I’ve been writing a lot lately. Somewhat cruelly, after years of trying to be taken seriously as someone who can produce marketing copy, it’s finally happened. One night Greg chirped “Maybe writing was your calling all along!” Indeed.

There are definitely pros to this professional writing development:

• I’m super engaged at work. And my enthusiasm is leading to exciting new assignments
• I’ve figured out lots of techniques that make writing less work, and less work to evaluate. That’s a big one, because if you can show that your work meets agreed upon objectives, as in any endeavor, individual opinion is less critical. It’s suddenly more of a “that works” than “i like it” discussion
• Deadlines keep me in excellent shape. I’m happy getting up early to work on projects and still have stamina to put pencil to paper (pixels to webpages?) after the kids go to bed

I’ve been disappointed that one expectation–writing for work would be my warm up for personal writing–hasn’t quite taken. After sitting inert at my keyboard for a while this evening, I think I figured out why. What I crave in creative work is collaboration. I don’t need to come up with all the ideas, I don’t need to get all the credit. I truly love being elbow to elbow with someone else while we ask questions, push boundaries and make stuff happen on a project.

Writing a letter. Thomas Wilmer Dewing (Detroit c. 1900)

Yet, I’m finally free and warmed up and ready to work on my stuff and…nada.

In my own work, it’s the structure collaboration brings that I miss. Collaboration shows me the shape of the space I need to fill with all these words. In truth, I just need an editor, and to grow up about how “lonely” writing is.