Freelance writing almost destroyed my love for words

until I broke free enough to notice

When I first became a freelancer in 2017, I was hopeful. I was determined to make a career out of my writing after many failed attempts to secure a typical 9-to-5 job after having children.

Freelance was the answer to all my problems; it had to be. I was drowning.

Two kiddos under three, no outside support, bills from my previous single life still piling up, and a partner with a job in the medical field—job security, not one to mess with if we wanted a roof over our heads and food on the table.

Plus, I was searching for that perfect career. The career I could hang my hat on, slap a sign on my desk, and add to the end of my email signature so everyone would know I was finally part of mainstream work culture.

I was searching for purpose, in all honesty. Purpose in a job and worth in the income that came from it.

My creative brain was alive and ready to work. It had been idle for years, writing nothing outside of professional emails, clinical notes, purchase orders, and admin reminders to my bosses. My fingers were trembling with the opportunity to write for work. Giddy.

So, freelance it was. Working from home, with my kiddos running around my feet. I secured all the essentials:

• a polished, updated resume

• a few different cover letter templates

• a list of freelance writing websites

• my first-ever MacBook

• blue light glasses

• a new sweater

• my trusty LL Bean slippers

• endless snacks and coffee.

  
  

What more could I need? Apparently, a whole lot of emotional resilience.

Freelance and creative suppression

I wasn’t entirely naive going into freelance. I had a rough idea of how the pay worked and which websites posted the quality gigs. I knew to look closely at contracts and avoid a few red flags. But I also wasn’t entirely prepared for what I was getting into.

I figured I knew how to write; it was my best natural skill. All my teachers and friends and family said so. I was in AP English and got soaring reviews of my 30+ page research papers in all my social work courses.

What I didn’t realize about freelancing is that your success depends entirely on your clients' opinions. To one, you sound brilliant. To another, you sound no better than your fifth-grader's first attempt at a five-paragraph essay.

I’d never entered an industry that was so subjective and judgemental. Some clients were outwardly disappointed, yet had no suggestions. It’s bad. Wonderful, any suggestions on what you’d like to see instead? No, just better. Do you have an example you would like me to base it off of. No, it doesn’t matter. Well, it clearly does. Just try again. Okay…

Writing is a weird industry

Writers come in all shapes and sizes.

Some of us are chameleons who can mimic the precise voice and style of any brand in any industry. Others have specialties: tech, law, medical, finance. Another group of us excel in relatable content, blogs, and narrative essays that make people feel seen and understood. Then you have creative writers and poets, who love to break rules and make up their own worlds that others just have to get on board with—these are my people, for sure.

Most of us can fit multiple roles, but very few people fit all. If you do, I’d love to meet you because you sound like a writing genius.

The writing world knows all this already. We know which areas we battle to sound sincere in and which ones we could craft in our sleep. But clients and brands who don’t write don’t know this. To them, a writer is a writer, someone who can produce any combination of words they desire. We must understand what they want to say, how they want to say it, and exactly how it should be worded, or risk receiving the ultimate insult…

You’re a bad writer

I don’t know why this insult still cuts so deep, but it does. It makes me feel as if my entire existence has just been questioned. Like what they really said was: See that bridge? Jump. No one will miss you. Look at this product description? How could you?

Perhaps it’s because, as writers, our words are our magic, our contribution to the world. We spend so much time twisting, contorting, and crafting what we consider the perfect concoction for our audience. Even if that audience is the owner of a small shower-and-tile installation service in Ohio.

We offer up our work with outstretched hands, eyes glistening, sweat dripping from our brow, stomachs grumbling from the excess coffee we siphoned into our bodies (without remembering to pair it with substance of any other kind), seeking a specific reaction—the only reaction that actually matters: approval. 

Instead, we are sometimes sliced down to our core. It’s not quite what I was looking for. 

If my work were in my hands, this is when I would proceed to crumble it up and strike it into an open flame. Sometimes I symbolically burn a candle next to my laptop, imagining the digital copy of the ‘Window Installation Service Page’ I just sent, disintegrating into ash.

You ask what you can do better. What improvements can be made? I don’t know; I can’t write. Yes, we know. We know you cannot write.

Just as we know that as patients, we cannot perform a tendon repair on a wrist like a surgeon, or scale a 100-ft skyscraper to rescue a family from a burning building like a firefighter, or spend weeks and months at sea, wrangling sea life to feed an entire coast of hungry seafood lovers with napkins strewn across their eager laps like a fisherman.

But we judge, anyways. We all do.

One time I was called a bad writer because I didn’t convey the right aspects of a new traffic law. There were many points to make, and I picked the wrong ones to focus on. Really, I just didn’t know the attorney's personal opinions on the matter, how he’d personally been affected outside his practice. Were these opinions shared? No. Did he also send me the law to write about? Yes.

Another time, I was called a bad writer for creating a children’s dinosaur story that was too short. The desired audience of the book would be as young as two, and it was already pushing the maximum average word count for ages 4-6 at about 800 words. She wanted 3,000 words—and she didn’t like the dinosaur’s name.

I was once called a bad writer for providing an unfinished professional bio for a client who provided little to no information about themselves. No links, no background info, no guidance of any kind. I wrote what I could, highlighted where I needed more information, and left suggestions for where we could put additional information if he had it. This is so bad, was the initial response, I’m sure it was…because I literally worked with nothing.

Writers are not mind readers

It’s strange to me how the product of a freelance job can be so bad when the input is so little. We are not magicians. We are not mind readers. We do not know you or your brand. Not in the beginning, that is. We need a little help here.

Not knowing that you volunteered at the Humane Society for 10 years in college and that you love to practice softball in your free time and that you were awarded the most prestigious award in the orthodontic industry for your seamless application of the Invisalign process, when none of this is currently public record, is not part of my job.

If I could read people's minds, I wouldn’t be writing for pennies and insults. I’d tap into the minds of stock brokers for investment insight for my passive income, and write poetry and loads of other stories on top of a mountain overlooking the ocean. For free.

I know this all now, but it didn’t matter in my fragile, newbie freelancer state. I started to second-guess my intuition. I started second-guessing every word that came to mind. I figured I was wrong, and maybe it was time.

Time to stop writing.

Right before COVID, I was questioning my entire writing career. I had been freelancing for three years by then, just starting to earn a decent income, but at the cost of my self-worth and health.

I stayed up all night, got up early, and sacrificed time with my family to hit deadlines. I shed many tears when I’d spend hours on a project, only to be told it didn’t quite fit, wasn’t needed anymore, or the voice wasn’t right.

Or the worst one—ghosted. Ghosted completely. Meaning no compensation for the hours I poured into researching topics in industries I’d never worked in, or writing tourism articles for cities I’d never been to, and couldn’t afford to.

When my freelance work halted for a bit, I realized how burnt out I was. Every word I submitted was singed with the pain and regret of feeling like a failure at my ‘natural talent.’

I cracked open my old journals, trying to remember why I ever thought I was a good enough writer to market myself in the freelance world to begin with. To my surprise, my fears were not validated. My creative brain sure was.

I flipped through decades of work: my poetry, my stories, my old college papers, and the silly tales created with my kiddos for fun. I was not a bad writer. 

The difference was my voice. This was MY voice, my perception of the world and the magic in my own mind. I could weave whatever words I wanted, one into the next, like a tapestry of evolving drama spun from my imagination. I could jump into my poet mindset and pretend punctuation didn’t exist, then segue seamlessly into a tale about a bunny and an otter who went to the big city on the back of a blind humpback whale, who was allergic to seaweed and loved a good orange.

I’d forgotten how freeing it was to write as myself. That is why I fell in love with writing in the first place. I started writing for myself, for my own enjoyment. Somewhere along the way, I forgot that.

Before the world opened back up, I started writing every day, putting down everything that came to mind. I buried myself in daily poetry, started working on my first book, formatted full manuscripts for children's stories, submitted them to editors, and created a blog for complete creative freedom. The magic wheel in my mind never stopped producing. It had been on hold so long; the backup of ideas was thrilled to see the light.

The problem was, the world did open back up, bringing me straight into a divorce and a need to resecure my freelance career for survival. Which was fine—freelance works for my chaotic blended family schedule now. But I know I do it differently this time. I couldn’t lose myself again.

Separation from your work words is key

Working as a freelance writer has taught me two important lessons:

1. You need to have tough skin. You WILL be critiqued, and that’s not always a bad thing.

2. You need to separate yourself from the words you write for others.

The truth is, if I did it my way, I would write most of the work I turn in for clients completely differently. I don’t love most of the articles I submit or the tone of voice I use, but it’s not mine. It’s my clients, and they are paying me to write what they want, not what I want.

It's not about me—it’s a job. Not my purpose.

I learned to look at my freelance words the same way I used to look at the inventory reports I turned in as a clothing store manager or the estimates I used to give customers as an admin at the wood shop. Business, emotionally removed, surface-level.

Most importantly, I gave up on my need to see my voice in my client’s work. I had my own work, my own writing I needed my voice for. So I didn't need to protect my voice in this blog about construction work safety in the snow.

Moving forward with magic

I still freelance as my day job, mostly words I would never say in real life or put my name on. After 10 years, I still get heavily critiqued (sometimes downright criticized), especially now that AI has upped the competition.

I’m competing with robots now, on top of my self-worth.

Some clients require that I use AI; others say Don’t use AI but still want their material to sound like AI, so that’s a conundrum. It’s almost even easier now to remove myself from my freelance words and maintain my love for my own. If I hand over AI-generated content that was just edited for the brand, it was never my voice to start. I have no idea whose voice it was!

I save my cares for the words that come when no one is looking. After the emails cease and the lights go dim, and the writing spirit in my head awakens after slumbering through a mundane day of work it wasn’t required to show up for.

Substack has honestly been a blessing. I love the space I’m creating more every day. It’s filled with writers, creatives, and artists who are battling to show their true, authentic selves to the world. They care not how you show up; they seek your unique voice; they notice when you don’t sound like everyone else, and they cheer you on.

The more I write for myself, the more confident I am in my words and my craft. I see where I really need to improve and grow. Surprise: It’s not adding more keywords and phrases or making it more visually pleasing.

This fall, as I continue to determine what project I want to put the majority of my focus on, I plan to show up here more raw and unfiltered, as I had always intended to do. Deconstructing the SEO, freelance ways of my past and tapping back into the ultimate creative force that started this entire journey to begin with.

The fun one that feeds on magic, imagination, and hope.

Until next time, dreamers, Shell