Lots of people dream of publishing a book someday. And even more enjoy writing as a creative practice, taking it no less seriously even if they don’t feel the need to sell their writing or let anyone else see it. 

Many people’s creative habits and aspirations have nothing to do with what they do for money. That’s often why creative projects are appealing; they’re totally different from what you do forty hours a week. 

But when it comes to people who write for a living and then also want to write creatively either for pleasure or profit, it can feel like an extension of the workday. Even if you write technical manuals for microwaves and then go home to write high fantasy novels where a princess is best friends with a talking unicorn, writing is writing. And even when the content is different, professional writers need different strategies in order for their creative work to feel less like, well, work. 

Change Your Environment

Even before the pandemic revolutionized how we think about work, writing was already a profession full of remote freelancers. 

Even if you weren’t working from home prepandemic, and even if you work a hybrid model now, chances are that enough time has passed for you to have perfected your office setup. Many workers have now invested in things like special chairs to protect posture, ergonomic keyboards, and multiple computer monitors, making the modern home office look more like a spaceship than the place where you answer emails. 

Even though that setup works for you, it might help to work somewhere else when you’re in creativity mode. Weather permitting, you can take your laptop or notebook outside to a park or coffee shop with outdoor seating. If writing from your couch or bedroom is totally unacceptable, you could reserve a desk at a coworking space or your local library. 

If getting out of the house is a nonstarter, or if you experience real physical discomfort when you type anywhere other than your ergonomic office setup, you can change the mood by taking a walk around the block when you end your workday and perhaps changing the lighting and any ambient music when you return to your office to start on your creative projects. 

Change Your Tools

If you use the same word processing software, the same Post-its, and the same editing and revision systems for your creative work that you do for your day job, it’s hard not to feel like your workday is still going even if you’re off the clock.

But if you’re a professional writer, you know the tools you like and you use them because they get you the best results. So why would you change your tools and risk making your creative process rocky?

Again, when you write nonfiction or as a marketing professional, it will help your creative work to separate the two. And, really, two different kinds of writing will be better served by different tools anyway.

Remember that your creative writing and your professional writing are two different forms and might be better served by different tools. If you’re a novelist, something like Scrivener, which is a program designed for long-form writing projects, might work better than Google Docs. 

Also, when you’re working on creative projects, you don’t need to make your process visible to colleagues or your boss. So unless the methods you use to track your edits make it easy for you to work on your own, you can use your creative writing as an opportunity to prioritize your own needs. 

Change Your Perspective

Writing is hard work.

It doesn’t matter if you’re writing goofy comedies for young kids or somber true crime reports, writing can be a brutal job. And even if you’re lucky enough to make money from your creative work, sometimes even that can put pressure on what is supposed to be a restorative artistic practice.

If you start feeling like your creative work is like clocking into a second job, and nothing external you change seems to help, then something internal needs to change.

That doesn’t mean you should suck it up and get the words on the page. It just means that you might benefit from a mental reset.

Why do you write? Not your work writing but your creative writing. Why bother? What does it fulfill for you? If you have to search for an answer to those questions, then you should reconsider how you engage with your creative work. 

Writing Is What We Get to Do

There are very few people in the world who absolutely must maintain their creative output to survive. While that’s a disappointing fact for most of us who’d like to ditch their 9–5, it can also allow a certain freedom. 

You don’t have to finish creative projects, especially if you have a career in marketing or copywriting. Which means that your creative writing is the work you get to do, not because you have to but because you want to. 

Chelsea Ennen is a writer living in Brooklyn with her husband and her dog. When not writing or reading, she is a fiber and textile artist who sews, knits, crochets, weaves, and spins.