Ever wondered how to make money through writing? We all do!
Nigeria is a unique environment where soft skills were once ridiculed but now they look like “the new Jerusalem”. Everyone is worried about getting a piece of the action, we all want to be trainers, writers, brand writers and such likes. *Non-Nigerians should watch and learn ;)*
Who Should Read This?
Writing skills are not only important for the artistic, creative, they are an everyday “survival kit”. In recent times there is an upsurge in demand for critical thinkers, ” white collars” who can
– Explain the market.
– Brand the product.
– Represent the product.
Organisations need people who can put them in good light, who can convince people about products and services. WRITING Does that pretty well, you lose nothing by being expressive. It even makes you popular in most cases *wink*, people pay popular people Lol.
Where do I fit?
Its not uncommon for a lot of us to be searching and surfing the net, trying to find where we can fit in. Its hard to know how to start when you don’t know which kind of food you want to eat or need to eat. So here is a short explanation of writing types that could help and there will be links to other sources where you can go for a detailed study.
There are 2 broad Categories:
1. Fiction: here the main source of revenue could be contests, book sales, eBook sales, brand storytelling, illustration and so on. I think the market that consumes a kind of writing determines the kind of writing you should work at.
If you are interested in entertainment, imagery, social media marketing. Then you should work on writings like:
– Poetry; short verses.
– Flash Fiction; its fiction, its short.
– Prose; short stories with Rhythm.
– Novels, Longer fiction.
– Sci-Fi; fiction about Science.
You can focus on the style that helps you build a particular skill, for example writing flash fiction has made it easy for me to compose my thoughts while blogging. I receive emails from a number of copywriters like Jeff Bulas and you can tell that they sell people’s products with very catchy lines and stories.
2. Non Fiction: these are mostly fact based writings, a lot of people write essays for competitions, research for journal publications, application letters, executive summaries and so on.
There may not be any singular approach to helping you write the perfect application, or the perfect Newsletter, but one of the skills we usually emphasis is PRACTICE. The benefit of joining a writing programme or community is to motivate you to try out new and different approaches to your writing.
Some types of Non-Fiction writing are:
– Autobiography – write your own life story.
– Book Review – summarise a book.
– Descriptions – Describe a Product
– Essays
– How- to- articles
– Journals
You can benefit from these writing types by understanding their relevance to your workplace, determining to improve your skill and taking time to act on your decision.
Here are some useful links for a better understanding:
Before you go over to those links, you should try out this exercise:
If you have a diary or jotter, write out your immediate work or income targets, determine which part of that target requires you to write. Now go back to the list that has been discussed here and identify which one fits into the kind of writing you do most frequently.
Lets say you give, weekly and monthly reports at work, you need to work on your Non- Fiction writing. Build your research skill, understand what your bosses want to see in your report sheets, how you should sound, definitely not like a comic strip writer!
We hope you have gained a lot from this short post, you can take a step further and send in questions through comments, help us be of benefit to you.
This Article was written and Compiled by Damilola Jonathan O.
