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Defining Freelancing Freelancing can seem like a vague activity and profession, often because people use the singular term to encapsulate any number of writing gigs and careers. Even after I’d been working as a reporter and staff writer for a while, I was still perplexed by freelancing—how people did it, how they got the “in” with a publication, how people made a sustainable income doing it. I had stringers writing for me when I was a weekly newspaper editor, but they were working for beans, and they’d been writing for the paper longer than I’d been there, so I had no clue how they found their way into my pages in the first place. I accepted their magical presence but never took the time to find out how they actually got their feet in the door. (Perhaps I was preoccupied by panic attacks and acid reflux spawning from my eight-feature-stories-a-week quota.) Simply put (and obviously put), freelancing is when you, as a nonemployee of a company, write something for someone else’s publication.1 But it gets more complex, especially on the giving-advice side, when you take into account the degree to which one freelances or wants to freelance. Before we go any further, let’s break down the different breeds of freelance writers so you can begin to form a picture of where you want to fall on the spectrum and what you want to accomplish. The Part-Time Magazine Freelancer This is the category I fall into (and, to be honest, the one in which I’ve always felt most comfortable). Part-timers cover an amazingly (and often absurdly) diverse swath of day jobs and after-hours writing pursuits. I know writers who teach English classes during the day and write for video game blogs at night. I know writers who run fitness companies nine to five and pen literary criticism in their spare hours. In my day job, I’m the editor of Print, a highbrow newsstand magazine about the intersections of graphic design and visual culture. By night, I’m often writing about dinosaurs and other wonders for National Geographic Kids. (The two jobs occupy opposite ends of the spectrum but are equally thrilling.) You can be a garbage truck driver and a freelancer. A college student and a freelancer. A lawyer and a freelancer. A lumberjack and a freelancer.