How creative writing can help improve your writing business

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If you think creative writing is a waste of time, think again.

I don’t apologize for using part of my business days working on creative writing. Whether it’s fiction, scriptwriting, or poetry, creative writing can help improve the same writing skills used to write blog posts, white papers, articles, speeches, or marketing materials.

How, you ask?

Creative writing forces you to really think about the subtle ways words can convey subtext and meaning

Word choices. Sentence structure. Giving characters voices. Creating a logical flow. All of these things, and more, apply to creative writing as well as persuasive writing, business writing, copywriting—all types of writing.

Entering writing competitions is a great way to challenge yourself. I’ve never felt entirely comfortable writing short stories, so every so often I enter a short story contest. I particularly enjoy flash-fiction competitions where your story has to include something specific (mostly so writers don’t cheat by submitting something they’ve been working on for months). Having a tight deadline forces you to buckle down and write. There’s no time to overthink your work. The first time I entered the Writers Weekly 24-Hour Short Story Contest I wound up getting a prize. Not a top prize by any stretch of the imagination, but my name was listed among the honorees and I won a couple of e-books. That was enough to encourage me to try again.

A couple years ago, a friend shared details for a short story competition with very specific guidelines: write the origin story for a (thankfully fake) business called Body Be Gone. I gave it a try, and my story was one of 20 stories published in Tesseray Publishing’s anthology Body Be Gone Origins Unearthed (Creatopia, 2024).

A decade ago, a good friend entered a brand new locally-run national playwriting competition, Rockford New Play Festival. She was one of the six winners. The combined creativity of those playwrights inspired me, and I entered the following year. My play, The Grove, was one of that year’s featured plays. I’m still kicking myself for not entering the competition the following year, but when the competition opened again 2018 I knew I wanted to enter it again.

Creative risks challenge you in new and unexpected ways

Photo taken (by my sister) prior to the start of the 2015 Rockford New Play Festival.

The short play I submitted that year, Near Mint, was a lot better than The Grove. I had no idea if Near Mint would make the final cut—or even the first cut—but that’s never the point of entering. Challenging myself to create characters, a setting, and give them a message that can be conveyed in 10 minutes or less is what mattered.

I think I accomplished that. Sure, I threw out three ideas before coming up with one that clicked, but late one Saturday afternoon I sat down and wrote three pages. I still liked those three pages on Sunday, so I expanded them to seven and asked a couple of trusted writer friends to read the rough draft. They gave me constructive feedback and I tweaked a few things to make the overall play even stronger.

It was exciting to see “Thank you for submitting your play to the 2018 Rockford New Play Festival!” arrive in my email box seconds after submitting my entry. Several months later another email informed me Near Mint had been selected for the festival. I later learned my script was a top-five finalist and festival organizers were surprised a script from a local writer ranked that highly in the blind judging.

Creative risks bring unexpected rewards

I write scripts and stories because I need to write scripts and stories, but sometimes they bring unexpected rewards. In 2023, Near Mint was performed as a staged reading at Bonita Springs Center for Performing Arts. My short play, The Biker and the Big Yarn, was read at Durango Arts Center’s 2023 10-Minute Play Festival. And The Dance: A Monologue Based on Real Events was published in Venus Theatre’s anthology, Frozen Women, Flowing Thoughts (Palmetto Publishing, 2024).

Those small successes inspired me to keep expanding my creative writing efforts. Every creative writing project I work on further hones my writing skills, which in turn benefits my freelance writing clients.

How does creative writing benefit your writing business?

Edited and updated from an older blog post

Paula Hendrickson
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6 thoughts on “How creative writing can help improve your writing business”

  1. My favorite creative writing spot is Creative Copy Challenge(CCC) where they give you 10 words or phrases and you have to incorporate them into a story, poem, or some other form of creative copy.

    I have samples of my entries on my personal blog. When it first started, I created a detective series on CCC. I love the site, but have been missing from it for too long. You inspire me to go back, Paula. 🙂

    Reply

  3. Great article and a pusher for me to begin my search for contests and even a class or two.
    I can hardly wait to make this spring and summer my writing renewal period!

    Reply

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