This is an excerpt of Write Your Way Out of the Rat Race…And Step Into a Career You Love by Linda Formichelli.

You want to be a writer. You know that.

But what you don’t know is what the heck you want to write about.

And there are so many choices it can leave you feeling like a kid confronted with all 100 flavors of Ben and Jerry’s.

I’ll help you figure out the best path to take. And don’t worry: You can develop more than one niche, and if one type of writing doesn’t work out for you, you can choose another. It’s not do or die.

Dream vs. Reality

You dream of writing articles about gardening, or blogging on travel topics for a large audience, or writing case studies for non-profits focused on children. Worthy goals!

I know you don’t want to start out writing on topics you’re not passionate about. But I need to tell you that you’ll have the best luck ramping up your writing business fast if you leverage your job and educational background to start getting samples—and money—coming in. 

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The journey to become a freelance blogger—or proofreader , copywriter, editor, freelance anything really!—can be an overwhelming one.

You know you want to, you just don’t know where the heck to start!

Do you print up business cards? Build a website? Talk to your accountant? Start looking for work immediately… or wait a few months? Ugh!

Writing has been my sole source of income for over 3 years now and even I get a little queasy looking at that. I remember all-too-well what it was like to be a newbie: As exciting and full of opportunity as it was, it was also gut-wrenchingly frightening.

It doesn’t have to be.

When I first took the plunge and went freelance, I kept wishing that there was a map I could look at. Some sort of step-by-step guide. I understood that the journey was my own—and that everyone’s freelance journey is different—but there were some things that everyone experienced, weren’t there? There had to be!

Turns out, I was right.

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