By Nancy Monson
I’ve been lucky enough to make a good living as a freelance writer for over 20 years. Part of that is because I’ve pursued a dual-track career: I’m both a consumer magazine writer and author and a medical writer/editor (meaning I write and edit continuing education materials for healthcare providers). This has given me a steady income and a nice variety of work. Plus, one project informs another: Often, while I’m researching a medical project I’ll find a study or trend that will make a good news hook for a consumer magazine article.
Lately, I’ve been trying to meld my career as a health writer and my love of quilting, collaging, and other crafts into a new career path. Like most crafters, I’ve long recognized how therapeutic crafting is for me, so I’ve written a book called Craft to Heal: Soothing Your Soul with Sewing, Painting, and Other Pastimes about it. I also blog about the links between crafting/hobbies and health as well as on psychological and pop culture topics.
Most recently, I’ve been writing a book about how to be a medical writer with my sister, Linda Peckel, called Just What the Doctor Ordered: An Insider’s Guide to Medical Writing. For years, writer friends have been asking us how they can break into the field, so we decided to take the plunge and will be publishing an e-book in April 2010. It’s been an eye-opening exercise writing the book—we’ve been pleasantly surprised by all of the knowledge we have to share—and crafting it into an e-book rather than trying to find a publisher for it. The work is all ours and we get to create the manuscript, the cover, the website, the publicity materials, everything. It’s all hands on, all the time, which means it’s hard work but it’s also really freeing and makes for a pretty positive experience.
How I write today hasn’t changed much over the years. I write best in the morning and save editing and administrative tasks for the afternoon. I usually don’t procrastinate too much—although Mondays are hard (and Mondays in January harder still) and social media and e-mail are real timesucks. I can’t concentrate with the TV or radio on, so I listen to classical music during the day and it creates a wonderful ambiance. (Right now I’m listening to violinist Hilary Hahn play Bach. Lovely!)
I find the qualities that have allowed me to be most successful as a freelance nonfiction writer are:
- I am very dependable. I make my deadlines or beat them. (I can count on one hand how many times in my career I’ve asked for an extension on a deadline and my clients tell me how much they appreciate that.)
- I am careful. I re-read and proof my work multiple times. I guess this is due in part to being a medical writer—you can’t make a lot of mistakes or you could hurt someone. It’s also due to the fact that I’m called on to be an editor a lot of the time, too, as a medical writer, so I know what happens after I submit an article and how frustrating it is to get sloppy or incomplete copy!
- I approach writing as a business as well as a craft, and I expect to be compensated fairly for it.
How do you approach writing? What projects are you juggling?
Nancy Monson is the author of Craft to Heal: Soothing Your Soul with Sewing, Painting, and Other Pastimes and co-author of the soon-to-be released e-book Just What the Doctor Ordered: An Insider’s Guide to Medical Writing. She has written for Glamour, More, Redbook, Shape, and Woman’s Day, among many other magazines, and blogs about creativity at Craft to Heal.
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