It’s a tough decision to live the life you’ve always dreamed of…
There are always scary obstacles. It will take an incredible effort. You’re guaranteed to fail (a lot!).
But if you push through…
The air around you pulsates with life. The hard edges of life are that little bit smoother. There’s a new “crispness” to your existence that previously wasn’t there…
It was always my dream to be a writer. A writer of fiction, non-fiction, poetry…
But rarely does that kind of writing pay the bills (unless you’re Stephen King or Margaret Atwood…)
So I found workarounds… Everything I did in life so far has had an emphasis on writing, researching and storytelling.
These combined passions served me well over the years…
Indeed, writing a PhD is certainly less arduous if you’re someone who’s more than happy to pound out a few thousand words per day…
The same logic applies to a 3,000-word sales letter…
Or a sequence of emails.
So of course my background as a writer and academic made the transition to copywriting a lot smoother.
In a sense I’d been writing professionally for some years before making this transition. I’d spent three years working as a fully-funded researcher, editing my own work under an excellent mentor…
I’d also received almost a year of funding from the Arts Council of Ireland for non-fiction projects…
And I’d been published in some top-tier publications (such as The Stinging Fly and The Irish Times.)
In a sense, I was used to being paid for my writing (something not all academics or writers can boast.)
I was aware that words have real, literal value…
But these funded projects and publications didn’t provide stability. They were all short-term sources of income.
So when I came to the end of my PhD…
And the end of my second bursary from the Arts Council…
I knew I needed something more sustainable…
Something more secure…
That was when The Copy Doctor was born.
I recognised that copywriting would allow me to start living a life built around my passions…
While at the same time helping business owners to increase their revenue and their bandwidth, take a step back from the stressful task of email marketing and focus on the tasks they love doing.
Here’s to living a “crisper” existence where the air pulsates.
Slainte 🍻
Shane
P.s. If you’re interested in checking out some of my creative work, here’s a link to a professional reading of “Fragments”, a short story that was shortlisted for the RTÉ Francis MacManus Short Story Competition in 2017.