I'm writing something because I'm allowed to

Sorry if this offends.

I’ve decided.

Signing up to Substack (a platform where I didn’t realise 1. loads of cool people were hanging out and 2. you can tweet, sort of, so why the hell was I languishing on bluesky of all places) marks a new era for me. The era of Writing Stuff Because I Want To.

Sounds easy enough, but consider: it follows years, (decades?) of Writing Because I Was Briefed to Do So.

Doing writing as a job

I have this anecdote I wheel out every so often, like that old TV-with-built-in-VHS-player they had at school.

When I left uni, I knew I wanted to Write. For a living. The dream was to be an author, but I by no means had the discipline, or even any idea what I would write about. Plus, that’s not a real job. My dad was a journalist at the MEN and I had this vague sense that traditional media was languishing, and online publications like LADBible and Vice were still getting into the swing of things. So, I didn’t fancy that. I simply scoured job listings for the word “writing.”

I found myself in an interview for a Digital Marketing Executive at some digital agency in Manc and the guy was all: “Hmm, you’re not right for this role, but you’d be a great copyrighter.”

“But I know nothing about the law??” I thought to myself.

I mentioned it to my dad in the car on the way home and he said: “No, Helen, copywriting is when you write words for companies.”

Who knows why this hadn’t been mentioned before (John) but I decided that’s what I wanted to do. And what I have been doing for the last 13 years or so. In house, in-agency, in charity. And it’s been great, in a lot of ways.

But also, it hasn’t.

Doing what you love every day

I once saw this meme which was like: “do what you love every day and find yourself sensitive to all criticism and taking everything extremely personally,” and honestly, amen to that.

Learning to write to brief is a skill, a craft. A job. An adventure.

For a certain kind of writer, like me, it comes naturally. It feels pretty easy. Your brain is simply set up to do it.

“Ho ho ho,” you chuckle to yourself, “I’ve got myself a good gig here.”

Except… you’re losing something. The time, the energy and the creativity to write what you want to write.

In a weird way, you start to feel like you should only write when you’re told to. When you’re allowed to. And you lose the control over what you write, too. Collaboration and amends are a necessary part of the corporate world, I’m not saying we shouldn’t have amends, but you get used to being told what to write and how to change it if it isn’t what the other person wanted you to write.

If you work for a company that’s a bit weird about you sharing client/company work and saying you did it, that only adds to the confusion. Nothing has your name on and you’re not even allowed to whisper: that was me.

Writing becomes something you do during work time, upon the instruction of somebody else. The fruits of your labour are swiftly whisked away as soon as they are deemed acceptable for publication. Eventually (and this is only a recent fun element of copywriting) they disappear from the internet altogether, like none of it ever happened.

And your own time is reserved for melting into a little puddle and mewling softly.

Writing for yourself

I was comfortably in my thirties before I even started to seriously consider Writing For Myself, even though it had been my lifelong dream.

I thought of an idea for a book. It came to me in the middle of the night, in the dark depths of the first lockdown.

I took a sabbatical from work (genuinely love that they offered that) in January 2022 and I wrote the entire goddamn thing on a goddamn typewriter.

The entire process was so wonderfully satisfying. I came up with the idea, plotted it all out, typed it all up. The words flowed and I allowed them to, without second guessing or thinking about who was going to read it. The typewriter was very noisy but it was tactile. It created the words on the pages straight away.

It existed. I could hold it. I wrote a book!

I actually went to the top of a hill and shouted: “I wrote a book!!!”

What a time to be alive. All I needed to do was scan all these pages in, clean it up in a Google Doc and get it to a publisher.

Except.

Making amends

Amends are a bit of a running joke in the marketing world, right? You create something you’re proud of, then Gerald from legal chips in and the C.E.O. gets their grandson to look at it from a ‘gen z perspective’ and so on until you don’t recognise the work you started off with and you stopped caring 24 emails ago.

Well, guess what happened once I’d finished my book?

I started giving myself amends.

I looked at the story and thought of it from the audience’s perspective. I thought hmm, this bit doesn’t quite make sense and could I make this point come across better? To a degree, this is just: editing. A good and normal part of preparing a manuscript for an agent and a publisher, to make sure it’s the best it can be.

Except.

I’ve gone way beyond that. It’s been five years.

And I’ve never finished a second draft.

I must have replotted and restarted fifteen times at this point. I’ve shifted the story into at least three other characters’ perspectives. I’ve worked with two editors. I added bitchy podcasters as a framing device. I wove them into the fabric of the narrative. I took them back out again. I changed the framing device into a Netflix documentary. Now the podcasters are back.

The core of the story has stayed the same. It has to. That’s my story. But everything around it is shifting. I’m plagued, haunted by this idea of somebody reading it and not quite getting it, “the point” not landing how I want it to. There is an invisible reader in my head saying: “but you’re not doing this story justice.” She’s giving me amends.

And she won’t stop.

I blame copywriting

In retrospect, I should have become an audiologist or worked in a cafe. Kept writing separate, sacred.

Weaving professional and personal writing together has properly done my head in.

I’m now incapable of creating anything, literally anything at all, and not being consumed by the idea of what someone might say about it. I can’t decide for myself whether or not something is good enough.

I can’t stop, so I edit.

Nobody asked for this

Which brings me back to this: I’m determined to change this deeply sad state of affairs, and I think Substack might be the key.

Nobody briefed me to set this up. Nobody told me what to write an article about. Not even a passing comment like: “Oh that’s interesting you should write about it!”

Even with a novel, I’m writing with the expectations of agents and the publishing industry and ghostly readers firmly in mind. It’s a product, which I eventually expect to be consumed.

On here? One or two followers. Probably, nobody will read this. Pressure = off. I’m just writing.

I’m just writing.

And that’s nice. I hope I’ll do it again.