Free PDF Writing Guides

Here are a few of my older writing guides, free for download below. And yes, though they are older, they are not doddering—there’s plenty of good info in all. Just click on the image to download the PDF.

Tips, Tricks and Tribulations of the Freelancing Life

Here’s a collection of essays (some a few years old but still relevant) on many topics of the freelancing life: getting started freelancing, writing tips, how to find stories, pitching stories, working with editors, getting paid, marketing, what to do during downtimes and much more. Sixty pages of good stuff, no fluff.

The Write Word Easy Editing and Spiffy Style Guide
Whether you’re a copywriter who can’t afford to hire an editor, an in-house copyeditor honing your chops, or someone who wants to add fresh air to their writing efforts—while ensuring that no sentences have flat tires—The Write Word’s Easy Editing and Spiffy Style Guide is for you.

The 55-Page Ebook Contains:

• Best Practices in Editing—Learn how editing is critical to effective communication
• Editing Tools—How to use all editing tools to maximum effect
• Types of and Approaches to Editing—Harness the power of every editing stage
• Proofreading Methods and Examples—Don’t let typos tangle your efforts
• Editing Checklists—Perfect your documents, step-by-step
• Editing Resources—In-context URLs providing expanded editing knowledge
• Style Guide Covering Numbers, Possessives, Semicolons and More!
• A Pocketful of General Usage Tips

The other is Creative or Commercial, which addresses the thought that business writing needn’t be—or can’t be—creative. Perish the thought, which is what this guide does.

The last, Flexible Body, Flexible Pen, is a guide to how to get the cranky out of your back, your eyes, your mind and everywhere, after you’ve been staring at your screen for too long. And how to continue to keep it out.

All the guides do have some amusement sprinkled throughout, so I hope you’re amused.

Creative Writing? Or Commercial Writing? Must You Choose?
In line with those age-old questions, like wheat or rye, Cary Grant or George Clooney, whiskey or some miserable hooch without a backbone, we present Creative or Commercial. It relieves you of the misery of trying to decide whether to imbue your writing with the heavenly (but lonely) hum of creativity, or to sell the damn stuff like lunchtime sandwiches.

Blessings of blessings, you don’t have to do one or the other: even your crass commercial writing can be outfitted with the gossamer wings of creativity, and you can flit and flutter your way to the bank. (By the way, the answer to that last age-old question is whiskey.)

Writers: How to Keep Your Body Fit and Your Pockets Full
As writers, we are used to stopping purse-snatchers with a well-placed karate chop, making a 10,000-foot vertical drop on a snowboard or rearranging Donald Trump’s hair weave into a reasonable representation of the Chrysler Building.

Flexible Minds Need Flexible Bodies
Oh, wait—did I say as writers? No, I meant as dreamers. As writers, we sit at desks all day, typing, grimacing and wondering why the New Yorker rejected our expose on the known aliens running Wall Street. So we need a guide on how to sit at that dang computer without our necks and wrists locking up like bank vaults. Thus, this free Writer’s Ergonomics guide, where even if your writing doesn’t stretch, you do.