If You Can Write Your Way Out of a Paper Bag, You Can Write Your Way Out of Debt

This is a guest post by Larry Brooks. Larry’s blog is full of fantastic tips for writers and bloggers.

He recently launched a new ebook, “101 Slightly Unpredictable Tips for Novelists and Screenwriters”.

Some people who wake up one day and realize they’re so far in debt their computer doesn’t have enough gigabytes to house their personal balance sheet, find some measure of comfort by sitting down and actually writing about it.

Diaries, journal entries, letters to editors, reciprocal death threats to bill collectors, not to mention the occasional blog or two.

Writing is one of those avocations that either works for you or it doesn’t. Many find it akin to a self-administered colonoscopy. Others find writing to be a form of psychological nirvana, and to them we say, hey, if it feels good, do it.

And much like that particular analogy, you can actually make money at it if you do it even marginally well.

Yes Virginia, you actually can write your way out of debt. That is, if you do it clearly enough to be understood by anyone with a green card or better. Because in this age of online commerce and the emerging phenomenon of outsourcing, people will actually pay you to write for them.

The professional copywriter is dead. Long live the copywriter who works cheap and needs the money.

It’s the ultimate work-at-your-computer home business, and you don’t have to ask your relatives to buy anything. All you have to do is – and this is the oldest piece of literary wisdom on the planet – write what you know.

Here’s how it works. Chances are you’re already familiar with eBay (you know, the place you hocked your gold watch to make that boat payment), one of the most robust and easily navigated resources on the internet for exchanging stuff – anything under the sun – for money. You post your sale item, people bid, a low-bidder emerges victorious, then the site collects the money for you after you deliver the goods.

Easy peasy. They’ll even referee a smackdown in the rare event of a dispute.

Well, the same model now applies to workplace skills, including writing. The world is suddenly full of wannabe internet entrepreneurs fresh out of a “how to” seminar, and they’re all looking for someone to write things for them.

Not only that, small companies and legitimate sole proprietors are jumping in when they, too, need an article, a press release or a resume written on the cheap.

But here’s the rub: you don’t need to be a pro with a portfolio to land these writing gigs. Or these design jobs, programming projects, legal secretarial assignments… virtually anything that used to require a necktie. It’s all now up for bid on the internet, and nobody cares where you went to school.

For the most part they only care about your price and some sense of reliability. And if you can write at all, you can convince them of the latter with a snappy cover letter. In some cases you don’t even need a work sample.

Who gets these gigs? Anybody who knows more than the person posting the job.

Just about everybody knows something about something – marketing, sales, fitness, nutrition, public relations, customer service, computer-speak, real estate, advertising, parenting, marriage, divorce… getting yourself out of debt… whatever. It doesn’t matter whether you were a CEO or a door guard in a prior life, so long as you claim to know.

Or not. If you can use a search engine you can turn yourself into an expert – at least to the extent required – on just about anything. Combine that with your ability to write a coherent sentence, and suddenly you’re a writer for sale.

I know this, I’ve made well over 50 grand doing it – on the side – over the past two years.

The eBay of this vertical niche is Elance.com, but there are many others (to be clear, eBay itself doesn’t engage in the bartering of skills, just the junk in your attic), all of them with the same basic business model. Membership is practically free (in some cases it is free), and the requisite bidding, project delivery and collection process is as easy as checking your bank balance online.

So if you’re in debt – and you are – consider writing your way out of that nasty little box of headaches.

You won’t get rich quickly doing so – for that I recommend taking a swing at a screenplay – but you might be able to write your way out of debt, or at least out of a few overdue payments.