by Sam E. Jones

Created on: May 31, 2010

The main difference between writing for fun, as opposed to writing for profit is in the type of enjoyment that is experienced. Because most for-profit writing is non-fiction, writing is more analytical than creative and thus requires a whole different part of your brain.

Fiction writing on the other hand is all about exploring your imagination and adding depth to characters and there is generally a journey of some kind, even if it’s just a learning experience. Writing fiction for fun is all about expressing yourself and finding little parts of yourself you never knew existed. It’s about laughing and crying and biting your own lip as you pause at the keyboard contemplating your next move. It’s about letting the emotional chemicals wash over your brain as you dive so deeply into what you are writing about that you sometimes disappear completely for awhile.

Non-fiction writing is about finding something that interests you enough to carry you to at least 400 words. It’s about ruminating and conceptualizing and deciding where you stand on your subject and then trying to create an opening paragraph that you believe will pull in readers by the truckload. It’s about choosing words and massaging sentences and then paragraphs and trying to make things follow logically, because whether it’s an article where you are expressing an opinion or one where you are simply trying to convey facts regarding a certain topic, things have to flow from the first word to the last, and anything the doesn’t add to what came before and get your ready for the next, causes the reader to waver; and you never want your reader to waver, because they might just stop and go away.

Non-fiction writing for business is fun though, because it forces you as the writer to use your brain in ways you don’t normally have to in every-day living. It’s fun because you wind up learning about things you never would have imagined, and it’s fun because once you reach your word count, you don’t feel the need to endlessly edit everything. Non-fiction writing for business is not so fun when you feel the pressure to produce or when you have to worry about whether those who will be reading it will like it, and if your work is a good as you think it is.

Writing for fun though, is always fun, as it’s sort of part of the definition. You only write for fun when it’s fun, and if you find it’s not, you stop.

That’s the difference in a nutshell, writing for business is work; writing for fun is not.

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