former squid who moved most of her content to WritEdge.com. That includes an article she called "Skills Every Freelancer Should Have."¹

Although it's not explicitly stated, the implication in her title and the article is that by "freelancer," Wright means "freelance writer." In short, she believes that a freelancer needs but three skills...

• Creativity
• Good record keeping
• Ability to meet deadlines

...and that's the long and short of it. OK, we'll buy all three of those as skills a professional freelance writer needs. Hell, the second two are skills a freelance anything needs, be it writer, welder, farrier, or marine biologist; and the third is a skill that anyone who ever works needs. In other words, Wright's advice borders on useless.

We did get the impression that Wright has clashed with a client a time or two, partially because of one passage in her WritEdge biography ("difficult private clients") and a second in her third bit of "advice": "...you have to protect yourself and be careful about who you work with and who you trust. Talking to the wrong person can even come back to bite you. The unfortunate truth is there are a lot of catty older women (no offense to non-catty older women who read this) but some of the older ladies I’ve worked with are really mean!" We don't know about others, but we find that sort of public comment to be quite unprofessional. We would probably be loath to hire a contractor who has a record of publicly complaining about prior clients, would you?

Be that as it may, perhaps the reason Wright finds clients "difficult" and "mean" is that she does not seem to know what skills really are important for a freelance writer. Based on our experience – by which we mean having read through tens of thousands of freelance posts that are poorly researched, poorly presented, or both; freelance writers also need other skills that Trisha doesn't mention, such as

• The ability to research topics
• The ability to grasp unfamiliar concepts or ask for help if you can't
• The ability to communicate with clients (that'll help avoid "difficulty" and "meanness")
• The ability to write: yes, proper grammar and knowledge of article structure are essential skills
• The honesty to turn down a job if one lacks the knowledge or skill to do it right

Those are the skills we think are essential to freelance writing. We base that on all of the absolutely wretched content to which we've handed out almost six hundred Dumbass of the Day awards; many of them to people who claim to be "professional freelance writers." Yeah, Sure...

¹ This website is now defunct, but you can see the post using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was   writedge.com/skills-every-freelance-writer-should-have/

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DD - WRITING