Freelance Writing Questions: Why Go Freelance?

Last week I invited you to ask your questions about freelancing. I got a great response, with several questions to answer. Rachel asked why I decided to go freelance.

For me, the decision was relatively easy. I didn’t realise how essential writing was to my well being till I stopped doing it every day. I was writing mostly academic stuff and I wanted to get back to regular writing.

On the face of it, it was a crazy decision. I had a good job as a lecturer, with a decent salary and flexible hours. Why give that security up for the uncertainty of freelancing?

My Reasons For Freelancing

I had two main reasons. First, lecturing was demanding, and it meant that I didn’t spend as much time with my baby daughter as I wanted to. Freelancing was one way to be able to set my own hours, more or less. I was able to freelance half the week while my daughter was in daycare, and do mother and baby groups for the rest of the week.

Second, I wasn’t happy not writing. When I went freelance, I knew I had made the right decision, because I was doing what I loved. I enjoyed getting up every day, even if I didn’t have that many writing commissions at the start.

Other Reasons For Freelancing

So those were my reasons. Many freelancers say they go freelance because:

• they can’t bear not to write
• they want to see if they can make a living from what they love
• they are trying to balance work and home life
• they don’t enjoy the office environment
• they want to work for themselves.

All of these are great reasons to feel the urge to go freelance. However, whether you should go freelance just for these reasons is a question I’ll answer in a later post.

Now it’s your turn. I know that a lot of you have faced this issue – what were your reasons for deciding to go freelance?

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Article by Sharon Hurley Hall

Sharon Hurley Hall has been mentoring writers here at Get Paid To Write Online since 2005 to help them improve and build sustainable and successful writing careers. Check me out on sharonhh.com. Feel free to connect with me online on Google+.

Sharon has written 659 awesome articles for us at Get Paid to Write Online

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