HES Content Marketing, LLC

Just keep swimming. Just. Keep. Swimming.

When I made the transition from academic college student writing to business writing, getting over writer’s block wasn’t as difficult as I imagined.

With the topics I chose as a writer, I always had something to say. Sometimes much more than the space allowed.

Over time, I had processes for overcoming a lack of creative spark. Reread the brief. Create the outline. Imagine how the text should look.

If nothing else, get words on the page.

After more than 10 years writing for businesses, I found that I rarely seemed to struggle to get going. The incentive to finish became its own motivation, if nothing else.

Now is a different matter. Now I write for myself.

Watching myself as the writer for businesses, compared to the person writing for myself, creates a weird duality. My self as a business writer thrives on organization, on backups, on checklists.

Writing for myself feels like chaos. I didn’t have an idea for what I wanted to say, which provides the title for this post. I’m writing directly to the editor. I’m not even saving all that frequently, a big diversion from the “save after every sentence” policy I’ve had since I was a kid.

I decided to create a blog because I knew that most of my recent portfolio pieces didn’t reflect a lot of storytelling. It seems odd that so many businesses list storytelling as an important aspect of their content strategies.

As a business copywriter, I rarely got to write such pieces. Instead, I focused on landing pages, short blog posts, instructional guides, and whatnot.

I suppose everyone has a story, but it’s up to the reader to know if there’s truth in the telling.