I have a confession to make. I don’t write fiction full time. Shocking, right? I should be sitting on a magical cloud eating green and blue cookies and drinking sunshine juice and pumping out magical worlds 24/7 while wizards fight dragons on a nearby cloud. Okay, those of your that have read my fiction know that’s not exactly what my full time creative bubble would look like (there’d be a bit less rainbows and a few more scary monsters), but you get where I’m going with this.

No, from time to time -okay a lot of the time- I write for clients. I’ve written for utility companies, I’ve written for design firms, I’ve written for online retailers and even art magazines. Sometimes I’ve known what I was talking about. Sometimes I had to research the difference between an Ai Weiwei and a Rudolf Stingel. Always I’ve been able to produce a piece that said what the client wanted to say with just a little bit of that “Rob irreverence™” mixed in for taste. The results have left my clients anywhere from mostly satisfied to ZOMG WHY HAVEN’T YOU BEEN WRITING ALL OF MY WEBSITE COPY SINCE 2001? I can’t really brag though because for every few wins there’s always a client who just isn’t satisfied with anything unless you crawl inside of their head and pluck their thoughts out word-for-word.

It’s grunt work. It’s unglamorous and often uncredited but it pays the bills and allows me to keep my writing muscles nice and flexed, not to mention allows me to experience writing in styles and voices I normally might never have thought to. In the meantime, I get to step away whenever I can and jump right back into the ocean of creativity and the fictional worlds and characters I know and love.

So how about you? Are any of you writing for people other than yourself and your fans? How does it make you feel? Do you feel challenged or does your creativity get drained and leave you unable to devote the energy you want to your creative work?