You’re retired and want to start a writing career. What’s the best way to prepare?

Being retired one has access to various experiences. To start a writing career it can be better to start with your own life story. No one knows you better than yourself and considering every individual as an unique person, the writing can come out to be an original one.

Consider the message you want to share and the intended audience. That will help you narrow down the genre and format needed. By all means, connect with a writing group. Groups are a great way to learn, get some feedback and the accountability to set and keep your writing goals.

You prepare for a career by being educated in its traditions, learning its vocabulary, connecting with the knowledgeable, and overcoming failure, rejection, jealousy, and theft daily. In writing, you will experience every obstacle to success. It is the same in medicine, law, engineering, teaching, etcetera. Perseverance is critical in all endeavors.

One of the great things about the internet and social media is that you have direct access to readers, rather than having to find a publisher for long form content. And since you are writing short posts (LinkedIn limits to 1300 characters) you can write frequently in bite size chunks and get immediate feedback (likes, comments, reposts). When I was in #pretirement, I wrote an article and took several days to revise it, and asked friends for feedback. I got like 14,000 views. The next week I took 30 seconds to write something with no review, and I got twice as many views. The best way to learn the craft, is to do the craft, and use the feedback to course correct. Write early, write often!

Just start writing. In 2021, I set a goal of creating one piece of content a month on Linked In. It was scary at first, but after a few months, I ramped up to every other week and then was posted weekly without even realizing it. By the end of that year, I had discovered my voice and used that to write and publish “Making Flex Work: Defining Success on Your Own Term” (my first best selling book on customizing your work) in August of 2022! If this engineer can do it, anyone can. Go for it!

Having retired has deep connotations for everyone and they can vary culture to culture. I have got three tips for the retired/retiring audience, even if I am only in my 30s! 1. Don't let the rules of today decide your fate as they were different 5 years ago and also 50 years ago. 2. Hope and pray that like Jamil Ahmad, you have a loving partner, friends and family. If it had not been for the wife of the civil servant from Pakistan, the story he wrote 30 years ago would have remained in their trunk and not have won the Man Asian Literary Prize, 2011. 3. Rather than learning writing, which can be a task, a more practical solution is to hire a professional ghostwriter, which is cheaper than working with a coach to get a book out!