There is a flavour of professional writing which I find myself trying to avoid veering into.
If you’ve ever been on that professional networking social media platform you know exactly what I’m talking about, those articles that talk about leadership, career growth and always seem to find a new way to write an article called what I learned about insert-business-trope-here from insert-random-life-experience-there.
On site, those articles get lots of likes and reshares, but off site many assume it is all a lot of performative mugging, a bit vapid, and almost certainly driven by a lot of generative AI.
So when a guy like me sits down to write a daily article on creative motivation or skill development or artistic niche hunting, it would be real easy to drift into the lane where all those aforementioned articles persist.
That’s not my goal. Far from it, in fact. It’s the reason I don’t pepper this site with advertising. I want to be more than that. Better than that. And in fact if I were to suggest that what I’m doing here is writing articles with that similar flavour but also with a lot more homespun sincerity and (what I’m hoping is) experiential insight then you might be closer to understanding where I’m coming from with this writing project.
Still, the problem remains: writing optimistic micro-essays about creative pursuits is a genuine niche and one that has drawn the ire and ridicule of many who see it, when poorly or hastily done, as an disingenuous to the spirits of voice and purpose and method.
It becomes just more slop.
But I think I can avoid that.
After all, just because fast food commodified and ruined the hamburger, doesn’t mean you won’t find a delicious example of one somewhere else, right?
Terms FROm this POSt
- career
- I willingly stepped away from a comfortable job in 2023 to pursue something with more meaning and purpose. We live in a society that values productivity above many other things, so questioning career (that pursuit of productivity perfection and identity) is a challenging thing. I write a lot about careers and career change because it is a defining part of what I am.
- professional
- There is a formality to this term, linked to the idea of a captial-P professional like a doctor or a lawyer or an engineer. Instead, I often use it simple to refer to the span in my life as a average joe salaryman, sitting at a desk in a neat shirt and tie and replying to emails: I was a business professional, but lacking any real formal certification.
- social media
- You almost certainly found this post because it was posted on someone’s feed. The platforms are terrible, but as it stands they are about the only way to find an audience in this crazy version of the internet. I avoid the socials when I can, but to ignore their existence is to toil forever in obscurity.
- trope
- There is something more to a trope than simple cliche. At it’s heart, yeah, trope is the tired old fallback to the familiar, but the way we often use it linked to literature and television seems to imply, at least to me, a kind of unspoken language of those media, familiar ground and “something we all understand” so that the programme can continue and we don’t need to stop to explain the weird cliche that is happening on screen or upon the page.
