Margaret and I have supported ourselves as freelance journalists since March 1987, when we married and moved to Harare, Zimbabwe. We’ve been frugal, and we’ve been lucky, so we haven’t had to do any writing we didn’t want to do. Just about all our articles and book have been from ideas we generated.

People often ask me what it takes to make a living as a freelancer, and the first answer I usually give is this: The writers who don’t make it are not the ones who are less talented. They’re the ones who don’t work hard enough.

This is a theme to which I’ll return often, but today, let me impart one piece of sage advice: Avoid avoidance.

It happens all the time; a reporting roadblock looms. Here’s an example from real life: For my New Yorker piece “Jake Leg,”  I needed to find relatives of a man named Max Reisman, who had lived in Boston. According to the on-line phone book I use, five Reismans lived in Boston. I called all of those, and none were the right one. Then I looked in metro Boston, and there were twenty-seven.

I really, really didn’t want to call twenty-seven numbers, so I put it off. The looming task nagged at me. It distracted me. It made me unhappy in a vague, unsettling way. I spent valuable time looking for reasons not to make all those calls and dreaming up shortcuts. The monstrousness of the task eventually ground me to a halt. I was stuck.

And then, like one of those cartoons where a light bulb appears above the character’s head, I simply picked up the phone and started making the calls. Once I started, it wasn’t nearly so bad. The whole thing took an hour. There’d been nothing to it. Once I gave up the quest for a way to avoid the task, actually doing it was a snap. Not only that, it made all the other reporting for the story go more smoothly because I didn’t have this great, onerous, guilt-producing ordeal hanging over me.

The point here is that, especially in a deadline-centric business like ours, delay is deadly. We all know what it’s like to have an unpleasant task ahead of us -- calling an editor we know is unhappy with a story, calling a source who’s bound to be unpleasant, grinding through a long list of fruitless phone calls, reading a stultifying report. We dither. We try to fool ourselves into thinking it won’t be necessary, or that there is a less painful substitute. In so doing, we risk our whole project losing its momentum.

When I say that many freelancer fail because they don’t work hard enough, this is one aspect. Have an unpleasant task standing in you way? Go right at it. You may find, as I frequently have, that the mere act of accepting that it has to be done makes not only it, but everything else, easier.