career

Life Advice For My Younger, Stupid Self

/ Stuart Danker / 57 Comments
Similar looking man and boy in black clothes

Photo: Moses Vega

What advice would you give your younger self should you have the chance?

Would you bring back an almanac and tell them to bet their way to riches? Or maybe you’d warn them how all those keg stands will result in them—you—having a rock for a liver?

I, for one, would probably tell myself to invest in cryptocurrency, but that’s a fool’s game, isn’t it? Isn’t our personal growth much more important than just having a few extra bucks in life? After all, if money could solve all our problems, we wouldn’t have so many of the rich and famous taking their own lives.

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Bored Of Writing Articles For A Living? Here Are Some Alternative Career Paths

/ Stuart Danker / 30 Comments
Man dressed in coat at a workdesk

Photo: Icons8 Team

Many people dream about quitting their day job so that they can write for a living. But did you know that it’s also possible to write for a living and dream of doing something else?

Maybe career progress isn’t easy to come by (the number of writers versus editor vacancies are pretty lopsided, after all), or maybe you could do without another day of blindly producing another thousand-word article just for the sake of content.

And on top of all that, you might want your cake and eat it too—as in you’re not ready to start over in a totally new career. Well then, why not give the careers below a try?

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How To Defend Your Writing From Your Bosses’ Demands

/ Stuart Danker / 21 Comments
Man yelling with hands grabbing his own hair

Photo: Ryan Snaadt

It doesn’t matter if you’re on a magazine’s payroll or if you’re helping out a friend of a friend with his website copy—as a writer, you’ll need to answer to somebody for your work, more often than not.

The thing is, these relationships do sometimes come with a bit of feedback, and some people are better at giving it than others.

Trust me, it’s no fun reading an e-mail with a list of things you’ve done wrong, even when you put your heart and soul into it. But receiving feedback and amending your work doesn’t need to be a helpless process. You, too, have a say as a writer.

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NON FICTION: This Is Your Life As A Struggling Writer

/ Stuart Danker / 8 Comments

Bunch of people taking notes

Photo: The Climate Reality Project

You wake up, you check your phone. You want to know the latest stats for the article you’d posted yesterday. Two views. No likes on Facebook. One spam comment.

An e-mail comes in. It’s from that fiction competition you joined five months ago. “Thank you for your participation,” it reads. That’s always a bad sign, and a quick scroll through the rest of the message proves it.

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NON FICTION: To The Writer Who Changed My Life

/ Stuart Danker / 5 Comments

Man staring up at skies

Photo: Matese Fields

A stranger changed my life. Someone whose identity I’ve forgotten. I don’t remember the byline, neither do I remember his face in the pictures, but he’d single-handedly set me on a path I didn’t know I would take.

I was a hairdresser, going through the motions every day just to pay the bills. On a particularly quiet day, while I was flipping through all the FHM magazines, I came across this story about an unfit writer’s journey to fighting an amateur boxing match.

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