Yesterday I guest-blogged over at Deb Ng’s Freelance Writing Gigs. The articles is called 6 Freelancing Lessons from Tony Stark, aka “Iron Man”. I think its a good article and the comments were very positive. Feel free to read it before moving on to the rest of my article. I’ll wait.
This was actually my first article as a guest-blogger. It was an interesting experience. I have read Deb’s blog for years. Our blogs share quite a few similarities (such as job feeds), but one of the key differences is that she focuses on freelance writing. Because of this, I needed to write an article with freelance writing as a topic. This was difficult for me, because I wanted my article to be original, and I often feel as if everything that can be said about freelance writing has already been said.
You can’t go a day without a dozen new freelance writing articles being added to the web. The reason for this is clear. The Internet is filled with writers and most of them either freelance or want to freelance. There is both a large audience and a large pool of writers who know the subject. If you put those two things together, you get an explosion of articles. While my advice was solid, there was nothing ground-breaking about it. I’ve posted most of that general advice before on this site.
The challenge for me wasn’t finding the information; it was finding a unique way to present it. Luckily, the day before I received Deb’s request, I went to see the Iron Man movie. It was a fun movie, perhaps a great movie by today’s reduced standards (don’t get me started). More importantly, the movie was something new and widely known. There are thousands of freelancing articles and plenty of articles about Iron Man, but no articles about freelancing AND Iron Man. That gave me what I needed — a hook. With Iron man as a jumping off point, the article itself was easy to write.
Finding new ways to present well-known subject matter is a one of the keys to long-term writing success. There are very few times in life when you can find something completely new. Iron Man, for example, is based on a comic book with a long history. The fact that the comic book had a proven audience and source material is the main reason the movie got made in the first place. Nonetheless, the team behind the movie found an original way to present the story and may well have the hit of the summer.
All of this leads to one simple piece of advice. If you can’t say something new, at least find a new and interesting way to say it. If you do that, you will be on your way to success as a writer.
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