How to Stay Creative When You Write for Work

I write for a living, which is probably why I feel particularly guilty when I don't write.

This sounds logical until you realize that after spending eight hours writing blog posts, emails, social media captions, website copy, and whatever else my job has decided needs words that day, the last thing I usually want to do is come home and open another Google Doc.

And I don't mean that I take a few days off. Sometimes I go months without writing anything of my own.

I've gone months without writing a poem. I've gone months without touching my novel. I've had ideas that I was genuinely excited about and still somehow couldn't convince myself to sit down and do anything with them. I usually feel pretty bad about it.

After all, I want to be an author. I've spent years talking about writing books, actually wrote and published one, and am currently working on three more. You would think that wanting something very badly would make it easier to do. Unfortunately, my brain does not seem to have received that memo.

Writing for work is a completely different thing

The strange part is that I don't actually dislike writing for work all the time. I'm pretty good at it.

I'm naturally empathetic, which helps when you're trying to figure out what someone needs to hear or how they'll respond to something. I can write for an audience, make complicated information easier to understand, and usually find the angle that will make someone care about a subject they didn't know they cared about five minutes ago.

Those are all useful skills when you're writing for a company, but there is a pretty big difference between writing because a sales team needs an email and writing because you have an idea that won't leave you alone.

Most of my professional writing has an objective attached to it: get someone to click, explain the product, rank for the keyword, generate a lead, or get people to stop scrolling for long enough to read a social post. Creative writing doesn't really work that way for me. I don't sit down and think, What is the business objective of this poem? Thankfully.

I don't even know if I'm particularly good at creative writing. I just know that every once in a while, something in my brain insists that I need to write it down. Usually, it's a line.

I'll be driving somewhere or taking a shower or doing something completely unrelated to writing, and suddenly I'll think of a sentence that I know I'm going to forget if I don't put it in my phone immediately. Sometimes that sentence turns into a poem. Sometimes it sits in my notes for three years and never becomes anything. I've learned not to question it too much.

Sometimes I need to read before I can write

When I'm struggling with poetry, the first thing I usually do is read other people's poetry. This feels almost embarrassingly obvious, but it works.

I'll read something that makes me want to write, whether it's because I love the language, hate the language and think I could have done it better, or recognize exactly what the writer is trying to say and suddenly have something I want to say too. Usually, I don't know which one it's going to be until I'm already halfway through the poem.

I do the same thing with fiction, although I'm much more likely to tell myself I'm being productive when I'm doing it.

I've recently been reading A Court of Thorns and Roses (be nice to me, I'm clearly vulnerable), and there have been plenty of evenings when I've happily read for hours instead of working on my own novel. I can justify this to myself by saying that I'm studying storytelling, which is technically true. I'm noticing how the characters are introduced, thinking about why I care about certain people and don't care about others, and paying attention to which scenes make me want to keep reading.

Or I'm just really invested in the series. Both things can be true.

I think there's something to be said for letting yourself enjoy other people's work without immediately turning it into homework. Sometimes I need to remember what it feels like to be excited about a story before I can get excited about my own.

I need other people to make me behave

Poetry and my novel also have one important difference: I have a mentor for my novel.

We meet every two weeks, and he actually likes my story. This is extremely helpful because there is something about knowing that another person is looking forward to the next chapter that makes it harder to abandon the book for several months.

There have been (many) times when our meeting is approaching and I think, Okay, I really should have something to show him. It's not exactly the glamorous image of the tortured novelist I had in mind when I started writing a novel, but whatever works.

I also find myself thinking about what it will feel like when the book is finished. Not published, not successful, and not sitting on a bookstore shelf; just finished. I imagine having the entire story in front of me and knowing that I actually made it all the way to the end, and I think about how proud I'm going to be of myself.

That doesn't always get me to sit down and write, but sometimes it gets me through a few pages when I otherwise wouldn't have. I've come to accept that I need a little external motivation. Apparently, wanting to be an author isn't always enough.

I'm trying to stop feeling guilty when I have nothing left

This is probably the hardest part for me because there are plenty of days when I get home from work and the last thing I want to do is open a blank page. After spending all day thinking about SEO, marketing, content calendars, and whatever else needs to get done, I would much rather watch television, scroll through Instagram, or read 300 pages of a fantasy novel without having to think about whether my protagonist's character arc is working.

And sometimes that's exactly what I do.

I've spent a lot of time feeling guilty about those evenings because there is always something I could be doing with that time. I could write a chapter, edit a poem, work on my website, or do literally anything other than stare at a screen and watch other people have fictional problems. The problem is that sometimes I'm just tired, and I'm not sure what I'm supposed to accomplish by forcing myself to write when I have absolutely nothing left.

I think creative people are particularly susceptible to feeling guilty about rest because there is always another person who seems to be doing more. Someone is writing every morning before work. Someone is publishing a book a year. Someone has a beautifully organized writing schedule and somehow manages to have a full-time job, three children, a sourdough starter, and 10,000 words of their novel written by Tuesday.

Good for them.

I'm usually much more interested in watching television, and I don't think that makes me less serious about writing.

I don't think you have to make your art your entire life

I knew pretty early on that I probably wasn't going to be able to make writing books my only source of income. Honestly, I think that realization was part of why I hesitated to write for so long. There is something intimidating about admitting that you want to be an author when you also know you probably need a more practical career, and I have a complicated relationship with professional writing because of that.

There are days when I feel like writing for work has completely killed my desire to write for myself. But I also know I'd probably be much more miserable doing almost anything else.

So I'm not interested in pretending that the answer is to quit your job and dedicate yourself entirely to your art. Most of us can't do that, and even if we could, I'm not convinced that turning the thing you love into the only thing responsible for keeping the lights on would necessarily make you happier.

There are going to be times when the day job comes first. There will be nights when you choose sleep over your novel and weekends when you do absolutely nothing creative because you needed a weekend where nobody needed anything from you. That doesn't mean you've given up on your art. It means you have a life outside of it, which I think is probably a good thing.

So, how do you stay creative?

I don't really know. I wish I had a better answer than that, especially considering the title of this journal entry.

For me, it's mostly about figuring out what makes me want to write rather than trying to force myself to write because I think I should. Sometimes that means reading poetry until I start feeling the itch to write something myself. Other times it's getting embarrassingly invested in a fantasy series and convincing myself that I'm studying storytelling. I'll save sentences that pop into my head at inconvenient times, and when I'm working on my novel, having someone waiting to hear what happens next is usually enough to get me back into the document. Sometimes I just think about how good it will feel when I finally finish it.

None of those things work every time. Sometimes I go months without writing, and I'm trying to get better at not treating that as some kind of moral failure.

If you're working a day job while trying to make art, you probably know how strange that can feel. You spend your days doing something that may be completely unrelated to the thing you care about most, and then you're expected to find enough energy somewhere to do the thing you actually want to do. Sometimes you have it. Sometimes the best you can manage is reading someone else's work and hoping that eventually you feel like making something again.

I don't have a particularly inspiring conclusion to that, and I don't think there needs to be one. I've spent enough time feeling guilty about being tired, and I'd rather not spend the next several years doing that too.

So, to the writers and artists who are working jobs because they have to: I'm sorry.

I'm sorry that sometimes you have to spend your days doing something else when you'd rather be making your art. I'm sorry that you can want something so badly and still not have the energy to work on it. I'm sorry that you've probably looked at an empty notebook or an unfinished manuscript and wondered if you're still really a writer.

I know how much it hurts. No one really talks about that part.

So I'm telling you: I know it's hard. You're not the only one struggling to find the time, energy, or desire to make the thing you love.

And if lately all you've managed to do is read someone else's book, watch a television show you love, save a line in your phone, or think about the story you want to tell someday, I hope you don't beat yourself up about it. The fact that you haven't made anything lately doesn't mean you don't still want to.

Sometimes the writing just has to wait until you have something to say.