I have been feeling very unproductive lately, looking for distractions and getting too few billable hours done in a day. Finally, today I tackled a project I had been putting off and finished it and afterward I felt like I’d dropped 10 pounds of mental fat. Though I didn’t realize it, I had been suffering from a chronic case of copywriter’s block.
Maybe it’s not as poetic as the creative seizings up of J.D. Salinger, Joseph Heller and other legendarily blocked writers. But copywriter’s block is a very real problem with freelancer hacks and scribes because if you aren’t writing, you aren’t getting paid.
I had a couple of real serious blockages early in my freelance career and will share what I learned from them. The cause of most of my episodes was that I hadn’t done enough preparation before sitting down to write. I was trying to think, and nothing was coming out. A far better strategy is to do so much prep work—in terms of research and rough, non-wordsmithed notes—that giving yourself permission to actually write the thing comes as a blessed relief.
Sometimes we stumble over something in the actual process of writing…. very often, the first paragraph in a letter or article. (And yes, editors will tell you your work can almost always be improved by simply removing that first warm-up paragraph after you write it.)
I still have a multi-page printout of my tortured attempts to write the first paragraph of a letter for a TPA—that’s a particular kind of consultant that handles a company’s health plan. What on earth could I have needed to say about TPA’ing that was so difficult? I can’t remember but I know I felt like a dog chewing on itself until I had the good sense to finally step away from it. I took a walk in the sun, then came back and worked on something completely different. The next day, the TPA letter was completed without incident.
This recent writer’s block had a new set of circumstances. It was for a good client, but I found it somehow very uninteresting, yet I knew I had to do it because of our relationship. The concept of “you must” is toxic to the independent and supposedly carefree freelancer, who has signed on to the concept that you can set your own schedule and work any 24 hours in the day that you like. But finally, writing it became more appealing than not writing it, and the deed was done. Now I’m going to celebrate by going to the library.