I am lucky enough to have a career in writing.
It sounds like an aphorism. Like an actor’s false humility while accepting their Nth Academy Award..
But here’s the thing: It really does come down to luck.
“No!” I can hear you saying. “You worked hard! Don’t diminish yourself!”
It’s true. I did work hard. But it also probably shouldn’t have worked out. I made poor choices.
For example:
- Failing to seize good opportunities when I had them
- Taking myself too seriously as an artiste instead of learning
- Dropping out of school (twice)
- Re-enrolling in the wrong programs and wasting tens of thousands of dollars in tuition
Et cetera, et cetera. We’re all stupid in our twenties.
I don’t really regret these failures–I learned important lessons from each one. All the same, if I could walk the same paths again, I’d take a few detours.
I’d get that journalism experience while the chance was in front of me. I’d take those undergrad creative workshops more seriously. Apply for that publishing internship that was basically being handed to me. Develop some goddamn work ethic.
That last one especially. How different things could be!
Despite all this, like most reasonably successful people, I somehow managed to fail upwards. I took administrative assistant jobs and talked my way into marketing roles. I got writing-adjacent experience, which I leveraged to get actual writing experience. I found someone willing to look past my subpar portfolio, and I made the most of it.
(The career lesson we can all take away? Your degree doesn’t matter nearly as much as the people do. All you need is one person to give you a chance.)
Now I have a career in my field. I’ve written blogs and marketing campaigns seen by thousands of people. I hit absolutely ridiculous deadlines. I get amazing feedback from my peers on a semi-regular basis.
But I’m not creative.
But here’s what I haven’t done:
- Finished a novel
- Gotten paid for a short story
- Established myself as an author literally at all
Why not?
A lot of reasons. But one big one is that I lack balance. I’m either obsessive and all in, or staring through a window, unable to walk through the door.
Right now, it’s the latter. But I’m stacking those stones, one-by-one.
creativity vs. the pandemic (or: i am not taylor swift)
During the pandemic, Taylor Swift famously put out some of the best (in my opinion) work of her career. Locked away in one of several mansions, she created furiously, dreaming of meadows and love and fairy tales, and spun it all into sun-dappled, daydream-fueled albums.
For her, solitude was an opportunity, and she embraced it the way I had always thought I would do.
She flexed her creative muscles as I let mine atrophy.
Let’s back up.
Once upon a time, I wrote (professionally) full time, and wrote (creatively) voraciously. Writing was all I did. When I was at work, I thought about it constantly. When i was driving. I carved out space in every corner of my life for it.
I woke up, wrote over breakfast. Drove to work, worked all day, wrote over lunch. Wrote at my desk after work until martial arts class. Went home, wrote until I fell asleep.
It was all I wanted, and I was surrounded by friends who were equally hungry for creative fulfillment.
As a result, I made an enormous amount of progress. I honed my point of view. My sentences flowed more beautifully. My instinct sharpened. My concepts gained depth.
Then I learned what burnout feels like. More importantly, I learned what it feels like to NOT be burned out, and nothing has been the same since.
You see, the pandemic was, in may ways, a hard reset. I lost my job. My extracurriculars. My entire life got put on hold. I was out of work for six months, with nothing to do but hang out with my dog and stare at the wall.
I had never had so little to do before.
Was this what it was like to be well-rested? A revelation.
During that time, I thought a lot about being that perpetually-overscheduled child with few friends to speak of, but extracurriculars every day of the week.
I used to wonder what it was like for my under-scheduled peers. What did they do with their time if, at the end of the day, they just… went home? Did they just sit inside by themselves? Do chores? What filled their time?
The answer, it turned out, was: nothing.
Thanks to the pandemic, I learned how to do nothing and enjoy it.
Is it rest, or apathy? I still don’t know. It’s a many-fingered root, and I have yet to pull it up in entirety.
But here’s the real difference between me and Taylor Swift.
She has always been self employed.
Her creative muscle is fit. But it’s also her job not to be precious about songwriting. She has to create every day so that she can put it all on albums and go on tour and continue paying people’s salaries.
Is it exhausting? Sure. But it’s only one job, and it’s one with tangible rewards.
I, on the other hand, write every day to fulfill somebody else’s business needs, and must scavenge time and energy to fulill my own creative ambition.
So when I scribble my creative pencil down a nub, what’s the real consequence? I still have a job to do.
So I stopped.
lessons from work-life (are a work in progress)
Now that I’m in a new job, I’m once again struggling to find sustainable work-life balance. When you’re learning the rhythms of a new team, new clients, new industries, tight deadlines and fast turnarounds… personal projects go on the backburner.
It’s only natural.
But I’m hungry for it again. Not that all-consuming, gnawing feeling I had before. But I think about it again. I want to tell somebody, “I’m a writer,” and mean more than copy. I want to sell a story. Or even just be proud of one.
This, itself, is progress.
I’m not there yet. But I’ve taken a few steps forward.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about which lessons I could take from work-writing and apply to my creative life.
It always amazes me how different it is. I can get assigned the driest of blog topics, hash out an outline, and bang out 2500+ words on it with relatively little trouble. It takes time, but I don’t have to think that hard, or even particularly enjoy it. I just have to follow through with the process.
But a short story? Pah. 200 words and I’m falling flat on my face, the infinite potential transmuting into infinite pressure.
I like it more, but as a result, I do it less.
How do I marry the workmanlike approach to copywriting with the ambition of fiction writing?
I think the answer structure.
You see, when I write a blog, the purpose and contents are evident in the brief. I hash out the headers to structure the thing, and then fill in the blanks.
It doesn’t matter if I don’t care about it, because I just have to do it. And I already know what each section needs to do.
For fiction, I outline in theory. But in practice, I don’t go deep enough. As a result, I creep forward until I run out of story, and then when I see that precipice looming ahead, I stop short, petrified of it.
That’s why, right now, I’m re-learning my story fundamentals. Structure. Pacing. And I’m working on a new outline.
My theory is that if I can outline deep enough, building out enough story, structuring and pacing it in advance, I can leverage that pragmatic approach from copywriting to push through the draft.
But more on that later.
what to expect in this blog
My goal for this blog is threefold:
- To create writing resources others can reference and rely on
- To relearn (relatively) unstructured writing
- To build my creative muscles through practice
You can expect meandering personal essays (like this one), educational resources, and reviews/analyses.
If there’s something you want to learn about, please pass the ideas forward, and I’ll do my best to fulfill them.
Thanks for reading!
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