Freelance Writer

Archive for the ‘Creativity’ Category

Being a freelance writer for the past 3 years, I have had some strange copy writing projects to work on. I guess this is one of the more interesting aspects of working as a freelancer, the work you do is probably more varied than that which you would be given in a  permanent role.

I think the strangest task, must have been the freelance writing I did for an adult website, I basically had to right naughty stories. This actually almost got me into trouble with my young lady. I use voice recognition software sometimes, especially when I am writing something that needs very little research. So I was sitting on my balcony, in my hammock, with a headset on and dictating adult stories to my laptop.

After about an hour of this, my girlfriend comes storming up the stairs, flying out on to the balcony with a face full of rage. She looks a little confused though, and after a few moments she starts laughing. She thought I was on the phone, talking dirty to another girl!

Who would have thought being a freelance writer could present you with such a strange problem? Luckily she was used to seeing me working this way and understood.

I have been doing a lot of work for the same client over the last couple of weeks; this is both a good thing and a bad thing. The client in question is a company that specialises in building websites for realtors in the United States. This means that all of the writing I have been asked to produce is very similar.

The upside of this is that it gets easier each day to produce good content, I have a nice rhythm worked out now, first some research, then sketch an outline for the content, go over the research again end then flesh things out, nice and simple.

The downside of course, is that one becomes stagnated by this rhythm, creativity levels drop as you switch to autopilot and everything starts to read very similar. It’s quite a challenge to write sixty or more short pieces about real estate in the USA and make sure each piece reads uniquely.