What I’ve Learned About Writing Lately

“People tend to look at successful writers who are getting their books published and maybe even doing well financially and think that they sit down at their desks every morning feeling like a million dollars . . . but this is just the fantasy of the uninitiated . . . Very few writers really know what they are doing until they’ve done it.”

–Anne Lamott, “Shitty First Drafts”

It’s one thing to hear people say that the creative process isn’t just random bursts of insight, and another to practice this myself.

I’ve been quickly learning about the “real world” writing process through my internship at Great Lakes Publishing this semester. GL publishes Ohio Magazine, among others, and I’m lucky to have the opportunity to work on it with some awesome colleagues. I also get to work on other magazines such as Long Weekends, the Ohio Visitors Guide, and other regional guides.

As an editorial intern, I actually get to write. The amount of creative liberty that GL gives their interns has been unbelievable, and I’m happy that the more monotonous tasks of copyediting and fact-checking (which I do also enjoy) are offset by the opportunity to write my own articles with my own byline.

So far, I’ve written two advertorials (advertisement + editorial) for Ohio Magazine about Ohio wineries, a COSI advertorial for Long Weekends (check it out soon in the spring/summer issue!), and two short articles for Long Weekends where I was able to pitch, research, and write about travel destinations in the greater Midwest.

I’ve learned a heck of a lot about these types of writing (copywriting and travel writing), particularly that the actual “writing” part is just one tiny snippet of the whole writing process. Through much research and many, many drafts, revisions, and fact checks for only a couple hundred words, my work becomes magazine-ready. Mark Twain once said, “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” It takes much more effort to condense than to write unfiltered.

I thought I’d dread this revision process; I thought I’d want everything to be perfect from the start, and sometimes it’s easy to forget that my favorite novels, articles, or pieces of writing didn’t look like that originally. I’ve learned to take writing advice from those above and around me, and I’ve become a better writer because of it.

It’s not like I’ve never written like this before, but I didn’t expect “real world” professional writing to mirror the academic writing process so much. I just assumed that innovative content creation was significantly “different” somehow.  I’ve learned that the creative process is more of a day-to-day grind.

Last week I was tasked with writing a last-minute, 250-word advertorial for a magazine that is going to print this week. They needed the story by the end of the day–which isn’t the typical, six-months-in-advance type of writing I had been doing. I couldn’t just wait for some fantastic idea to come to me; instead, I had to go straight to work to create, edit, condense, clarify, and adapt marketing content for a specific audience. The result is something I’m really proud of, and it’s not because I waited around for the right phrase or idea to come to me, but because I put pen to paper (ahem, fingers to keyboard) and just did it. No matter how shitty the writing may be at first.

For others, this type of creative process may feel too slow and regimented, but to me, it is freeing. I consider myself a creative person, but I’m often tied down by interior rules and a split-brained analytical side of me that sometimes feels inhibiting. To fully practice creation through this more methodical process, I get the best of both sides of my personality and my potential.  

If you’d like to read my stories, two travel articles will be featured in Long Weekends magazine’s fall 2019/winter 2020 issue and mentioned on their Facebook page. Additionally, two of my advertorials, about Ohio wineries, will be featured in Ohio Magazine’s September and October 2019 issues.