Different Strokes

Some creative writers like having pay jobs that are as monotonous and mindless as possible. These are jobs like secretary, receptionist and anything with the word "assistant" in it. For these creatives, devoting half the day to being bored creates a build-up of creative juices. When the writer finally gets home at the end of the day and curls up next to his or her laptops with a cup of green tea and a bag of Funions, the dam built up by the work day is torn down and a flood of quirky ideas comes pouring forth. The downside is sometimes the job is so boring that its wears you out. Yes, you can actually become fatigued from being bored. So that by the time you get home, all you wan to do is brew some green tea, crack open the Funions and stare at the wall because you've done enough data entry for the day to fill a Bible.

Other creatives opt to have interesting jobs that they feel facilitate the creative process. Jobs like antique furniture mover, meter maid and baker fit into this category (all jobs I've held by the way). These jobs offer fresh, new experiences for the creative to use as material. The downside: They can be fairly labor intensive. Antique furniture is heavy, and sometimes all you want to do after lugging a 500 lbs. marble birdbath up a flight of stairs is crack open a few beers and call it a night.

Finally, some creative writers actually choose to write to balance their lives. Currently that's what I'm doing. I write technical copy during the day and funny, wacky sketches, jokes and scripts at night. For me, this is the best fit. The two really seem to feed off each other. The techincal writing is very structured, which increases my ability to structure my comedic writing. The comedic writing is about finding your audience, which really feeds into my ability to hone in my technical writing audience. The downside to this is I can get pretty burnt out from writing so much all the time.

Which is why I still don't know why I started this blog.

Let me know what you do to balance out your creative side and keep your checking account above the zero mark.