Creating 9 to 5 👩🏽‍🎨

I'm no Picasso, but I kind of am.

Even though this newsletter is aimed at creative freelancers, I don’t see myself as a creative. “Creative” suggests an element of artistry that I associate with painters, musicians, graphic designers, photographers. They are true creatives.

I am of course a creative. I’m reminded of this every time I go to a co-working space or other shared workspace.

If you were to sit beside or behind me in the mornings, you would see me opening a blank Word document and writing and rewriting paragraph after paragraph until I have a reasonably coherent story a few hours later. I don’t make anything up and there’s little phantasy or imagination involved in the writing I do, but I’m a creative in the sense that I create content, words, stories – however you want to describe it – day in, day out.  

I’m often surprised when I’m reminded one way or another that many people have jobs were nothing is created from scratch. Many of my fellow co-workers spend their days clicking on things, leading or sitting through meetings, and the writing they do seems limited to emails. This fascinates me without end.

There’s an action-reaction, effort-result chain with being a creative and creator that is deeply rewarding. Sitting down in front of an empty screen and saving a 700-word story a few hours later invariably makes me feel pretty good about myself. Look at me getting things done.

I imagine this is the polar opposite of what people who have “bullshit jobs” experience – a term introduced by the American anthropologist David Graeber a few years ago to describe jobs that even the people who do them view as worthless. He believed that between 20 to 50% of the workforce are stuck in such jobs, though later research put the figure much lower, at around 1 in 20.

I think part of what makes these jobs so frustrating must be the absence of the effort-result sequence I have become so used to. Working on a project for a long time but never seeing the fruit of your labour. 

Of course, there are days that I don’t want to create – that I would much rather work off someone else’s labour and, say, edit or translate a piece. 

There are days that I feel so sorry for myself and am convinced that I truly have the hardest job in the world because I have to push /churn out words, stories, content like a frigging factory no matter how uncreative I feel.

There are days that I resent that I can’t be one of those people who have jobs that allow them to have the radio on. (Creating, for me, requires silence and if silence cannot be had, I need something like SoftMurmur or a lo-fi playlist.)

Being a creator also means that it’s harder for me to have an off day without anyone noticing. When I’m tired, my stories have typos, I misspell sources’ names and confuse billions with millions. Those are painful things to have to rectify in emails to editors later on. When I’m not feeling motivated, my stories don’t flow; they trundle.

So keep this in mind next time you feel stuck on a creative assignment. Creating something where there was nothing is really something you can come to underestimate when you do it every day. But it’s pretty damn hard and also pretty damn special to create things into existence for a living day after day.

Linda