Making the Best of Your Next Project

Over the course of my nearly thirty-year writing career, I’ve been lucky enough to work in a wide variety of areas. I started out freelancing for a regional trade publication titled, Construction Equipment Guide. Not the most noble of beginnings, but it got my foot in the door and helped me build up some clips for my portfolio.

Since then, I’ve written for several regional and local publications. I’ve also worked in communications and marketing, written about employee benefits, did grant writing for several non-profits, and written scripts for training videos. In between all that, I’ve penned quite a few short stories.

We’re all these jobs fun? Not especially. Some were great, some mediocre, and a few were awful. But through them all I always treated my writing projects the same way. As creative exercises.

That’s how I make the best of every project I work on. It’s sort of like making them into games. I have this information I need to pass along to someone else. I always picture an individual as my audience. That’s the person I’m writing for and I need to make sure they understand.

It doesn’t matter if I’m working on a grant, a short story, or an article for a magazine. In each case I write for that one person. I don’t necessarily see them or visualize what they look like. They are the unknown reader. What I do, however, is put myself in their shoes, look at my text through their eyes. I imagine them to be an ordinary person who may not know much about the topic at hand. My challenge is to write in a way that gives them understanding.

I’ll give you an example. I was working with a national non-profit that focused on improving childhood nutrition. They had a program where they went into elementary and middle schools and taught children about home gardening, making smart food choices, and showed them how fruits and vegetables could be just as fun to eat as junk food.

I was helping this group to get a grant from one of the biggest retailers in the U.S. I assumed that the people reading this grant request probably didn’t know much about these topics. In fact, I figured they were all well off and probably never had to worry whether or not they and their families were eating well.

With that in mind, I knew I needed to get them to see these issues from another viewpoint other than their own.

So that’s how I approached the project. I had to get creative and figure out how best to explain the situation, what they non-profit was proposing, and how important it was for this giant company to help.

Sure, the material was dry. There were a lot of stats, a lot of data, and I had to massage it into something interesting and compelling. I had to flex my creative muscles.

And that’s what I did. I didn’t write the request in a sterile, by-the-numbers way that I’d seen in so similar documents. I told a story. I wrote about children in the inner-city who had never seen a vegetable garden. I wrote about kids in rural areas who were growing up with diabetes and obesity problems from eating so much junk food. I wrote about a future where the health care system is overrun with adults in poor health.

And you know what? They gave the non-profit the grant. Two-hundred thousand dollars. Not bad.

I’ve found that looking at every writing project as an exercise in creativity not only makes it more fun for me, but it also gives me a chance to do something different. Like with requesting a grant. I know the people reviewing these documents are seeing a lot of the same language, the same points, the same arguments. It’s got to be monotonous for them. When I give them something different to read, something that takes them on a journey, then it’s going to stand out from the rest. And in the end, that’s really what matters.

If you feel like you’re getting into a rut with a project, take a step back and see if you can come at it from a creative angle. I guarantee you’ll end up with something better than expected.

RB