Why I still find writing and editing interesting
I’ve been writing professionally for about twenty years. That’s long enough to have outlasted several trends, a handful of employers and at least one complete reinvention of what “content” is supposed to mean.
People don’t usually ask whether I still enjoy it. They just assume.
Occasionally someone does the maths and gets a slightly worried look, the way you might if a chef admitted they’d been making the same dish since 2005.
So here’s the answer.
The subject is never really the subject
Every brief I’ve ever taken has had something underneath it.
A company nervous about a competitor. A founder who can’t explain what they sell. A product that works but nobody knows why they need it.
The visible job is to write something. The real job is to work out what’s actually going on, then find a way to say it clearly.
That second part doesn’t get old, because the specific version of it is always different.
I’ve done it for fintech companies, router manufacturers, WordPress plugin makers, personal finance blogs and at least one very confused ecommerce brand that sold both luxury candles and garden furniture.
Twenty years of that is twenty years of different puzzles. I’ve just got faster at spotting what kind of puzzle it is.
Editing is better than writing
This sounds like heresy but I mean it, with one caveat. Writing is often frustrating.
You know what you want to say and the sentence keeps coming out wrong.
There’s a specific kind of suffering in staring at a draft that’s almost right and not being able to see why it isn’t.
But I still love it. The frustration is part of it.
Getting a sentence to do exactly what you wanted it to do, after four attempts where it didn’t, is a genuinely good feeling that still hasn’t worn off.
Editing is just better in a different way.
Where writing is mostly struggle and occasionally joy, editing is where the actual thinking happens, where you read something back and realise the third paragraph was the introduction all along.
You’re not trying to find the thought. The thought is already there. You’re just cutting away everything that’s getting in its way.
I’ve spent more time editing other people’s work in recent years, and it turns out I like it more than I expected to.
Not more than writing. More than I thought I would.
The work got harder, which helped
The arrival of AI content tools didn’t make my job redundant. It made it more specific.
The question used to be “can someone produce a competent piece on this topic?”
Now it’s “can someone produce something that’s worth reading rather than just technically complete?”
That’s a harder question to answer.
It involves judgment calls that are genuinely difficult and occasionally wrong. I find that more interesting than the version of this job where the challenge was mostly volume.
I still learn things
Last month I learned more than I wanted to know about router firmware update cycles.
The month before that, conditional logic in form builders. Before that, structured data markup and why it matters.
None of these were on the list of things I thought I’d ever have a working knowledge of.
Most of them I’ve now forgotten. But the process of getting up to speed quickly on something unfamiliar and then writing about it in a way that makes sense to someone who knows even less, that’s a skill that keeps needing to be exercised.
This new knowledge doesn’t atrophy, which means the job keeps being something I can get better at.
That’s probably the real answer. Many years in, there’s still room to improve. That’s not nothing.
If any of this sounds like your kind of approach to content, I’d genuinely enjoy a conversation. Drop me a line. No hard sell, just a chat.
