 The beauty and challenge of working in any creative field is that there is no right answer. Almost any idea can be a great idea or a horrible idea, depending how it works out. So your success as a creative often comes down to how much your team can help you execute your ideas successfully.
My first two jobs in advertising, I found myself working for great mentors. They taught me so much about writing and about advertising in general, and made sure my ideas turned into something successful. Each mentor was extremely smart, and they would never settle for anything that wasn’t as great as it could be. They were also incredibly patient and were willing to work with me to improve my skills. At my third job in advertising, that completely changed.
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 When you get paid to write, you lose a lot of the control you have writing for yourself. Personally, I never thought I had a preferred “writing environment” before I started writing professionally. During school, I’d almost always written at a desk in my dorm room, maybe with some music on. When I would write for personal fulfillment after graduation, same thing, except in my apartment.
I didn’t realize at the time that, though I may have chosen these environments out of convenience, they fit my writing personality. They were comfortable, generally quiet, and I could shield myself from outside interruptions. That all changed when I got my first “real” writing job and was given the little kid desk at the back of the office, against the wall. It was - no joke - a piece of wood supported by two file cabinets. I learned then that a professional writer doesn’t often have the luxury of choosing their work environment.  Professional writers need to find a writing environment that can consistently work for them. The first article I wrote for my home town’s weekly magazine was a travel piece about Las Vegas. I’d recently gone on a trip there with a group of friends and had offered to write about it in order to get my first article published. In order to get my first byline, I was willing to throw out the old rule about what happens in Vegas staying there, obviously.
I had trouble sitting down and writing, though. Perhaps it was a way to recapture the feeling of my trip, but I ended up writing it all through the night. I was literally typing in my bed at 3 am, getting it ready for a deadline the following morning. By the time I handed it in, my eyes were red, my brain was mush and I swore to myself that I’d never wait until the last minute to write an article again. Of course, I did the exact same thing when I wrote my next article. |
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