When I first started freelancing, one of the biggest adjustments wasn’t managing clients, setting my rates or chasing invoices.
It was learning how little information I’d sometimes be given.
After years of working in-house, I was used to being part of the bigger picture. I knew the objectives behind a campaign. I understood the audience. I’d sat in the meetings, heard the debates and witnessed the occasional disagreement over whether a headline was “too bold” or “not bold enough.”
By the time I started writing, I knew why I was writing.
Then I became a freelancer.
Suddenly, projects would arrive looking something like this:
“Can you write a blog about web traffic?”
And that was it, no context.
For some writers, that’s probably a dream.
For me, it felt slightly unsettling.
The problem with my brain
I’ve always been naturally curious.
When someone gives me a project, I immediately want to understand what’s happening around it.
Who are we speaking to?
Why are we creating this?
What does success look like?
What’s the bigger objective?
What problem are we trying to solve?
These aren’t questions I ask to sound clever. They’re questions I ask because I genuinely want to understand.
And because experience has taught me that the quality of the writing is often directly linked to the quality of the thinking that happens beforehand.
The writing isn’t always the problem
One of the biggest things I’ve learned over the years is that writing can only solve certain problems.
Good writing can make a message clearer. It can make an idea more persuasive, help people understand, engage and take action.
What it can’t do is fix a confused strategy.
Sometimes a project doesn’t need better words. It needs a clearer objective or a better understanding of the audience.
Or alignment on what the business is actually trying to achieve.
That’s why some of the most valuable conversations happen before I write a single word.
The unexpected part of freelancing I ended up loving
If you’d told me years ago that I’d enjoy discussing messaging frameworks, campaign objectives and audience behaviour, I probably wouldn’t have believed you.
I became a writer because I loved words.
What surprised me was how much I enjoy everything surrounding them.
The questions.
The planning.
The problem-solving.
The process of taking a vague idea and turning it into something focused and purposeful.
Somewhere along the way, I realised I wasn’t just interested in what we were saying.
I was interested in why we were saying it.
More than a brief
One of the things I enjoy most about freelancing is becoming a temporary extension of a client’s team. Understanding the context behind the work, the challenges, the opportunities, and the goals. Because the more I understand, the better the writing tends to be.
And frankly, I find it more interesting too.
So, let’s talk about strategy
Don’t worry, I still love writing. That’s not changing any time soon. But these days, some of my favourite moments happen before the document is even open.
They happen during the conversations where ideas are challenged, audiences are defined and objectives become clearer.
The conversations where we’re talking about why the words matter.
And in my experience, that’s usually where the best work begins.
