@miawinter@mastoart.social It is near impossible to land jobs writing, like writing copy or manuals or such, especially if you're entry-level, because those things are not valued much anymore, and most of the market seems to have shifted into asking a Lame Lying Machine (LLM) to write it for them. There may be a re-surge of demand for such writers once the majority realize that using the same LLMs as everyone else means you have zero competitive advantage, and thus, a possible shift may happen back to human writers. But for now, I think the only way someone can start as a writer is to skip the middlemen, and directly build an audience for your own persona. Whether you're doing technical writing, or fiction, or scripts, or something else. This is, of course, a very risky approach, because it means you are now an entrepreneur, not just a writer, and you will have to wear two dozen more hats, to be your own editor and marketer and video producer and publisher and logistician. And the time-horizon for such an approach is many years, a decade perhaps, you will have to learn a lot and fail a lot. On the positive side, once you build such a fan-base; people who are interested in your writings because they are interested in /you/, personally, in the way you think, the way you write, and what you uniquely bring to their lives, then you would have a very strong moat, because only you is best at being you, and any later imitators would be just imitators. No one entity has power over your direction, you would have great leverage in any future deals or partnerships, but of course, this doesn't mean you're ultimately free or anything; you would have traded a boss, for tens of thousands of bosses. Such an approach is possible, because we know there are people who manage it, but on the other hand, all bets are hedged against you, and who knows, perhaps landing the near impossible writing job would still be more likely than managing on your own. All we have are intuitions, no concrete probabilities or numbers, so learn your options, and then double down on what you feel intuitively drawn towards, and put your all into it. And don't forget, having a second non-writing job is /okay/, and was necessary for most writers, even many of the most successful. It buys you precious time, until you get your writing career on track.