Ah, freelanced writing: The ideal career for people who hate comfort and serenity. It combines a few terrible things with one awesome thing: You get constant change and a lack of security, constant nerve-wracking negotiation and the occasional dispiriting edit, but at the end of the day you get to write things for a living, and that is marvelous.
It’s also mysterious and opaque for a lot of folks, which inspires some magical thinking. One question I’ve seen frequently concerning freelance writing as a career concerns tools: Things like Grammarly or FocusWriter that either purport to make your work better or help you to work better.
There’s nothing wrong with using (or paying for) tools that legitimately help you, and experienced writers can make those decisions on their own. But the questions I’ve seen recently concern the need for these tools — as in, do you need certain tools to be successful as a freelance writer?
And the answer is simple: Absolutely not.
Read Moar Books
The idea that you can pay a subscription to the right service and instantly (and easily) improve your writing and/or your income is fantasy. Grammarly is often required by clients, and I understand why, but let’s be blunt: Grammarly is trash and at least 50% of its suggested revisions make your writing arguably worse (it does often catch boneheaded mistakes that can slip past a tired eye, so it’s not worthless — but it won’t transform your work in any meaningful or positive way, aside from apparently eradicating the phrase “in order to” from the English language, for some reason). And if you need help focusing, why not use an App or plugin designed to help you do so — but that doesn’t mean your work will be appreciably better as a result.
The only way to be a better writer is to read more. For fiction, that means books and stories. For freelance, it can be helpful to look at what other people are doing in your niche, especially folks writing for A-List web sites or mainline print venues. Study their tricks. Mimic their ledes. Just absorb it all as enthusiastically as you can — that’s how you’ll get better. All the Apps in the world won’t help.
Of course, once the next iteration of GPT-3 starts producing writing that doesn’t read as if it were written by your slightly creepy older cousin who spends their spare time reading the dictionary, we’ll all be redundant anyway. And, I assume, the phrase “in order to” will cease to exist.