Freelance writing is a business venture, but it still needs to be fun or we wouldn’t want to do it. You can very easily get bogged down in the mundane research/report cycle that makes writing seem like nothing but work, but that approach is really up to you. How you go about producing the final product is your choice, no matter what the subject matter is. There are projects that allow you to spread your wings, and there are projects that require no real creativity at all. Those can be boring and tedious, and several revision requests later you might wonder why you traded in your 9 to 5 corporate job for freelancing.
However, even a boring and tedious project still takes talent and skill to finish. There is a great deal of satisfaction to be had just from producing a final copy that your client is happy with. Finding the right combination of words and phrases and putting them all in the right order is an ability not everyone possesses. If they did they wouldn’t need us. I find that process to be fun whether it’s putting technical words in order or writing creatively for a new website. It’s all about my approach and mindset – if I start out thinking it will be boring, it will be boring. But if I see it for what it really is, which is a project that takes my particular skill set to complete, then I can make it fun.
All writing is a creative process. Even if you are editing and basically just rearranging the words someone else typed to make them flow and easy to read, you are still being creative. You still need to think about how a sentence can be restated or what words you can substitute to make a flyer or email into a successful campaign for your client. It is up to us as writers to approach our keyboard every day with either the “I have to get to work” mindset, or the “Yay, I get to play with words!” mindset.
Today, I get to play with words all day. And as far as I’m concerned, that rocks.