I’ve been writing for a living at times. As I’m writing this, I’m splitting my time between various types of writing, and running the Odd Alice web agency. While I doubt I will split my time like this in the future, it suits me right now.

A few years back my salary was paid by various writing gigs. I’ve been the freelance writer so many times I have long since stopped collecting clippings, and to my publishers’ dismay I often wouldn’t even tweet my work. It’s not that I don’t care, I do, but rather it had become normal. When you deliver 20 shorter pieces, whether it is blog posts or niche news, a few columns, and a couple of longer articles each month you tend to forget how awesome it is. At least I did, and sometimes still do.

Writing for a living isn’t too hard, actually. It all depends on what you want to do, and how expensive you are for the publishers. I started out being pretty cheap actually, but I had the luxury of being enthusiastic and the US$ was fairly strong against the Swedish currency. I was also a very productive person, working at a high pace, still do. As I built my personal brand I also charged more for my work.

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A writer writes. Chances are you could do with some more hours in front of the screen, and I’m not talking about rotting away on Facebook. Finding the time to write, and then actually sit down and do it, is hard, even if we set aside the perils of the craft.

Writing really is hard enough as it is.

Hopefully you have plenty of friends and a great family. Maybe you’ve got kids, pets, or a wife or husband that you share your castle with. That’s great, but they are all Enemies of Writing. You see, your everyday life will invade on your writing. People will ask you for help, dogs need walking, kids want to play, adults want to play, online friends want to chat, and so on. Every time this happens when you’re writing you’ll be in a fix.

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I don’t have too much to say about characters actually. They all differ, they are all crucial to your story, and they are all carrying something of yourself.

That’s right, I subscribe to the idea that there is a little bit of the author in every character. Yes, even the murderer, and yes, even the politician. We are all.

Characters build over time. Some are planned in advance, perhaps the reason a story unfolds in the first place, whereas others are born during the outlining phase. Main characters usually pop up in your mind before you start writing since they’re probably pushing your story forward, but support characters are sometimes invented while writing. I see no problem with this, other than that unplanned characters are often introduced with just one purpose: To move the story forward. That’s not wrong by itself of course, but even small characters need to be believable, otherwise you’ll risk breaking the reader’s spell.

A good character is believable. A bad one isn’t.

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If you’ve ever read a site or book about how to write a novel (or anything longer than a couple of paragraphs), you’ll have been told to outline.

So what is an outline?

You know, that depends on who you ask. It could be a simple disposition with chapter titles and a few sub-headings, or it is a crazy deep index card system that basically tells the whole story. None of those are wrong, nor is whatever method of outlining you might be subscribing to.

There are no rules for how you are supposed to write a book.

Again: There really are no rules.

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