words, don't come easy

One of the reasons I quit Nike was to 'do more writing'. Specifically writing for money, i.e. trying to be 'a writer'. It's been a story of mixed success but it's taught me quite a lot about my priorities, and some other things.

Thing One, I'm blogging a lot less than I did when I was an employee. This isn't to do with hoarding my words or anything it's to do with the fact that corporate life is full of dead holes you can fill with blogging. And it's superb displacement activity. The twenty minutes between a status meeting and a creative review is the perfect time to fit in a couple of blog posts. Whereas if I'm at home, trying to get some work done or get something written, and I find myself with twenty dead minutes, I'm much more likely to watch a bit of telly, have a cup of tea, tidy up a bit, play with Arthur, do some drumming, than write a blog post.

Blogging, for me, is more fun than work, but it's not more fun than life.

Thing Two. I suspect I might actually need to get a proper job if I ever want to write another book. I wrote Egg, Bacon, Chips and Beans while working at Nike and W+K. Since going freelance I've written precisely no books.

Thing Three. Depressingly, but not surprisingly, you get paid a lot more for writing PowerPoint than you do for writing books/articles. Unless you're a really, really famous writer.

Thing Four. I'm really lucky to have the Campaign gig. The discipline of having to make up 460 words every week is tremendously educative. Like regular gigging or a weekly 10K. And the experience of writing for print is so completely different than writing online. Slower, no feedback at all, but makes you much more considered and always makes you worry if you're using semi-colons correctly.

Thing Five. With the odd freelance writing job I get I always have to do a delicate dance with people to make sure they know I'm not one of the other Russell Davieses. Either this one, or this one. (I did think I'd write something in the blog sidebar to explicity point out that I'm in no way responsible for Dr W__ and his time-traveling adventures but I suspect that'll just make google confusion more likely.) I'm doing this travel writing thing for someone in August and once it had all been agreed by email they sent some details in the post with a note saying 'love your work' which instantly made me worry that they thought I was someone else. I don't really have work you can love in that way. But I'm not sure of the etiquette you deploy to make sure that a person hiring you doesn't think you're someone better than you are. The reassuring evidence that they do know who I really am is that there's no way the other Russells would do it for the fee I'm getting. I had a similar email correspondence with some TED people the other day who sent me a lovely email inviting me to get involved with a project they were doing. I was massively flattered but it wasn't really up my street so I politely declined. But they then wrote back asking if I could point them in the direction of any of my contacts at the BBC. Damn. They thought I was the other one. Good job I was polite or they might have thought he was a real git.

Anyway. I'm rambling. You can tell I'm supposed to be working now can't you?

Comments

[Leon Jacobs]

Was listening to a BBC show on the World Service on the weekend where they interviewed "... blogger, futurist and writer, Russell Davies."

There I thought I was listening to you. Was I? Or one of the other ones?

[russell]

Er, yes, actually that is me. Good point. Should probably be one of the other ones though. I wish they wouldn't say 'futurist'.

[Paul H. Colman]

I like the rambling posts, it's like the old days.

[apolaine]

I can sympathise. Writing for a living really can kill writing for fun. Maybe your not-written book can join mine in a Not-Written-Bookshop.

I also find writing for print weird. I'm not even sure Desktop has a letters section anymore. I feel like my words just go into the void.

[Faris]

Ramble on fella.

I remember getting paid to write words. Wasn't enough to live on. But there was something super cool about turning words into money.

Once I did gets paid to write some words about advermetising.

Mostly though I just do it have words somewhere I guess.

Is that your keyboard chief? You must use a lot of S and D.

FX