What if you treated your writing like a business?

I seem to have a business mindset at the forefront right now (see my post from last week about criteria for bestowing grants), which isn’t surprising when you consider that we’re going through a marketing phase in my screenwriting master class at ScreenwritingU right now.

Sonya commented on last week’s post saying, “[this] is very close to the same list of things investors want to see when considering an investment in a business; a book and author are no different for a grantor (or publisher, for that matter)! They are an investment, and a risk, to manage.”

It fits right in with this idea that’s been swirling around in my brain: What if we treated writing like a business?

When I was in my early 20’s applying for jobs, my father taught me to look at myself as a asset that I was bringing to the job interview. As if I was the CEO of my own small company, and it was up to me to make smart business decisions based on my skills, talents, and abilities, and to communicate about them objectively to my prospective employers. He also taught me to consider whether or not that employer was a good fit for me, not just whether or not I was a good fit for them. 

In other words, it had to be a good match for everyone.

It occurred to me that it might be interesting to think about our writing endeavors as their own kind of enterprise. After all, at the end of the day, many of really are writer-entrepreneurs, even those of us that get traditional publishing deals. 

I’m sure there are artists out there right now rolling their eyes, talking about art for art’s sake and all that.

But I don’t really mean this in a grasping, heavy-handed business-y / gross marketing kind of way. (Though I do believe in grounded, sustainable marketing as a valuable thing — I do not subscribe to the belief that all marketing is evil and wrong.)

What I mean is this:

• What if we look at every writing project we take on as an investment, with pros and cons and viability to consider ALONG WITH our level of passion and artistic interest and commitment in it?
• What if we make real, practical choices about developing our skills in order to do our best work, by evaluating our writing skills not with a fixed mindset, but with a growth mindset, and pursue training and mentoring accordingly?
• What if we treat our writing like a professional commitment and show up every day to do the work?
• What if we set specific goals for our writing projects and careers and check in on them monthly, quarterly, and yearly to see how we were doing?
• What if we think about a project from start to finish, including how we will take it to market?
• What if we wrote because we said we would, and didn’t wait until we “felt like it”?

Again, I don’t say any of this to suggest “selling out” or becoming overly commercial.

To me it’s more about the mindset of being a professional and taking our work seriously.

And, as I write this, I also know that I love exploring the side of writing that puts the focus on the joy and passion of it.

I believe there is a lovely hybrid of business and pleasure that feels like a sweet spot for each one of us. That’s what I mean when I use the word “calling“. More about that to come in a future post.

I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments on the blog.