[Women's Day Special] Writing Her Way To Success, Kanchana Banerjee

When you’re a mother to a 15 year old, a freelance writer with 19 years of experience, an entrepreneur, and have to change cities and countries with your husband, life’s not easy. It becomes very difficult to balance one’s personal ambition and home. And many women will be able to relate to this story of Kanchana Banerjee. Today on Women's Day, we chronicle this inspiring story of a woman helping other women.

Kanchana has been a freelance writer for nearly two decades now, and has written for numerous publications & companies. But, the strong urge to start up spawned from the thought “what next?” The ubiquitous entrepreneurial air in India gave her an answer to her question and she launched Writeword.

Built around Kanchana’s passion for writing, and assisting women along the way, Writeword is an online platform where Kanchana imparts quality writing skills to women, and helps them take up freelancing as a full-time work-from-home profession. With the prevalence of internet and social media so prevalent the opportunities are galore, and she wants maximum women to leverage this. Kanchana points out that there are many women out there who have completed their studies but are not working because they need to manage their homes. She wishes to open up the world of freelancing and urge them to explore their creative bend with writing.

All the courses are online, and the lessons are emailed one at a time. Each lesson is about one particular aspect of writing. All lessons are written by Kanchana, and every lesson has an assignment, which the student completes and emails back to her. She reviews and gives feedback to the students. She feels writing can be easily mastered with adequate practice under guidance.

The 3 basic courses on offer are:

• WRITE WOMAN – a beginner’s guide to freelance writing
• WRITE AWAY – an advanced writing course
• WRITE SMART – a business writing course

Writeword began in Feb 2012, and has about 40 women currently enrolled. Many of these women have finished the course and some of them have begun writing for various online magazines, websites and publications. “One of my students, a very talented and spirited woman is also working as a retainer writer with an ad agency,” says Kanchana.

She also stresses on the fact that although she’s not a part of an employment agency, neither does she own a newspaper or a magazine, she tries her best to get the promising students connected with publications and websites, where she has worked before starting up. Recently one of her student worked on an assignment for M&C Saatchi digital, an advertising agency.

Kanchana does not feel different from the other entrepreneurs just because she is a woman. Instead, she says that during her initial days, like any other entrepreneur, she also had to struggle a lot in order to convince the early students. Many women were skeptical whether she would actually be able to help them. What if they lost their money? But, thankfully, they believed in her, and signed up for her course. She feels grateful to her initial students who trusted her, and later became her evangelists, and spread the word about Kanchana’s workshops to other women.

YourStory wishes its readers, Happy Women’s Day!