What’s so great about their course?

What’s so great about their course? Has it brought you extra work?

That’s what someone posted on Facebook this week in response to one of our students recommending Cracking Pitches, our online course in how to land more freelance writing work and keep editors happy. 

In my head, I high-fived that person. Because her question – has it brought you extra work – gets right to the heart of why we created Muse Flash, and why we’re still running courses five years on. 

Our goal – nay our dream, because there’s a touch of wonderment to the fact that we get to do something this fun and still call it work – is to help freelance writers achieve satisfying, sustainable careers doing what they love.

Why? What motivates us? Two things. One; we’ve never quite got over how bloody brilliant it is to pay the bills with our words and work for ourselves. Having established working lives that mean we never have that dreaded Sunday night sinking feeling – even after more than a decade of doing this – we can’t help but want to share that with other people, especially folks who find themselves wondering if writing for a living is a pipe-dream. ‘It’s not!’, we want to shout from the rooftops. (But that’s not very practical or profitable, so we settled on running an online course instead…)

Two; we’re still a bit cheesed off at all the people we who told us that no-one makes a living as a freelance writer anymore. Print is dead, rates are appalling, no-one pays on time. Blah blah blah. True, perhaps, but none of that means journalists are extinct; it just means we need to adapt our skills to fit all the new emerging opportunities to get paid to write. (More on our diversification course coming soon… drop us an email if you’d like to know more.) 

Look, we’ve got more than 20 years’ combined experience as freelance journalists and we’ve never yet had a month where we couldn’t pay the mortgage. We take holidays, run cars (albeit old bangers) and buy expensive oat milk lattes on a regular basis. We’re not ‘rich’ by any means but we truly think we’ve got the best jobs in the world. No boring bits we dread (except maybe tax returns), no horrible bosses whose unreasonable ways must be tolerated at all costs, and no crappy office politics to endure. No soul-sapping commute. We can work in our pyjamas or from our beds. We take days off at the drop of a hat, we spend time with our kids or family members when they need us without answering to anyone, and we have long baths at midday whenever the mood takes us. (Which is often.) We get to speak to wildly fascinating people week in and week out; we’ve amassed some fabulous freebies in the course of doing our jobs; and we’ve been sent on epic travel assignments from shopping in Italy (driven everywhere by Porsche) to sailing around Barcelona on the world’s biggest cruise ship.

In other words, we LOVE OUR JOBS, and we know what a huge freaking privilege that is these days.

So yes, we’re a bit annoyed that so many people poo-poo this profession and seemingly try to put other people off it. Having found career happiness – nirvana, even – we’re determined to share what we’ve learned with anyone else who really just wants to get paid to write, but who fears starving in the process.

So to come back to that question – has their course brought you extra work? We couldn’t live with ourselves if it didn’t. What would be the point of running an online course that didn’t help you actually get more writing gigs or break into better paying markets? We’re not interested in profiting off the back of other people’s unfulfilled dreams. We’re interested in seeing people break through their limitations, self-imposed or otherwise, to achieve a freelance writing career that puts food on the table and a song in your heart. Or something.

In the early days of running our courses, our greatest hope was that our students might land new writing gigs off the back of our advice. That was never the be-all and end-all of the course – it’s as much about boosting your confidence and changing the way you think about pitching so that fear of rejection stops holding you back. But these days, after five years of honing the content and delving more deeply into our own patchy pitching pasts, it’s pretty much the norm for students to earn back their course fee before we part company. Honestly, the buzz that gives us is indescribable. When it happens, it validates everything for us. 

So if you’re wondering if Cracking Pitches is really all it’s cracked up to be, the answer is yes. But don’t take our word for it. Here’s how our student answered that question:

“I did this course as a refresher a few years ago and it was what I needed to get my mojo back. I still find it useful today and often go over my course notes just to keep myself on track. I think if you are starting out or if, like me, you’ve lost confidence in yourself, the help and support within the course are excellent. For health reasons I am on a break from pitching (and have been for over a year now - I do actually miss it) but I enjoyed this course so much I thought I would share. And, of course, Hazel and Heidi and simply the best.”

And then, before we’d even really recovered from that lovely little praise fest, someone posted this in our secret Facebook group that’s exclusively for Muse Flash students:

‘Sorry to do this but you guys are the only ones who will get it. I JUST GOT A COMMISSION FROM A MAGAZINE I HAVE WANTED TO WRITE FOR FOR AGES. Remember all those years ago when I did the course and I told you I wanted to write for them? Yessssss!’

I dug back through her emails and she’s right. When she did our course she told us what she really wanted to do was be a food writer. She’d convinced herself, prior to the course, that this was too lofty an ambition.

“Until I read your notes and the section about narrowing your focus,” she wrote to us at the time. “Then it occurred to me that I should stop trying to be a jack-of-all-trades and focus on what I really want to do, and that was reinforced in your homework exercise, because when I went into the newsagent to pick some titles, as instructed, the ones I walked out with were all food mags. For the most part, it's become clear to me that I want to specialise in food writing and get better at it, even though it's competitive.”

One of the titles she picked up that very day as part of her homework for us is the mag that commissioned her this week. Granted, it’s taken years to get to this point but has she starved in the process? Nope. Is she glad she stuck at it and pursued the dream that she’d once written off as too lofty? Hell, yes.

What’s so great about our course? THAT.