Today’s guest post was written by Howard McEwen, author of The Pure Investor and Wrath.

Jen asked me to write a piece on making a comfortable living as a writer.

I thought, How should I know? My writing doesn’t make my living comfortable. But it does cover my mortgage most months. And that’s something. So here’s how I did it.

I wrote.

Simple, yeah. But that was the first step. Let me elaborate.

I wrote fiction in my teens and twenties. I knew I had writing chops but was unwilling to toss myself into the life of a poverty-stricken author or work in academia. So I became an investment advisor. In the early 2000s after years of dormancy, I dusted off those little used writing skills and wrote The Pure Investor. I self-published it and gave it to my clients and prospective clients. It wasn’t fiction, my first love, but it was writing. Some folks read it. Most folks ignored it. One who didn’t ignore it was a newspaper editor.

A few months after I published The Pure Investor a new weekly newspaper started up in my area. I thought, they’re going to need a financial columnist, right? So I sent the editor a copy of my investment book with a nice cover letter. A week later I called him and he agreed to a meeting. He has no interest in a financial column but he did tell me I could write well and asked, Would you mind writing a story for us? It doesn’t pay much. One hundred dollars for 600 words. It was a profile of a local, historic family jeweler who I’m sure they were trying to land as an advertiser. I said sure. I did an OK job and he asked me to do a few more. Then I was doing a story for every edition. I even won some kind of state-wide journalism award.

The key thing to note is it all began with this fact: I wrote.

I wrote The Pure Investor. When people have asked me how I got these jobs they seem gung-ho until I tell them they simply have to write something that shows they can string words together in a competent manner. So often they remind me of the 22 year old college grad who things he should be running the place he was just hired into.

You also have to network.

One of the subjects that weekly newspaper gave me to cover was a local tournament at a karate studio. I interviewed the studio owner and discovered he was a retired photo editor for The Cincinnati Enquirer. During our talk he asked why I hadn’t written for the Enquirer to which I answered, ‘I dunno. ‘Cause they never asked me’. He gave me a name and I called the name and that name asked me to send her some samples. Months passed by and when a freelancer stiffed her on a story that needed to be done that name dug my name out of a drawer and asked me to do it. I did an OK job and got it to her on time. Then she sent me more jobs. Then other editors at the Enquirer asked me to write for them.

Once I was in at the Enquirer people just assumed I knew what I was doing. A local magazine asked me to write for them. Then another. After some time the first asked me to be the Contributing Financial Editor. Cool, I thought but I had to ask what the heck that meant.

Soon I was paying my mortgage with all these jobs. How I ended up doing that I had no idea. I asked one of my editor who said she liked me for three reasons: I was affordable, on-time, and easy to work with. So I used that as my tag-line.

Now here’s a funny fact: newspapers and magazines don’t pay squat. Corporations pay much better than squat. But corporations won’t let you in the door unless you have a track record and they seem to prize no better track record than writing for peanuts for newspapers. Go figure.

Through some coincidences and a small bit of marketing I landed a few corporate clients. I don’t write as much for the newspapers or magazines now. For one, they’ve cut their budgets to the bone. For another, I’d rather spend that time writing for a corporate clients making ten times as much. You never see your name on a by-line but you do see it in the payable field of a much larger check.

But more and more I started thinking back to my first love. Fiction.

A funny thing. All those articles I’d written about dry subjects with word count and style limits? They made me a much better writer. My prose is sharper and my dialogue is more true. I was able to tell a story better. All those articles also gave me the simple, certain durability to sit down and produce words.

Seventy-thousand words later I had my first novel Wrath – the life and assassination of a United States Governor. I’ve also started a series of novelettes called The Prescott Carmichael Jaunts. They’ve not made me not much dough. Neither has provided me a comfortable living. But all my fiction is better by the living I made writing all those boring articles.

I still write the occasional newspaper and magazine article. I write for a few corporate clients. I do marketing pieces and blog posts. It’s nothing too demanding. But it pays my mortgage and when I see the foreclosure rates in America I’d say that my writing has done me ok.

You can learn more about Howard McEwen and his writing on his facebook page and chat with him on Twitter. Howard also has a website for his freelancing services.