Short post today. Below is why:
As I was driving to work this morning, a thought popped into my head and I’m not sure where it came from. It had to do with people who get paid to write for a living. Not fiction authors – I mean they do, but that’s not what my thought was about.
Copywriters. Freelancers. People who create articles, marketing copy, that sort of thing, and get paid for it on a regular basis. I pondered this and thought “I’m a writer, why don’t I do that instead of running SQL queries and generating sales analytics?”
And then I answered the question. For me, personally (I don’t hold anyone else to this, everyone is different), writing would lose its joy if I had to do it to get by. Especially if it was writing copy for some dry topic I didn’t really care about. This is what I told myself as I flipped a U-turn around the island that separates the west side of the road from the McDonalds that made my coffee today. I told myself “I could never write like that for a living.
And then I got to work and spit out a poem for a writing challenge I’m participating in. (Never do two that last a week or more at the same time, especially if you just spent the last month editing your novel. It’s why I wrote poetry today. Which is never a good sign for me.) Anyway. Spit out the poem, posted it to the challenge, and then turned to work.
Where I proceeded to write a short technical manual complete with training steps for using an internal software an application.
Nope. Could never write for a living. Not me 😛
Could you do it? Do you do it? How do you feel personally about integrating copy writing/technical writing with your fiction writing?
I do not write for a living, and I’m not sure I would want to. Though editing- that I could do 🙂
It doesn’t interest me at all. However, I have written a few press releases and proposals in support of my “real job”.
I do it. A large part of my work is writing about films, for our website, for flyers etc. I think it’s pretty complimentary to the fiction writing. But I guess I’m writing about something I’m generally pretty passionate about (even when I hate the movie) and if I was writing ad copy for Kotex or something, I might not be quite so thrilled to be doing it.
I wonder how many of us are like that. Even though we don’t technically write for a living, it’s a part of our jobs anyway.
I probably could be an editor. I was an editor for a newspaper in college and when I switched to reporter the spelling errors in the published pages increased a fair amount. My degree include English and a minor in Communication. So, would make sense. Then again, a job would be nice right now.
Fascinating question. I worked in science and engineering for 30 years, and now I have a different life. I used to routinely write technical documentation, specifications and manuals of all kinds, and now I write only fiction.
Yes, I could write the technical documentation now, and I’d do it well, but I think it would be a distraction from the fiction I want to write. Or would it? And then, it would pay…
Hmmm. Like I said. Fascinating question.
It’s part of my job, and I love it. Some of it’s like: “Oh boy! We got some new bindi dots in the store, woo hoo!” But a lot of it is really fun–writing up with a Stone of the Month, or editing down class descriptions. I even write metaphysical articles on my own time. Plus our newsletter goes out to about a thousand e-mail addresses, and if I write an article I get to link my website.
Sorry to get all gushy-gushy, but I really like my job. I guess for what I get paid, I’d better.