How My 6-Figure Freelance Writing Career Murdered My Creativity
Learning to write for ME again is pretty terrifying, but I’m figuring it out
Pretty good headline, right? Yeah, that’s what I do.
I write fantastic headlines. I increase page views. I get search engines to pay attention. And yes, I get paid pretty well for most of it, at least compared to the many other writers I know who are struggling to eke out a living.
I’m a “success” story. Or something.
But let’s be real: This is not what I set out to do. Like a lot of people, I desperately wanted to be a writer. A writer-writer, not an internet writer. I wanted to write books and featured columns and be a NAME that book-loving people would recognize.
Practicality won out
Instead of going down that pleasant little path, I turned my attention to Money Highway. Frankly, I didn’t have much of a choice. A decade ago, I was a divorced, under-employed single mom with two small kids. I did most of my grocery shopping at The Dollar Tree (literally). One particularly memorable day I had to call out of work because I had no money to put gas in my car.
I needed to make something happen for myself.
After a rocky start, I managed to grow a thriving freelance career. Over the last 10 years, I have developed super-sharp instincts about how to create content that companies love. But being a successful freelancer is about a lot more than being a good writer. I also know how to get work, how to sell myself, and how to get paid what I’m worth.
But while those instincts were becoming finely tuned, my creative instincts were dying on the vine.
I can’t un-know how the sausage gets made
Now I sit here, trying to jump-start my creative writing and I feel like I can’t quite get the engine humming.
I worry that I know too much about how to game the system. My instincts have been clouded by too many years as a professional writer, too much focus on page views and SEO, and too many clickbaity headlines.
I’ve been writing a lot over the past few months but I haven’t been posting any of it. It’s all for me, pages and pages of notebook scribbles, a massive document in Scrivener, endless, unfinished blog post drafts. Lots of it feels like it “could be something.” Yet none of it feels like it has the form to live out in the world as something someone might be interested in reading.
I want to be read. I don’t want to keep stuffing my writing in a drawer. But I also want to remember how to ease my way into a piece and see where it takes me, rather than me insisting that it needs to land in a certain spot.
It’s terrifying, frankly.
I feel like I’m sitting in the dark in an unfamiliar house. I have to wait for my eyes to adjust. I have to trust that if I start by just getting oriented to the few inches around me, I’ll gradually see a little more, and then a little more.
Are there ghosts here, in this darkness? Damn right. Ghosts of expectations, the writer I used to be, phantoms whispering about dreams deferred and self-doubt. But I can learn to tune them out. I can let them scare me into stillness, or I can start relearning my space, inch by inch.
