“Writing isn’t like getting to the Olympics, where you need hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of training and influence to get there. Anybody who has a piece of paper and a pen can write,” says Veronica Chambers, a freelance writer and the author of ten books, including The Joy of Doing Things Badly. “It’s you and your work, and everyone is wrestling with the same blank page.”

Writing is one of the few professions that women have worked in for hundreds of years, from Anne Bradstreet, America’s first published female poet, to Margaret Fuller, the first female newspaper correspondent.

Writers can find jobs in many fields, from writing medical textbooks to advertising copy. But according to the United States Department of Labor, the two most popular fields of writing—and therefore the most competitive—are book authoring and writing for magazines, newspapers and websites.