Photography: James.

Blog posts don’t have such obvious little techniques. Writers hurl themselves in, hoping to create a first paragraph that will look inviting, stand out on a home page, and generate enough curiosity to pull the reader into the body of the post.

You can start big, with a concept (as this post does), attaching the idea the article contains to a bigger theme and setting it in a context that gives another depth of meaning. Or you can use the first few sentences to summarize the point of the article. That’s a favorite of news reports; if the reader is going to give up halfway through, he or she should at least take away the main information the story offers.

Those two approaches alone should be enough to kill the blank page and get the words moving.
Ending the post though is often a little trickier. You know when you’ve said enough – or, if you’re a pro on commission, when you’ve reached your word count – but you need an ending that tells the reader your point is made. Movies roll credits, magazines have a back-of-book section, and books have conclusions. Nut apart from the one-paragraph summary crafting an end that feels final but which still leaves the idea firmly planted in the reader’s mind (where, hopefully, it will grow into a beautiful thought) usually takes a bit of wit and planning.

How Do You Say It’s Over?

One option that always works is to bookend the article. Refer back to the metaphor or the argument made in the first paragraph and you’ll show that your piece has passed through a process: the opening paragraph introduced a concept, the body did something with it, and the end showed what happened to it.
It’s a strategy that appears to be standard at The Economist. The newspaper’s recent obituary of Tsutomu Yamaguchi, a double nuclear survivor, for example, begins:

“WHEN he had stopped crying, Tsutomu Yamaguchi would tell you why he called his book of poems “The Human Raft”. It had to do with the day he forgot to take his personal name-stamp to work, and had to get off the bus…”

and ends:

“He began to be comforted by three things. One was a set of drawings of the 88 Buddhas of the Shikoku pilgrimage, whose outlines—robes, haloes, calm hands—he devoutly painted in. The carbonised, face-down Buddhas of his tanka found peace again. The second comfort was in “simple acts of kindness”. And the third was an image of his life as a baton, passed on every time anyone heard or read his testimony. All these batons might form, together, another human raft.”

The metaphor, repeated at the end of the article, gives the readers a sense of closure, provides the image with a new meaning — and ends the story. There might not be a marriage or a feeling of happy-ever-after, but as readers, we know the story is finished, and as writers we’re shown another way to say “The End.”

Photography: Ninja M.

It all comes down to a mixture of professionalism and contacts – and it’s the professionalism that’s hardest to acquire.

When you work for a company, your success depends entirely on your position in the hierarchy. Whether you rise, stick or leave relies on your relationship with your boss – and on his or her relationship with your colleagues. Being an employee might mean being part of a team but when only one of the team is heading for a promotion, it also means a dog-eat-dog environment in which your prime concern is you. As a freelancer though, it’s never about you.

It’s always about the client.

The Freelance Customer Is Always Right

Whether you’re writing content for the Web, producing code for websites or designing graphics for ads, as a freelancer you’ll soon find that the customer really is always right. Even when he’s wrong about the project, he’s right when he says that if he doesn’t get what he wants, he won’t pay. The result is that successful freelancers quickly learn to lose their ego and focus on the client’s demands. You get to voice your opinion, but the decision is always down to the person who holds the purse strings. That relationship between pay and performance really does bring out a different kind of professionalism, one in which you genuinely try to put yourself in the client’s shoes and deliver the product he didn’t even know he wanted.

That professionalism should grow naturally, with experience, and with the pleasure of receiving freelance pay. Contacts will come the same way. Freelance careers often start with nothing but an Elance profile and a dream of a better way of working. Sometimes, they’ll come with a client or two in the form of a former colleague who’s moved on to a different company. But eventually, they build up to a point at which you’re serving a handful of clients most of your time and contributing to a number of others some of the time. The trick is to make sure that your biggest clients are kept happy while you keep your eye out for new clients to replace them should they decide to pull the plug.

It’s not an ideal way to work – it means not one boss but lots of small bosses, and urgent work still comes in on Friday afternoon – but it is still a great way to earn a living.

Photography: smiling da vinci

1. Plan Ahead
That starts with careful planning. The biggest advantage that phone interviews have over email interviews is that they’re instantaneous. Provided you can get the subject on the line right away – and let’s face it, that’s horribly rare – you can have the information you need in twenty minutes and be on line to meet your deadline. If you plan your article ahead though, email interviews can squish that advantage. While some respondents will shoot you back answers within a day, you’ll do best by sending out your interview requests at least a week in advance.

And you’ll do better by sending out at least three. Not everyone will reply, so the more requests you send, the lower the odds that you’ll end up empty-handed. And if everyone replies, you’ll have a better pick of the quotes.

2. Keep the Questions Down
Ideally, you’ll want the kind of long answers that are packed with information and are filled with juicy soundbites that you can toss into the article. The likelihood that will happen depends in part on the personality of the subject, but it also depends on your questions. Ask lots of questions and the subject is more likely to give short answers to get through them all. Keep the questions to ten or less and you should find that at least some of them produce answers that are long and full.

3. Get Stories
You can do even more to encourage those answers by asking questions that generate anecdotes. Questions like “What was your favorite project?” or “What was the biggest challenge?” might be journalistic clichés but they do produce good answers. Put at least one of them in.

4. Read the Website
It’s likely that you’ll have questions designed to get the basic background information out of the subject. Much of that information though is often available on the website – and what you get back might just be cut and pasted from the About Us page.

If you have that information already, don’t ask for it again (even in the hope of getting a usable, original quote). Instead, pick something out of the bio and ask for more details.

5. Interview Businesses
The biggest risk of email interviews is that you won’t get the replies, and when you’re up against a deadline that’s a big risk. If the deadline is hard and real, then it’s time to hit the phones but one way to increase the chances that you’ll get an easy email response is to send your questions to businesses. They’ll understand the value of the publicity and respond with good answers. Make at least one of your recipients a company, and you can be confident of receiving at least one set of answers.

Photography: eclecticlibrarian

There are lots of reasons that an agent might reject a query. The topic might be wrong, either for the agent or the market. The structure might not work or the characters could be unconvincing. But often, it’s the writing.

Professional agents can tell, at a glance, whether a writer is capable of creating balanced sentences, whether she knows how to use words appropriately, dodge clichés and dig up new and interesting ways to express ideas. Yes, no, read on, reject… the decision often happens in seconds, sometimes as early as the first sentence.

It’s not always as difficult as it sounds, and not just because ‘no’ is the default answer. Redundancies like “fictional novel” are giveaways, and a failure not just to spell, but to spellcheck is usually a good sign that the writer has a low sensitivity to poor wordsmithing.

Learning Writing

Some aspects of good writing can be taught. Journalists can learn how to pull information out of interview subjects.

Bloggers can practice creating introductions and headlines that pull in readers.

Technical writers can take classes that teach them how to explain processes without sending their readers to sleep.

Talent can’t be taught, but it can be honed, sharpened and – most important of all – not wasted.

That happens when the writer reads a lot, reads carefully, and generates his or her own sensitivity to poor writing.

It happens when the writer reads his or her own work before publishing or submitting, and spots the clumsy sentences that trip readers up.

And it happens when writers write a lot.
Writing is a craft built on talent. Good writers might start with talent, but that talent produces better writing the more they do it… and the more they think about the writing they produce.

Photography: Pink Sherbet Photography

But she was still lucky. She was lucky first because she beat the cancer. A long course of chemotherapy and one mastectomy later, Lisa is healthy and cancer-free. Hooray for that. She was also lucky because she has talent. The blog that she wrote about her cancer treatments is one of the smartest, saddest, funniest, and most moving sites on the Web.

She’s lucky too because she was able to turn her situation around. A book based on her blog will be published in April 2010 and, working as a freelance writer, she has been commissioned by the Financial Times, the BBC and Glamour, among others.

Much of that success came down to one golden piece of luck. It might not have been as dance-worthy as the cancer’s decision to go away and not come back, but in career terms it’s up there with being spotted in an airport by the founder of a model agency. Lisa’s blog was read by British actor Stephen Fry who, recommending it to his followers on Twitter, called it “funny and brilliant” and Lisa “the web’s top cancer bitch.”

It was the sudden burst of extra page views that recommendation generated that brought Lisa to the world’s attention.

Would her talent have been spotted anyway? Perhaps. People do talk online. But then again perhaps not. Writers write. We like writing and if we’re able to do it professionally, that’s a pretty good sign we’re at least reasonably good at it. But there’s a difference between being good at writing and being good at marketing.

Let Writers Write and Publishers Publish

Publishers market, and it’s something that they seem to enjoy. They get a kick out of watching their page views grow, seeing their site ride up the search engine results, and closing deals with advertisers. The thrill that a writer gets out of a witty sentence, they feel for landing spot number three for the “kitchen pliers” keyword phrase on Google.

Most workplaces these days are fragmented. Each employee is paid to do what they’re best at, whether that’s copywriting, graphic design or marketing. No one expects Rupert Murdoch to write the day’s stories in his newspapers, draw the funnies, bring in the ads, and make sure the printing and distribution system is working properly.

Only online are publishers expected to do everything, from creating the content to building the links, approving the comments, bringing in the ads, and kicking the servers. It’s not the most efficient way for the Web to work.

Publishers should market. They’re good at it and they enjoy it. Writers should write. They’re good at that and enjoy that too.

At Scribat, we’re working on something new. We think it’s going to be something that will let writers write, publishers publish, and everyone feel that they got lucky.

Image: lapolab

And we’re live. It’s a big step for Scribat and hopefully it will turn out to be an important step for our writers and publishers too. We figure it will take time to become known, to build trust among both writers and publishers, and to create a library of great content that website owners will line up to purchase and license.

In the meantime, much of our current effort is focusing on building the agency. We’ve managed to recruit an impressive team of contributors, from talented beginners with interesting specializations to award-winning Madison Avenue copywriters with portfolios packed with creativity. The selection process was eye-opening.

It was also thought-provoking, and the thoughts it provoked were about what goes into great content. What does a writer need to be able to produce the kind of varied content that publishers demand and readers will enjoy reading?

Fantastic Web content always comes down to two things: information and style.
Information can be acquired. When I was just starting out as a freelance writer, I was approached by a new client to produce an ebook about online advertising. I told him I’d love to help but there was just one problem: I know nothing about online advertising. “No problem,” he said. “I’ll send you a list of websites. Do some reading.”

I read the sites, joined the forums and emailed people who had been there, done it and sold the t-shirt. Then I wrote the ebook. It sold thousands. The client published it as a print book. It became a best-seller. I don’t claim to be an expert on Internet marketing but I feel I know a thing or two about it now.

Sure, there are some things that are best learned hands-on, from years of experience. Careful writers talk to people who have that experience and ask them questions. The rest can be sucked up with a curious mind.

Style though is a little trickier. It’s something that comes from reading, from the personality of the writer and from an understanding of the audience. It’s a combination of wit, topic and character. And it can’t be taught. A good editor — and all of Scribat’s content is edited before being posted or sent to the client — can smooth out the edges. But talent is innate and hard to find. It’s what we were looking for in the samples we reviewed and the writers we contacted.

What it all comes down to is smarts: an inquisitive mind capable of absorbing information, extracting more and turning it out in a form that others will find entertaining and informative. We’re looking forward to seeing what the writers we’ve chosen turn out for our new clients.