I write everything at my job. Everything.
I write up SOPs for software installation, hardware maintenance, corporate store applications. I write “news” stories and announcements for our intranet frontpage. I create PowerPoint presentations from talking-point outlines. I write and edit marketing copy, business proposals, executive resumes. I write and revise panel descriptions, sales rep letters, insurance business proposals and company histories and all of our web content.
I have written talks about tax history, documents about how to use our timekeeping system and how to create service tickets. I’ve written sales policies, revised the company handbook, formatted and reviewed hotel directions, convention agendas, and loan applications. I’ve created order forms and trade brochures and email campaigns and edited four hundred pages of operations manual – twice.
I have written everything, and when I didn’t know how to write it, I googled it and found formats and examples and ideas. I’m constantly learning about how to write sales pitches, persuasive copy, and business proposals, because you can never be too good at writing those, and you can always be better.
And I’ve spent the last couple of weeks working on synopses, one-line elevator pitches, pitch paragraphs, pitch packages, pitch copy, because you can never be too good at writing those, either. I have never written this shit before, and it’s involved a lot of reading, a lot of searching, a lot of reviewing, a lot of writing and re-writing and starting over and reading.
It’s a small miracle, making a living as a writer. What people never understand, though, what everyone sighs over and makes eyes at, is that writing is a job. Like acting or modeling, it seems very glamorous, but I don’t think I realized exactly why it seemed so glamorous. I honestly thought all that glamor had to do with lots of money and hot bed partners and expensive toys and trips to Paris.
We’ve attached all sorts of associations with these sorts of professions, but the glamor of making it as a creative person isn’t actually about the work itself, or even the expected perks, I think. Work is work.
The real glamor, the real perk, is the idea of spending your days doing something you love.
Sometimes I think that’s what the allure is of any place: this idea that you can live somewhere, with someone, doing something, you love.
It is, perhaps, the greatest gift on earth.
That’s the glamor.
