Funny story… I worked as a freelance writer for more than four years before I started to think about it as a creative profession (and even then, that realization only happened because a friend asked me, “Is it hard to have to be creative all the time?”).
For a long time, I thought of writing as something that you just “do” – like eating meals, sleeping at night or doing any kind of rote work. But the reality is that writing is an inherently creative process, and that means that it comes with its own set of challenges and demands that must be balanced to ensure continuous productivity.
There are days when I feel like my creative juices have run out and days when I feel like I have absolutely nothing left to say about the topics I typically write on. I’m sure anyone else working as a writer has experienced this type of burnout before – and while I don’t have a solution for the larger overall issue of managing creative energy sustainably, I have found a way to trick myself into being productive when it feels like I couldn’t possibly write another word.
