freelancing Archives - Page 2 of 2

How The Movie Nerve Can Inspire You To Lead A More Exciting Life

Posted on November 5, 2016 Written by Pinar Tarhan

Nerve movie poster — Image via Collider.

Sometimes, you just feel stuck. Whether it’s being stuck in your comfort zone because of elements out of your control or failing to take risks due to practical reasons, it’s a horrible feeling. You don’t want your life to be any less exciting the movie characters’ you’re watching, though you (probably) want slightly less danger.

The fun drama thriller Nerve (2016) dares its characters to take crazy risks you’d probably never do.

A bit on Nerve starring Dave Franco and Emma Roberts

Vee (Emma Roberts) is a high school senior, a talented photographer and unwilling to take risks. She’s delayed telling her mother (Juliette Lewis) she was accepted to CalArt, partly because they’re both still recovering from the death of her older brother.

But when her popular and overtly extroverted best friend Sydney inadvertently embarrasses her to her crush, Vee decides to play Nerve, a popular interactive game where watchers pay to dare players to do all sort of things, from relatively harmless to potentially lethal. Her first dare has her kissing a stranger (Dave Franco) for 5 seconds. That cute stranger, Ian, turns out to be a Nerve player as well, and watchers love them together.

As they start taking challenges together, their attraction grows more intense. But is Ian really a great catch that’s genuinely into Vee, or does he have ulterior motives like Vee’s other best friend Tommy thinks?

Nerve is a fun ride that entertains more than makes you think

Don’t get me wrong. I loved Nerve. And it did make me think. But there is so much compelling social commentary that can be done with a PG-13 rating. And it is okay. If you want to think and get depressed about what people and technology have come to, you can always watch any Black Mirror episode. So far, I’ve watched the first season (the first 3 episodes), and I plan to skip season 2 altogether.

Nerve isn’t a depressing movie. It’s also strangely romantic, and if you take away the right lessons, it will inspire you to have a life that will give you plenty to write about.

Why This Writer Is Feeling Stuck

Now as writers, our lives are rarely devoid of drama. A lot of us are prone to mood swings even if we are not combating a mental condition. The potential economic instability (known as the feast or famine cycle) of freelancing, the hatred of our day job if we are not freelancing, the obligation to multitask and the feeling that we’re not doing enough for our careers, health problems like chronic illnesses, writing disabilities or just annoyingly weak immune systems that give us long-lasting colds every two weeks… How can we not be emotional?

How can we not get frustrated?

We all have obstacles that get in our way, some of them harder than others. And even though we know better, sometimes we say stuff like “I wish something would happen in my life already.”

Like you already haven’t endured disappointment, heartbreak, depression, illnesses, failures, rejections, grief, …. on the negative side.

Or you haven’t already experienced tremendous lust for life, exciting crushes, a thousand travel stories, unique adventures and occurrences on the positive.

Sometimes you just hit a rut. And whatever the reason, the rut feels like it has been there forever when it wasn’t just last week, or month or year.

So you start comparing yourself to the narrators of your favorite personal essays, characters from the movies and novels and TV series and maybe sometimes even your friends.

Let’s face it; you’re not in Amsterdam taking beautiful shot after beautiful shot. You’re struggling to cobble of two words or ideas together. You haven’t sold a piece in what feels like forever whereas your blogger friends seem to be at the height of their productivity and success. Their lives are filled with excitement and surprise and spontaneity.

Yours feels just…the same.

Because you forgot about that two beautiful vacations you took in the summer or the awesome musical you just saw last week. Instead of feeling like you can take over the world, you feel like the world has taken over you.

But then you stumble upon a piece of writing that speaks to you. You watch a film that motivates you. The film was Nerve.

For me, that piece of writing was my friend Olga Mecking’s blog post WHY THE BEST STORIES ARE THE WORST where she reminds us how great characters, characters we want to read about, are always in big trouble. And the great storytellers have compelling real life material they derive from.

Sure, you are looking forward to the new war thriller Allied starring Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard, but there’s no way in hell you want to be a spy during Word War II. You may want to kiss a hot stranger for five seconds, but you’d never lead him as he sped up to 60 miles an hour on his motorcycle blindfolded.

Then you remember that your friend’s Amsterdam photos are taken on a post-divorce trip. And while you’d want to be aboard, you would not want to be going through a divorce. Or that you’d have never wanted to marry the guy she was with. When they were together, their relationship was the stuff of nightmares. Not dreams. You feel bad for feeling envious of that trip. You apologize silently and wish her the best of luck.

Sometimes boring is good. It’s better than catastrophe. It gives you time to collect on what’s happened, and what you want to happen. It teaches you to procrastinate less when you are healthy because you have only so much time when things are going your way.

You also remember that while you might be going through a rut, your life hasn’t been boring. You wish you had less drama. But hey, you already suffered an education system that treated you like a racehorse and made medical mistakes to continue the race.

You suffered, but not without getting some trophies and learning your lessons. You were never going to live by somebody else’s rules again as much as you could possibly help it.

That’s why you are freelancing. Because even when it seems like a rut, things are still more exciting than they could ever be if you held a job that went against your very nature.

Even boring is good, when you get to call most of the shots.

Watch Nerve. Read Olga’s post. Dare to do something different. But don’t mistake your temporary rut with other people’s lifelong ones.

Write on! (This post contains an affiliate link.)

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Freelance Writing Tasks You Can Do Without the Internet

Posted on April 11, 2012 Written by Pinar Tarhan

Image via illustrationconcentration.files.wordpress.com

There is no doubt about the fact that 21^st century made a writer’s job a lot easier. Maybe the markets became more competitive, but at least now it is so much easier to contact editors, submit queries without waiting for the post office to do its job or wait for a conference to be able to get the editors to notice you (although this is still a great method for this purpose. It is just that you can’t always attend all the conferences you want to due to time, money or place constraints.)

And there is so much that we need to do on the internet – from billing to sending e-mails, from researching the web to updating our blogs…It is so easy to get worked up when our internet connection fails us. Usually this glitch is temporary, and it doesn’t cause that much of a disaster-given that we’ve saved all our work, and we haven’t left anything to the last minute.

But whether the problem lasts for a minute or a day, and whether you experience it in your office or at your favorite coffee shop/co-working space, there is no need to lose your temper or patience. There’s so much you can do in the name of productivity and creativity while you are offline. From organizing your files to taking a break, from making a list of your goals to brainstorming, you can turn the glitch into a productivity fest.

The original version of this article was published on Freelance Switch and is called Freelance Tasks To Do Without the Internet.

Enjoy your list, and save it somewhere offline for a rainy an offline day. : )

You can leave your comment here or on Freelance Switch.

11 Writing Job Requirements That Are Against Freelance Nature

Posted on April 25, 2011 Written by Pinar Tarhan

freelance picture — Image via teknosarj.com.

This is how wikipedia defines freelancing:

“A freelancer, freelance worker, or freelance is somebody who is self-employed and is not committed to a particular employer long term.”

Pay attention to the “free” in the word freelancing. Freelancing is -by definition- different than a regular desk/office job. You don’t have one boss, you don’t have set working hours. You don’t typically make the same income every month.

Unfortuntely, economy is almost always tough, and many employers in the marketplace have some unreasonable demands, or just demands that resemble more of the demands of a controlling office boss.

Below are some of these unreasonable, un-freelance-like demands that I run into often:

1. Hourly pays

Some employers want to pay you hourly. While it can make sense for some writers, most freelancers like to freelance because of the freedom.

Some jobs can take you 30 minutes and some can take 4 hours. When you are expected to bill in, your performance and motivation can dramatically decrease.

Of course if you manage to snatch a writing job that pays $500/hour, by all means please take it. I know I would.

But jobs that pay $10/hour? Thanks, but no, thanks.

2. Webcam on desktop turned on

There are freelance job sites (such as odesk) and employers who request that they can see you working. It is a very odd demand, as even your ex office boss didn’t probably have a chance to watch you directly, unless you worked in a very small office.

How can you concentrate or feel liberated when you know someone can observe you anytime? Yikes.

3. Bidding

There are many bidding job sites, such as Elance, Guru, oDesk and more.

The concept on these sites is that an employer gives you his budget and you estimate how much your time should be worth. Then you make a bid at a common denominator.

But of course the employer will be likely to choose the writer that charges less, given that the credentials are equal. This doesn’t work in the favor of the writer as the cheapest most qualified writer tends to get the job. The only benefits here is obtained by the employer.

And since most projects don’t really involve impressive budgets, these bidding sites decrease the amount of money the writer is going to make.

4. No-pay jobs and Internships

The idea behind applying to a job is to make money. Some job posters do not disclose how much they are offering. And you quickly find out that this is mostly because they don’t intend to pay at all. Under the name of internship, recognition and work-experience, you are supposed to work for free. But who is going to pay for the bills?

5. Very low pay

Some businesses ask you to turn in about 10-20 articles a week. This is doable, unless you are expected to get $5 or less for each article. Then why would you do it? You could write whatever you wanted for user-generated content sites, and maybe earn even a little more, without being obliged to write about something you don’t have control over.

I am not defending content mills blindly, but I am really opposed to taking $5/article jobs. The lowest I ever went for was $10/500 words -on a topic I could write my eyes closed. Let me put it this way: I used to talk about these topics (my favorite bands) all the time when I was in high school. No one paid me then.

If an article is going to take you a lot of time, and it is not on a subject you’d write about even for free, even $20/500 words is low.

6. Low pay, but maximum quality requirements

Some companies do offer to pay you $1-5 per article, and moreover, they demand the quality of a $50-100 article. Yes, you heard right. This is not any more rational than a guy who demands a loyal wife while he wants to be allowed to sleep with whomever he wants. These are things that should never happen!

If noones takes these jobs, no matter how desperate they are, people won’t post it. If there is no supply, how can there be demand?

7. Only employing people from certain countries

Many employers have some specific location requirements. Of course being from New York would help if you are to write New York-related articles. But if you are going to write about universal topics, such as blog traffic tips, what difference does it make if you are in New Zealand and your employer lives in Japan?

8. Only hiring people of 5 years’ experience

Some jobs go very overboard with their requirements, such as demanding multiple years of experience. While experience is a bonus, not all jobs really require that much experience. Sometimes experience is wanted only for experience’s sake alone.

I mean, if you have 5 years of experience, chances are you are not applying to jobs to get clients. Clients are contacting to hire you.

9. Phone calls and face-to-face interviews

One of the most appealing things about freelancing in the 21st Century is that you can handle anything via an internet connection and a laptop.

However some editors like to treat their freelance writers as they are office-bound, or as if freelancers need to live nearby. While it might be helpful on some occasions, having to meet/see your employers is something you did frequently when you weren’t freelancing.

I’m not opposed to the occasional skype conferencing, but commuting to offices? It wouldn’t work unless you lived close to where the hiring company is located. Remember one of the most attractive things about freelancing versus office jobs: Eliminating commute!!!!

10. Revenue-sharing job ads

Many internet writers take advantage of revenue sharing sites such as Factoidz. I did. I actually still do. It is fun to get paid while I do article marketing and link-building.

However when I am searching for writing gigs, I don’t want to run into ads of a million sites who only pay according to your adsense earnings. There are already many websites that work in that fashion. If I were satisfied with their paychecks, I’d write for them only. After all, nothing hardly beats the freedom of writing about whatever you want.

11. Job ads of sites already famous for revenue sharing such as Hubpages and Suite 101

It might be a blessing for newbies to find out about as many revenue-sharing sites as they can but for a more seasoned web-writer, it becomes old and boring news. Because chances are you already checked out Hubpages or Suite 101 ages ago and you are either writing for them or you aren’t.

I really don’t want to see their ads on my favorite job-hunting sites!

What writing job requirements do you find against freelance nature? Do you agree with any of these 11 pet peeves of mine? What are yours?