I’ve known for sometime that sometimes the more constrained you are, the more creative you are forced to become. In writing, this can only be a good thing. Give me a deadline, give me a strict set of guidelines, give me an inflexible word count and together they will force my creative thoughts into places they otherwise wouldn’t go.
You are probably aware that I am rather passionate about the uses and abuses of online content as a source of information and misinformation. The ability for the internet to completely distort and manipulate our view of the world is immense and so far isn’t taken seriously enough – particularly by the media operations that still use the internet for fact-checking.
Since starting this blog last year, I have regularly been asked about how to become a professional writer. Mary, one of my keener subscribers (see – I didn’t forget you), recently raised the topic again and prompted me to think some more on it. Some of the issues related to this discussion I covered previously in my series on ‘The Professional Writer‘, but what I didn’t cover was how to get writing work in the first place.
Checking my website statistics, I have been amazed recently at the number of visitors who come to the site mistakenly believing it contains discussions on copyright law. Google searches such as “How to copy write a movie” and “The law behind copy write” persuade me that there is some confusion between copyright and copy write. On clicking back through to one of these Google searches I was even more amazed to find a high number of forum posts, web articles and more that talk about “copy write infringement”, “the difference between copywrite and trademarks” and other similarly misguided missives.