In this February 1970 Writer’s Digest article, Eudora Welty argues that, “Fiction is not meant to be a disguise for propaganda. A story should speak for itself as a story.”

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By Eudora Welty

Writer’s Digest, February 1970

Not too long ago I read in some respectable press that Faulkner would have to be reassessed because he was “after all, only a white Mississippian.” For this reason, it was felt, readers could no longer rely on him for knowing what he was writing about in his life’s work of novels and stories, laid in what he called “my country.”

Remembering how Faulkner for most of his life wrote in all but isolation from critical understanding, ignored impartially by North and South, with only a handful of critics in forty years who were able to “assess” him, we might smile at this journalist as at a boy let out of school. Or there may have been an instinct to smash the superior, the good, that is endurable enough to go on offering itself. But I feel in these words and other like them the agonizing of our times. I think they come of an honest and understandable zeal to allot every writer his chance to better the world or go to his grave reproached for the mess it is in. And here, it seems to me, the heart of fiction’s real reliability has been struck at—and not for the first time by the noble hand of the crusader.

It would not be surprising if the critic I quote had gained his knowledge of the South from the books of the author he repudiates. At any rate, a reply to him exists there. Full evidence as to whether any writer, alive or dead, can be believed is always at hand in one place: any page of his work. Integrity can be neither lost not concealed nor faked nor quenched nor artificially come by nor outlived, nor, I believe in the long run, denied. Integrity is no greater and no less today than it was yesterday and will be tomorrow. It stands outside time.

The novelist and the crusader who writes both have their own place—in the novel and the editorial respectively, equally valid whether or not the two happen to be in agreement. In my own view, writing fiction places the novelist and the crusader on opposite sides. But they are not the sides of right and wrong. Honesty is not at stake here and is not questioned; the only thing at stake is the proper use of words for the proper ends. And a mighty thing it is.

Because the printed page is where the writer’s work is to be seen, it may be natural for people who do not normally read fiction to confuse novels with journalism or speeches. The very using of words has these well-intentioned people confused about the novelist’s purpose.

The writing of a novel is taking life as it already exists, not to report it but to make an object, toward the end that the finished work might contain this life inside it, and offer it to the reader. The essence will not be, of course, the same thing as the raw material: it is not even of the same family of things. The novel is something that never was before and will not be again. For the mind of one person, its writer, is in it too. What distinguishes it above all from the raw material, and what distinguishes it from journalism, is that inherent in the novel is the possibility of a shared act of the imagination between its writer and its reader.

“All right, Eudora Welty, what are you going to do about it? Sit down there with your mouth shut?”, asked a stranger over long distance in one of the midnight calls that I suppose have waked most writers in the South from time to time. It is part of the same questions. Are fiction writers on call to be crusaders? For us in the South who are fiction writers, is writing a novel something we can do about it?

It can be said at once, I should think, that we are all agreed upon the most important point: that morality as shown through human relationships is the whole heart of fiction, and the serious writer has never lived who dealt with anything else.

And yet, the zeal to reform, which quite properly inspires the editorial, has never done fiction much good. The exception occurs when it can rise to the intensity of satire, where it finds a better home in the poem or the drama. Large helpings of naïveté and self-esteem, which serve to refresh the crusader, only encumber the novelist. How unfair it is that when a novel is to be written, it is never enough to have our hearts in the right place! But goodwill all by itself can no more get a good novel written than it can paint in watercolor or sing Mozart.

Nevertheless, let us suppose that we feel we might help if we were to write a crusading novel. What will our problems be?

Before anything else, speed. The crusader’s message is prompted by crisis; it has to be delivered on time. Suppose John Steinbeck had only now finished The Grapes of Wrath? The ordinary novelist has only one message: “I submit that this is one way we are.” This can wait. When we think of Ibsen, we see that causes themselves may in time be forgotten, their championship no longer needed; it is Ibsen’s passion that keeps the plays alive.

Next, we as the crusader-novelist shall find awkward to use the very weapon we count on most: the generality. On fiction’s pages, generalities clank when wielded, and hit with equal force at the little and the big, at the merely suspect and the really dangerous. They make too much noise for us to hear what people might be trying to say. They are fatal to tenderness and are in themselves nonconductors of any real, however modest, discover of the writer’s own heart. This discovery is the best hope of the ordinary novelist, and to make it he begins not with the generality but with the particular in front of his eyes, which he is able to examine.

Taking a particular situation existing in his world, and what he feels about it in his own breast and what he can make of it in his own head, he constructs on paper, little by little, an equivalent of it. Literally it may correspond to a high degree or to none at all; emotionally it corresponds as closely as he can make it. Observation and the inner truth of that observation as he perceives it, the two being tested one against the other; to him this is what the writing of a novel is.

We, the crusader-novelist, having started with our generality, must end with a generality; they had better be the same. In the place of climax, we can deliver a judgment. How can the plot seem disappointing when it is a lovely argument spread out? It is because fiction is stone-deaf to argument.

The ordinary novelist does not argue; he hopes to show, to disclose. His persuasions are all toward allowing his reader to see and hear something for himself. He knows another bad thing about arguments: they carry the menace of neatness into fiction. Indeed, what we as the crusader-novelists are scared of most is confusion.

Great fiction as we very much fear, abounds in what makes for confusion: it generates it, being on a scale which copies life, which it confronts. It is very seldom neat, is given to sprawling and escaping from hounds, is capable of contradicting itself, and is not impervious to humor. There is absolutely everything in great fiction but a clear answer. Humanity itself seems to matter more to the novelist than what humanity thinks it can prove.

When a novelist writes of man’s experience, what else is he to draw on but the life around him? And yet the life around him, on the surface, can be used to show anything, absolutely anything, as readers know. The novelist’s real task and real responsibility lie in the way he uses it.

[Read more about writing “of man’s experience” in this 1937 WD article about the American labor novel.]

Situation itself always exists; it is whatever life is up to here and now. It is the living and present moment. It is transient, and it fluctuates. Using the situation, the writer populates his novel with characters invented to express it in their terms.

It is important that it be in their terms. We cannot in fiction set people to acting mechanically or carrying placards to make their sentiments plain. People are not Right and Wrong. Good and Bad. Black and White personified: flesh and blood and the sense of comedy object. Fiction writers cannot be tempted to make the mistake of looking at people in the generality—that is to say, of seeing people not at all like us. If human beings are to be comprehended as real, then they have to be treated as real, with minds, hearts, memories, habits, hopes, with passions and capabilities like ours. This is why novelists begin the study of people from within.

The first act of insight is to throw away the labels. In fiction, while we do not necessarily write about ourselves, we write out of ourselves, using ourselves; what we learn from, what we are sensitive to, what we feel strongly about—these become our characters and go to make our plots. Characters in fiction are conceived from within, and they have, accordingly, their own interior life; they are individuals every time. The character we care about in a novel we may not approve of or agree with—that’s beside the point. But he has got to seem alive. Then and only then, when we read, we experience or surmise things about life itself that are deeper and more lasting and less destructive to understanding than approval or disapproval.

The novelist’s work is highly organized, but I should say it is organized around anything but logic. Just as characters are not labels but are made from the inside out and grow into their own life, so does a plot have a living principle on which it hangs together and gradually earns its shape. A plot is a thousand time more unsettling than an argument, which may be answered. It is not a pattern imposed; it is inward emotion acted out. It is arbitrary indeed, but not artificial. It is possibly so odd that it might be called a vision, but it is organic to its material; it is a working vision, then.

A writer works through what is around him if he wished to get to what he is after—no kind of proof, but simply an essence. In practice he will do anything at all with his material; shape it, strain it to the breaking point, double it up, or use it backwards; he will balk at nothing—see The Sound and the Fury—to reach that heart and core. But even in a good cause he does not falsify it. The material itself receives deep ultimate respect: it has given rise to the vision of it, which in turn has determined what the novel shall be.

The ordinary novelist, who can never make a perfect thing, can with every novel try again. But if we write a novel to prove something, one novel will settle it, for why prove a thing more than once? And what then is to keep all novels by all right-thinking persons from being pretty much alike? Or exactly alike? There would be little reason for present writers to keep on, no reason for the new writers to start. There’s no way to know, but we might guess that the reason the young write no fiction behind the Iron Curtain is the obvious fact that to be acceptable there, all novels must conform and so must be alike, hence, valueless. If the personal vision can be made to order, then we should lose, writer and reader alike, our own gift for perceiving, seeing through the fabric of everyday to what to each pair of eyes on earth is a unique thing. We’d accept life exactly like everybody else, and so, or course, be content with it. We should not even miss our vanished novelists. And if life ever became not worth writing fiction about, that, I believe, would be the first sign that it wasn’t worth living.

With a blueprint to work with instead of a vision, there is a good deal that we as the crusader novelist must be at pains to leave out. Unavoidably, I think, we shall leave out one of the greatest things. This is the mystery in life. Our blueprint for sanity and of solution for trouble leaves out the dark. (This is odd, because surely it was the dark that first troubled us.) We leave out the wonder because with wonder it is impossible to argue. Much less to settle. The ordinary novelist thinks it had better be recognized. Reckless as this may make him, he believes the insoluble is part of his material, too.

The novelist works neither to correct nor to condone, not at all to comfort, but to make what’s told alive. He assumes at the start an enlightenment in his reader equal to his own, for they are hopefully on the point of taking toff together from that base into the rather different world of the imagination.

It’s not only the fact that this world is bigger and that fewer constrictions apply that may daunt us as crusaders. But the imagination itself is the problem. It is capable of saying everything but no. In our literature what has traveled the longest way through time is the great affirmative soul of Chaucer. The novel itself always affirms, it seems to me, by the nature of itself. It says what people are like. It doesn’t, and doesn’t know how to, describe what they are not like, and it would waste it’s time if it told us what we ought to be like, since we already know that, don’t we? But we may not know nearly so well what we are as when a novel of power reveals this to us. For the first time we may, as we read, see ourselves in our own situation, in some curious way reflected. By whatever way the novelist accomplishes it—there are many ways—truth is borne in on us in all its great weight and angelic lightness, and accepted as home truth.

Passing judgment on his fellows, which is trying enough for anybody, is frustrating for an author. It is hardly the way to make the discoveries about living that he must have hoped for when he began to write. If he does not pass judgment, does this mean he has no conscience? Of course he has a conscience; it is, like his temperament, his own, and he is one hundred percent answerable to it, whether it is convenient or not. What matters is that a writer is committed to his own moral principles. If he is, when we read him we cannot help but be aware of what these are. Certainly the characters of his novel and the plot they move in are their ultimate reflections. But these convictions are implicit; they are deep down; they are the rock on which the whole structure of more than that novel rests.

Indeed, we are more aware of his moral convictions through a novel than any flat statement of belief from him could make us. We are aware in that part of our mind that tells us truths about ourselves. Yet it is only by way of the imagination—the novelist’s to ours—that such private neighborhoods are reached.

There is still to mention what I think will give us, as the crusader-novelist, the hardest time: our voice will not be our own. The crusader’s voice is the voice of the crowd and must rise louder all the time, for there is, of course, the other side to be drowned out. Worse, the voices of most crowds sound alike. Worse still, the voice that seeks to do other than communicate when it makes a noise has something brutal about it; it is no longer using words as words but as something to brandish, with which to threaten, brag, or condemn. The noise is the simple assertion of self, the great, mindless, general self. And for all its volume it is ephemeral. Only meaning lasts. Nothing was ever learned in a crowd, from a crowd, or by addressing or trying to please a crowd. Even to deplore, yelling is out of place. To deplore a thing as hideous as the murder of three civil rights works demands the quiet in which to absorb it. Enormities can be lessened, cheapened, just as good and delicate things can be. We can and will cheapen all feeling by letting it go savage or parading in it.

Writing fiction is an interior affair. Novels and stories always will be put down little by little out of personal feeling and personal beliefs arrived at alone and at firsthand over a period of time as time is needed. To go outside and beat the drum is only to interrupt, interrupt, and so finally to forget and to lose. Fiction has, and must keep, a private address. For life is lived in a private place; where it means anything is inside the mind and heart. Fiction has always shown life where it is lived, and good fiction, or so I have faith, will continue to do this.

A Passage to India is an old novel now. It is an intensely moral novel. It deals with race prejudice. Mr. Forster, not by preaching at us, while being passionately concerned, makes us know his points unforgettable as often as we read it. And he does not bring in the dark! The points are food forty years after their day because of the splendor of the novel. What a lesser novelist’s harangues would have buried by now, his imagination still reveals. Revelation of even the strongest forces is delicate work.

Indeed, great fiction shows us not how to conduct our behavior but how to feel. Eventually, it may show us how to face our feelings and face our actions and to have new inklings about what they mean. A good novel of any year can initiate us into our own new experience.

From the working point of view of the serious writer of fiction, nothing has changed today but the externals. They are important externals; we may have developed an increased awareness of them, which is certainly to the good; we have at least the same capacity as ever for understanding, the same eyes and ears, same hearts to feel, same minds to agonize or remember or to try to put things together, see things in proportion with. While the raw material of our fiction is changing dramatically—as indeed it is changing everywhere—we are the same instruments of perceiving that we ever were. And we do not know what is to be made out of experience at any time until the personal quotient has been added. To convey what we see around us, whatever it is, so as to let it speak for itself according to our lights is the same challenge it ever was, not a different one, not a greater one, only perhaps made harder by the times. Now as ever we must keep writing from what we know; and we must really know it.

No matter how fast society around us changes, what remains is that there is a relationship in progress between ourselves and other people; this was the case when the world seemed stable, too. There are relationships of the blood, of the passions and affections, of thought and spirit and deed. There is the relationship between the races. How can one kind of relationship be set apart from the others? Like the great root system of an old and long-established growing plant, they are all tangled up together; to separate them you would have to cleave the plant itself from top to bottom.

What must the Southern writer of fiction do today? Shall he do anything different from what he has always done?

There have already been giant events, some of them wrenchingly painful and humiliating. And now there is added the atmosphere of hate. We in the South are a hated people these days; we were hated first for actual and particular reasons, and now we may be hated still more in some vast unparticularized way. I believe there must be such a thing as sentimental hate. Our people hate back.

I think the worst of it is we are getting stuck in it. We are like trapped flies with our feet not in honey but in venom. It’s not love that is the gluey emotion; it’s hate. As far as writing goes, which is as far a living goes, this is a devastating emotion. It could kill us. This hate seems in part shame for self, in part self-justification, in part panic that life is really changing.

Fury at ourselves and hurt pride, anger aroused too often, outrage at being hated need not obscure forever the sore spots we Southerners know better than our detractors. For some of us have shown bad hearts. As in the case of our better qualities, we are locally blessed with an understanding and intimate knowledge of our faults that our worst detractors cannot match, and have been in a less relentless day far more relentless, more eloquent, too, than they have yet learned to be.

I do not presume to speak for my fellow Southern writers, a group of individuals if there ever was one. Yet I would like to point something out: in the rest of the country people seem suddenly aware now of what Southern fiction writers have been writing about in various was for a great long time. We do not need reminding of what our subject is. It is humankind, and we are all part of it. When we write about people, black or white, in the South or anywhere, if our stories are worth the reading, we are writing about everybody.

In the South, we who are now at work may not learn to write it before we learn, or learn again, to live it—our full life in the South within its context, in its relation to the rest of the world. “Only connect,” Forster’s ever wise and gentle and daring word, could be said to us in our homeland quite literally at this moment. And while the Southern writer goes on portraying his South, which I think nobody else can do and which I believe he must do, then if his work is done well enough, it will reflect a larger mankind as it has done before.

And so finally I think we need to write with love. Not in self-defense, not in hate, not in the mood of instruction, not in rebuttal, in any kind of militance, or in apology, but with love. Not in exorcisement, either, for this is to make the reader bear a thing for you.

Neither do I speak of writing forgivingly; out of love you can write with straight fury. It is the source of the understanding that I speak of; it’s this that determines its nature and its reach.

We are told that Turgenev’s nostalgic, profoundly reflective, sensuously alive stories that grew out of his memories of early years reached the Czar and were given some credit by him when he felt moved to free the serfs in Russia. Had Turgenev set out to write inflammatory tracts instead of the sum of all he knew, could express, of life learned at first-hand, how much less of his mind and heart with their commitments, all implicit, would have filled his stories! But he might be one of us now, so directly are we touched, with 113 years gone by since they were first published.

Indifference would indeed be corrupting to the fiction writer, indifference to any part of man’s plight. Passion is the chief ingredient of good fiction. It flames right out of sympathy for the human condition and goes into all great writing. (And of course passion and the temper are different things; writing in the heat of passion can be done with extremely good temper.) But to distort a work of passion for the sake of a cause is to cheat, and the end, far from justifying the means, is fairly sure to be lost with it. Then the novel will have been not the work of imagination, at once passionate and objective, made by a man struggling in solitude with something of his own to say, but a piece of catering.

To cater is not to love and not serve well either. We do need to bring to our writing, over and over again, all the abundance we possess. To be able, to be ready, to enter into the minds and hearts of our own people, all of them, to comprehend them (us) and then to make characters and plots in stories that in honest and with honesty reveal them (ourselves) to us, in whatever situation we live through in our own times; this is the continuing job and it’s no harder now than it ever was, I suppose. Every writer, like everybody else, thinks he’s living through the crisis of the ages. To write honestly and with all our powers is the least we can do, and the most.

Time, though it can make happenings and trappings out of date, cannot do much to change the realities apprehended by the imagination. History will change in Mississippi, and the hope is that it will change in a beneficial direction and with a merciful speed, and above all bring insight, understanding. But when William Faulkner’s novels come to be pictures of a society that is no more, they will still be good and still be authentic because of what went into them from the man himself. Mankind still tries the same things and suffers the same falls, climbs up to try again; and novels are as true at one time as at another. Love and hate, hope and despair, justice and injustice, compassion and prejudice, truth-telling and lying work in all men; their story can be told in whatever skin they are wearing and in whatever year the writer can put them down.

Faulkner is not receding from us. Indeed, his work, though it can’t increase in itself, increases us. His work throws light on the past and on today as it becomes the past—the day in its journey. This being so, it informs the future, too.

What is written in the South from now on is going to be taken into account by Faulkner’s work; I mean the remark literally. Once Faulkner had written, we could never un-know what he told us and showed us. And his work will do the same thing tomorrow. We inherit from him, while we can get fresh and firsthand news of ourselves from his work at any time.

A source of illumination is not dated by what passes along under its ray, is not qualified or disqualified by the nature of the traffic. When the light of Faulkner’s work will be discovering things to us no more, it will be discovering us. Even we shall lie enfolded in perspective one day; what we hoped along with what we did, what we didn’t do, and not only what we were but what we missed being, what others yet to come might date to be. For we are our own crusade. Before we ever write, we are. Instead of our judging Faulkner, he will be revealing us in books to later minds.

About Eudora Welty

The author’s short stories and novels have been critically acclaimed since their first publication in 1941. Collections of her work currently in print include those by Modern Library, Atheneum, and Harcourt, Brace and World. Her next book is to be published by Random House.

Working on writing your novel in this Writer’s Digest University course.

The post Vintage WD: Must the Novelist Crusade? by Amy Jones appeared first on Writer's Digest.

Freelance writers come from all walks of life. Few of us knew as youngsters this is what we’d do for a living.

That means many of us don’t study anything related to writing or business, or even follow a career path that would naturally lead to freelancing. We usually just have to sort of dive in and figure it out.

Writer Gina Horkey pivoted from her work with a family-owned financial firm to freelance writing and virtual assistance in 2014.

She had no formal training or professional experience, but she put up a website, wrote for Huffington Post in the early mornings to build clips and found her first paying client within two months by leaning into her experience in personal finance to quickly carve out a niche.

She made more than $800 in her first month of paid work. She’s since written for big-name financial firms and publishers, including BMOHarris, Discover and GoBankingRates.

Now she teaches others how to launch their own freelance writing or VA business through her well-known “30 Days or Less” courses and her blog, Horkey Handbook.

Through her course 30 Days or Less to Freelance Writing Success (30DOL), Gina promises, “If you give me just 30 days, I’ll give you everything you need to build a high-paying freelance writing business.”

I’ve been freelancing for nearly 10 years, and I wish I’d found this course at the beginning of my career. I recommend it to any writer who wants to quit their day job and quickly find paid writing work.

How to find freelance writing success

Without training or experience, Gina attributes her success to grit. She was unhappy in the job she’d had for 10 years and determined to develop a career she loved as a writer.

Gina recommends goal setting and networking to set a foundation for your new career or side hustle as a freelance writer. But the real driver of your success will be how much work you put in.

Gina got up to write at 4:30 a.m. until she left her day job at the end of 2014. She’s a mother of two, and her new income had to continue to support her kids and husband, who’s a stay-at-home dad.

Your goals might be different — maybe you define success as a side hustle, extra income that pays off your debt or a hobby that lets you share your talent and explore your creativity.

Whatever success means to you, you have to commit to doing the work to get there. 30DOL is a great introduction to how that work might look and where to start.

Who should be a freelance writer?

As Gina’s story illustrates, anyone can become a freelance writer. The work doesn’t require formal training, and you can start small to build experience that will help you get better clients and make more money.

You should, at least, enjoy writing. There’s no sense in being self-employed at something you don’t enjoy — finding clients and managing your finances are unnecessary work if you’d be just as happy working for someone else.

Freelancing is for people who want to carve their own path. Gina left behind her full-time job because she was unhappy there, and she chose freelance writing because she wanted flexibility and autonomy. She developed her writing skills along the way.

As long as you enjoy it, writing is a learnable skill. Tons of writing websites, communities and courses exist to help you hone the craft, so don’t be intimidated if you’re not a star writer (yet). You can learn with practice and experience.

30 Days or Less to Freelance Writing Success: Course details

30DOL is an all-online course that covers the basics of becoming a freelance writer: what kind of writing you can do, how to find clients, how to pitch, business basics, building a website and self-promotion.

It includes 12 text-based modules and a 90-day pitch challenge. Course participants can also purchase a membership to an exclusive Facebook group for leads and support.

Text-based modules that cover the basics of freelance writing

The text-based modules cover:

• Laying the foundation: Set goals for your freelance business and build a support network of friends, family and colleagues.

• Types of online writing: Learn the industries, mediums, formats and topics you can specialize in, plus what kind of writing pays best.

• Where to find paid work: Research your target audience or clients, tap into your existing knowledge and find work through job boards and other sites.

• Get your pitch on: Learn what makes a good pitch, how to keep track of your pitches and how to get started with a 90-day pitch challenge.

• Establishing your business: Keep track of your finances, decide whether to create an official business, set your rates, create invoices and contracts, write your bio and polish your LinkedIn profile.

• Building your writer’s website: Learn what your website needs (and why you need one).

• Web hosting and WordPress tutorial: Learn the nitty gritty of creating a site, including registering a domain, setting up hosting and how to navigate WordPress. This module also includes video tutorials to show you how to set up pages and other functions in WordPress.

• Promoting your new business: Build your brand on social media and email, and protect yourself as your profile grows online.

• Honing your writing skills: Get tips for coming up with ideas, formatting for the web, using images, conducting research, interviewing sources; and writing for various markets, including content marketing, copywriting, SEO writing and B2B writing.

• Helpful tools: Get an overview of the Google suite, tools and courses to help you write better, and tools to streamline your pitches.

Each module includes several lessons, a checklist of action items to apply the lesson to your work and a quiz to help you evaluate what you’ve learned.

Each lesson ends with an action step or several, which I love. They’re filled with useful resources, including Gina’s own worksheets, personalized tools (like the Pitch Tracker) and links to third-party resources.

90-day pitch challenge

The course doesn’t present the challenge as a separate component — it’s just part of the pitching module — but I think it’s a section worth pointing out for its unique value. The 90-Day Pitch Challenge encourages you to send 10 pitches per weekday — 600 total by the end of the challenge.

It sounds like a lot — but that’s the point. Setting the goal to write and send tons of pitches forces you to get into the habit of brainstorming, researching publications and pitching. Plus, you’re bound to get at least a few yeses out of 600!

The challenge includes a free Pitch Tracker spreadsheet so you can track where and what you’ve pitched, contact information and responses.

This challenge is a good example of how 30DOL drives participants to action. You get a framework for action and the tools you need to succeed — you just have to commit to the work.

Optional add-on: Facebook group for leads and support

30DOL course participants have the option to purchase a $33-per-month membership subscription to the exclusive VA Leads Facebook group, where you can network with other freelancers, get support from Gina and her team and take advantage of shared client leads.

The benefit of the additional price tag is the group is pretty small for an online community — fewer than 500 members when I checked. And you know everyone there is serious about making their freelance business work. That makes for focused and valuable discussion, and the intimate size gives you better access to career and course support.

The membership also includes a free Flywheel WordPress hosting account, usually $15 to $30 per month.

Pros and cons of 30 Days or Less to Freelance Writing Success

My favorite aspect of 30 Days or Less to Freelance Writing Success is its focus on actionable advice. Every lesson includes explicit action steps, so you know how to apply what you’ve learned to building your freelance business.

Most importantly, the advice in the course is sound. Gina shares action steps and exercises she used to find success as a writer, and I’ve had success with many of the same tactics throughout my career. It’s safe to say you’ll find freelance writing work by following the steps recommended in the course.

I also like that the lessons are text-based, because it keeps the course simple and accessible. You can read them on any device. The course platform is easy to use on desktop or mobile, so it’s easy to bounce around among modules and mark them as completed when you want to.

The biggest drawback to the course is it’s a lot of information to absorb as a new freelancer. It’s everything you need to know to run a freelance business and make it your main source of income. You could become overwhelmed if you try to tackle it all as you start freelancing, especially if you’re writing on the side of a full-time job.

But the course is a trove of information and resources you’ll find valuable throughout your career. Once you sign up, you’ll have lifetime access to the course, so you could take it slow and revisit things like building your website and promoting your business when you’re further along.

How much does 30 Days or Less to Freelance Writing Success cost?

The course costs either a one-time payment of $297 or four monthly installments of $89 ($356 total). Registration gets you instant, lifetime access to all course modules and materials.

Access to the VA Leads Facebook group (which includes free WordPress hosting) costs an additional $33 per month, and you can make your first payment when you register for the course.

Is Gina Horkey legit?

In a nutshell, yes! Gina Horkey is absolutely legit. She has shared her advice with The Write Life readers before, and we’re happy to recommend her course to anyone who wants to kickstart a freelance writing career.

Gina has been working as a freelance writer, covering personal finance, freelancing and entrepreneurship, since 2014. Throughout the course, she’s transparent about her finances, sharing her early income wins and goals.

She’s built a strong network around Horkey Handbook courses and resources, and her readers and students share glowing online reviews.

If you’re not sure whether you’re ready to dive in, check out Gina’s article on becoming a freelance writer, including some worksheets to boost your writing business, to see what she has to offer.

Bottom line of our 30 Days or Less to Freelance Writing Success review: Gina Horkey knows what it takes to launch a freelancing career from scratch, and she laid out the blueprint in 30DOL. 

Following the action steps in the course will almost certainly get you freelance writing work. The course might be a bit too comprehensive for side hustlers, but it’s well worth it if you’re ready to make writing your full-time job.

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For the duration of the coronavirus crisis, Granta Books is running special offers on themed selections of our ebooks to make them as accessible as possible. Each week we’ll announce a new theme, and five titles which you can purchase for no more than 99p. This week’s theme is American Fiction.

Leaving the Atocha Station
Ben Lerner

Adam Gordon is a brilliant, if highly unreliable, young American poet on a prestigious fellowship in Madrid, struggling to establish his sense of self and his attitude towards art. Buy from Apple Books or on Kindle.

Dept. of Speculation
Jenny Offill

Written with the dazzling lucidity of poetry, Dept. of Speculation navigates the jagged edges of a modern marriage to tell a story that is darkly funny, surprising and wise. Buy from Apple Books or on Kindle.

Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? 
Kathleen Collins

Written in the late 1960s and early 1970s but overlooked in Kathleen Collins’s lifetime, these stories mark the debut of a masterful writer whose electrifying voice was almost lost to history. Buy from Apple Books or on Kindle.

We the Animals
Justin Torres

From the intense familial unity felt by a child to the profound alienation he endures as he begins to forge his own way in the world, this beautiful novel reinvents the coming-of-age story in a way that is sly and incredibly powerful. Buy from Apple Books or on Kindle.

This Book Will Save Your Life
A. M. Homes

Richard is a modern-day everyman, a middle-aged divorcee trading stocks out of his home in Los Angeles who needs no one. His life has slowed almost to a standstill until two incidents conspire to hurl him back into the world. Buy from Apple Books or on Kindle.

The post 99p Ebooks for Lockdown Reading appeared first on Granta.

Kathryn Scanlan and Kate Zambreno discuss life in quarantine, and the works of art that make time feel as strange and deconstructed as it is now.

 

Kathryn Scanlan:

It’s been rainy all week, cool and windy and purple out. I walk every day but now, suddenly, there are three or four times as many people walking at any given hour, so I’ve been finding different routes. Everything is blooming and the air smells strongly of flowers, even inside my apartment. Hummingbirds are militantly at work. On Tuesday I cut my finger when a glass jar of frozen curry I was trying to coax into a pan broke in my hand. The cuts seemed deep and continued to bleed hours later, but they’re almost healed now. On Wednesday I cut the same finger with a large knife, chopping collards – a shallow split halfway through the nail. I’ve been batch cooking, freezing the extra. On Thursday I simmered a chicken, argued with my husband. Reading Natalia Ginzburg, The Little Virtues, Moyra Davey, Index Cards, Thomas Bernhard, but also randomly picking up books from the scattered stacks on my desk and reading a line, a paragraph, a chapter, a story – then setting them back down. Texted with my mother. She told me she’s had this quote next to her laptop since last summer: ‘Life is a sinking ship and work is the lifeboat.’ Felt wilder and wilder with fear, day after day – crying wildly in my office in the dark – until yesterday, when it culminated in bodily collapse, a relentless rod of pain in the head. This morning I feel quieter, and am writing this to you.

 

Kate Zambreno:

We can’t figure out how long we’ve been mostly inside. We think two weeks, although that feels inexact. It doesn’t help that our clock in the main room has been broken for a day. I keep overlapping all this with the beginnings of daylight saving time. It’s when our three-year-old daughter stopped going to bed at night, and we began letting her, as the day began to lose shape, which feels like a return to her being a newborn, to those early days out of time. John now lays with her for hours, talking to her in the dark, holding her hand through the crib. I usually have been waiting for that time to weep, because most of our efforts have been to keep Leo upbeat and active, even though she is not going to school or seeing her friends except over Zoom, or leaving except for one circumscribed walk around our Brooklyn neighborhood, trying our best to avoid others while not seeming unfriendly. Our streets feel crowded too, especially on the bright springish days, with the flowering magnolia and cherry blossom trees and lilacs coming up. There’s that line from Territory of Light, something like, why is it only our children who are allowed to have breakdowns? I think about that a lot. I’m sitting here cross-legged on the couch, a green wool striped blanket on my lap, and Leo has just come and demanded that she have that blanket, and she pulls it out from me, because she wants her father to play Linus in this new game of Charlie Brown she likes to play. She is almost always Charlie Brown, and sometimes Peppermint Patty, we are usually the minor more passive characters. John is usually Marcie and I am almost always Schroeder, which works well for me, because I can just not talk and hunch over my laptop. This morning we sat on the floor in front of my laptop and watched a dancer in her cramped bedroom admiringly lead a toddler dance class with very few props or space. We wiggled our toes in front of us and jumped like frogs and waved around scarves. At one point the dancer took a small stuffed animal from a shelf and began speaking to it, then looked at the screen and said something like, This is what ten days of quarantine has done for me, I’m now talking to stuffed animals, and I really felt for her.

 

Scanlan:

Thinking about this – as the day began to lose shape, which feels like a return to her being a newborn, to those early days out of time – and how crisis (birth, death, illness, catastrophe) exposes the artifice of time as we’ve constructed it. For the past year I’ve been working from home and thinking a lot about dailiness, creativity, and productivity. When a day is not structured by appointments, meetings, driving to work, taking lunch, driving home, shopping (i.e. capitalism), its soft, loose (wild?) shapelessness becomes apparent. This is a beautiful thing and is probably the medium of writing and the essence of life – but how to reconcile that with ambition, financial pressure, bodily survival? In Drifts, your narrator’s days are sometimes structured (she teaches, attends readings and meetings, travels by train) and sometimes not (summer, when she’s home, working on her novel), but threaded throughout is an interrogation of the day as a unit of measure – its slipperiness – and how something as fluid and ongoing as thought gets concretized into work on a physical page, in a physical book. Drifts as a title is wonderfully evocative in itself and in its reference to the work of other writers. What does drift mean to you?

 

Zambreno:

Some people have contacted me and told me that their life now – not going out except walks around the neighborhood with the dog and recording the animals and neighbors and trees, staying mostly inside, keeping company with others through email, reading and thinking – reminds them of the life of the narrator of the book, which in some ways is still my life. So much of Drifts is enthralled to dailiness and solitude, to even alienation. Speaking of Moyra Davey, I really identify with her gaze, her video work and essays, how her apartment becomes her studio, filled with photographs of others and her books, that she too randomly picks up as you describe, how she thinks of her practice as a flaneur of the apartment, but also the watchfulness of her series of people reading on trains, of trees, etc. Even when I was out working one of my several teaching jobs, traveling on the train, I felt entirely alone, watching, absent of colleagues or conversation except in the classroom. And then there’s the feeling of claustrophobia and often spooky isolation in the second half of the book, where the narrator is pregnant and almost always inside, when not commuting to work, thinking about Vermeer’s women and Chantal Akerman’s solitary figures trapped inside and reading Sentimental Education while continuously eating weird food, which more closely mirrors where I am now. It’s strange how haunted I too now feel by the book, even though I’ve apparently finished it. I am in a later stage of pregnancy again, amidst this more mandatory quarantine, still in the same apartment, still worrying, more than ever, about financial pressure and bodily survival. I realize I didn’t answer your question. I think I was thinking of drifts as a form, and a way to write time, a way to write a narrative that felt like a diary, or the day. In some ways I was thinking about Robert Walser’s feuilletons or Clarice Lispector’s cronicas, a form of smallness that expresses the strangeness and uncanniness of the everyday. I guess I had the title – Drifts – and it was a feeling, a feeling that was about a gaze as well, and a feeling of ghostliness and smallness. And I had to write that feeling somehow. Which brings me to how haunted I have felt lately by your Aug 9—Fog, especially in this new now, this hyperawareness of the isolation and vulnerability of others, especially the elderly, who must now stay more inside than they were before. I am haunted thinking about this found diary of an 86-year-old woman keeping a document of her days, and how you mysteriously rewrite and compress the last years of someone’s life, celebrating the beauty of its ordinariness, or the ordinariness of its beauty. Could you speak more about how you were thinking of a page as a day in this work, about smallness, about the passage of time? What other artists and writers have you been thinking of, who deal with time and dailiness?

 

Scanlan:

In Aug 9—Fog, I wanted a page to become a kind of stage, and I wanted a day to become more than a day. The pages in the book do not correspond to particular days in the original diary: they are undated, and are a very lean sample of the original text’s length and density, and many are combinations of days from different months, different years. My inclination is that reduction, compression, silence, and absence in a text might enable a largeness to expand in the mind of the reader. I think about Moyra Davey’s work often – feel irretrievably imprinted by her – but especially this past year, as I’ve been rereading her writings and looking through the new large volume of her work published by Steidl and her forthcoming Index Cards. I’ve been working on a book about writing and photography which is probably largely informed by her writing and photography, but is also a continuation of Fog in a way – thinking through ideas of the found object, the diary as form, and how photography, like a notebook or diary, is a way to ‘catch’ or ‘net’ the ‘pearls and coral’ we encounter in our daily lives (per Walter Benjamin). Through your books I came to read Hervé Guibert’s Ghost Image. I don’t remember where I heard this, but are you working on a book about Guibert? I’d love to hear about it if so, as well as how photography (and film/video) figure in your thinking, your work. At what point in writing Drifts did you decide to include the grainy, Sebald-esque images inserted throughout the text?

 

Zambreno:

The relationship of writing to photography also intrigues me – part of Drifts thinks through my (amateur) photography practice, and my impulse to take a photograph, the practice and process of that. I don’t remember why I began to put images in the Drifts project. Book of Mutter also had many found images and family photographs, at one point, and by the end was winnowed down to two or three stills. I think so much of Drifts is about a gaze, and how the narrator looks at art, especially photography (an interest in Sarah Charlesworth’s Stills, or Peter Hujar’s photographs of dogs), and so I began to create these collages after looking at these photographs. I was inspired by the mysteriousness of a found photograph as Sebald employs it in the way I cut up the images from the Rilke sections, where it’s unclear the source, a speculative effect I’ve been playing with in other essays. I am working on a small book on Hervé Guibert. It centers around his To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, but also encompasses his photography and his other later writings. It’s not a monograph – maybe it’s more of a possession? Thinking through Guibert’s first-person narratives that he wrote with such speed, his concept of photographic writing that’s closer to a note or a journal. Today I am trying to watch his film La Pudeur ou L’Impudeur (Modesty, or Immodesty) – his documentation of the daily and banal in the last year of his life dying from AIDS that was broadcast on French TV – it strikes me there’s a connection here to all of us in self-quarantine, some of us sick or suffering in different ways, the privacy of that. I think in writing lately I’m also searching after the long take of Chantal Akerman, this series of interiors or rooms. I wanted to ask about your essay on Anne Charlotte Robertson’s diary films, how you feel compelled by her videos. It’s marvelous your ekphrasis of her video works, the lists and objects, in a way that defamiliarizes, it reminds me of the domestic tableaus in your stories, the violence underneath the mundane.

 

Scanlan:

I learned of Robertson’s work recently – it’s not very well known because she wasn’t able to digitize her films during her life and screenings have been rare – and I’ve only seen maybe ten or eleven hours of her forty-plus-hour opus, Five Year Diary, but it’s such a compelling film. There’s something I love about banality and durational work that tests an audience’s endurance and attention span, or forces them to examine their discomfort and expectation of entertainment – I’m thinking also of Chantal Akerman’s films (Jeanne Dielman, News From Home) and David Lynch’s recent Twin Peaks: The Return. Robertson originally modeled her film on the same type of mass-produced diary – ‘the little blank books with locks and keys, that allow only a few lines to each day’s notation’ – used by the elderly woman upon whose writings Aug 9—Fog is based, and they were roughly contemporaneous, too: 1968-1972 are the dates of the diary I adapted, and Robertson began her diary film in 1981. Five Year Diary feels both massive and fleeting, which is what life feels like. It makes me think of Walker Evans declaring that his photography was not ‘documentary’ but ‘documentary style’ – I feel Robertson’s work is not a diary, but diary style: her film has the raw, immediate feel of the unedited everyday, but you quickly realize how shaped it is, how aggressively she played with time. I think that’s something I like to do in my stories, too – aggressively play with time, with cuts and edits, with speeding up or slowing down time, life.

 

Zambreno:

I’ve become increasingly drawn to constraint-based and durational work. I recently wrote the foreword to the Grove reissue of Kathy Acker’s early Black Tarantula works, these zines that came out of collaging pulp texts with her journal, experiments that were inspired by artists such as Bernadette Mayer’s Memory project – that encompasses the entire month of July 1971 through a daily journal and a daily roll of 35mm film (today to cheer myself up I flipped through the Siglio edition of the Memory project that’s coming out in May). I am drawn to works of endurance, both on the part of the artist and on the part of the viewer/reader – like Acker, like Akerman’s early 70s trance films, the date paintings of On Kawara – but also diaristic works that are extremely condensed, but still feel like the shape and texture of a life, even the fragmentation and speed of a day. I like works that make time feel as strange and deconstructed as it does now. I really like that about the sudden quality of your stories. This is what I’m so drawn to with Guibert’s project, the dichotomy between endurance and speed – you have the complete diary project of his The Mausoleum of Lovers, translated by Nathanaël in a beautiful Nightboat Books edition, that Guibert himself edited and wanted to be read like a novel, but then you have the diary-like project of To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life (that Semiotext(e) is reissuing in April), which feels diary-like but is not a diary, in fact Guibert couldn’t look at his diary when writing it. I see Drifts as more of a work that feels diary-like or note-like but isn’t actually transcription, I was interested in the idea of manipulating space and the page to achieve a sense of the passage of time – there were times I wanted it to feel trance-like and other times fast, vertiginous. I’m realizing Aug 9—Fog feels both sped up and slow at the same time. Like a day. Maybe this can also lead to a question about process and writing. Do you write slowly? With speed? How does one of your stories form? Is the formation often in the shaping, that winnowing away?

 

Scanlan:

I write slowly but sometimes I write with speed. I’m able to write more quickly and joyfully when I allow myself periods of sitting in a chair, dazed, not making anything, which can feel difficult or counterintuitive. I tend to be impatient with how long it takes me to make work. When I had a day job outside the house, I’d write stories in my head while driving and on the clock, keeping scraps of notes – that slantwise approach. Likewise when I’m walking, cooking, washing dishes, or reading, a story will suddenly sort itself out. It’s taken me years to write some stories – others I’ve finished in an afternoon. They’re shaped by editing, and often it’s a game of moving sentences and blocks of text like puzzle pieces, from one story to another, or within a single story. Do you do that? What does your editing process look like?

 

Zambreno:

It often helps to have a project that I can work on, but I usually work on it in really slow ways, over many years, going through many layers and processes of refinement. With Drifts I played around with the first section, Sketches of Animals and Landscape, for many years, just moving around these notes – the time in which I was writing it kept on getting away from me, because of course time gets away unless you have absolute freedom and space to write, and I wanted it to feel alive and present, to feel like a body was in a room writing it. With the second section, Vertigo, I had less raw material to work from, so over years I just kept on going through a period of refinement. I want writing to have that immediate and present feeling, not to have it feel too worked over, but I rewrote Drifts for many years. Since I have had the child I have liked taking on more constraint-based work – like the project of the screen tests, as well as the talks that became the appendices – because those I actually write in something like real time, sometimes over a day or a month – a way to force myself to make the space and time – and then just shape and cut down. It’s good to have a piece that can be finished, versus a longer work that feels more unwieldy and the writing of it and finishing of it is the actual problem that you need to figure out first. My last question to you is how do you know when a text is finished? Is there a certain feeling or effect you want to achieve? And are you able to write now, during this mass isolation and unease?

 

Scanlan:

Finished is always just a feeling – and what ‘finished’ means is always changing. I’m usually looking for maximum impact with a minimum of words. Fog finally felt finished when I found the five-act seasonal structure for it. I’m interested in your wish ‘to have that immediate and present feeling, not to have it feel too worked over’ – I think we’re manifesting it in different ways, but I feel I share your desire for a sudden, startling text. These past weeks I’ve felt scattered and fractured, but have written a little, and felt better when I did. And you?

 

Zambreno:

Just writing in a journal when I can. Reading and thinking about the Guibert when I can and taking notes. Yeah, I feel better when I do as well, like a space for solitude where I can pulsate and think and also write down the flowering trees I see in the neighborhood, the sounds of the birds, all of the strange tableaus my child has created around the apartment.
 
 

Kate Zambreno’s new novel Drifts is available for pre-order, and is forthcoming from Riverhead Books in May.

Kathryn Scanlan’s new collection The Dominant Animal is also available for pre-order, and is forthcoming from Daunt Books on 23 April.

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