damn, fine writing

It's Spring and I've just started a writing business. Here I am, pen perched in hand on my 30-minute grocery store lunch break trying to write this. This being a testament of my writing--the explanation of why writing is important to me, why I don't feel confident in this ability, and how instrumental it would be for me, and for my fledgling copywriting business, to change this.

I am a learner. I soak things up, as deep and sodden as a sponge. It is when I feel most alive and truly motivated. And so I've taken to copywriting. It started with a 6-week long business course and a book I had nabbed from a summer nanny job--The Well-Fed Writer by Peter Bowerman. It made sense. I could write. I could write from.home. I just had to be self-assured. That was the part that stopped me in my tracks.

I am really starting on this journey two years after I first picked up that Bowerman book. Aislinn, my copywriter turned electrolysis administering friend, whom I met in that business class, was handing me jobs she was too busy to complete. I was pumping up my writing samples while gaining experience. But the butterflies are still there. I falter when it comes to the fact that my words need to sell. I need to sell them. They need to sell other people and their businesses/products/missions.

And now I'm working on my website. Which is, in fact, highlighting my ability to sell by selling myself to my clients using my talent to sell. Sheesh. I'm feeling overwhelmed and undereducated. Searching the internet for a portal of how to be a successful and winsome copywriter in NO TIME FLAT!, I stumbled on the entry for this contest--winning a spot in the Damn Fine Words writing course. Knowledge of the craft truly can change my life, along with motivation and a challenge. And this course is all of those things.

More than anything, I want to feel confident in my ability as a copywriter. There's a difference between knowing that you can write and quitting your minimum-wage job with health insurance benefits because you know a living can be made of it, or that someone should pay you for it. I want all the facts--the tricks, the warnings, the traps, bell and whistles. So that I can feel strongly that I can successfully market a start-up business. To tell its story in a way that gathers business and translates passion.

Summed up, I want in on the Damn Fine Writing course. I want the adrenaline of learning. Specifically, learning what I am excited about. The thrill of writing with peers. Getting instruction from someone of such clout as James Chartrand of Men with Pens. For homework assignments and deep-thought exercises about working in the field to ferret out my insecurities. I want to feel confident enough that I could cold call anyone and ask them if they need my copywriting services--because I'm that good. 


p.s. Thanks for reuniting me with my blog, and igniting the spark that got me here.