How Creative Writing
Will Make You Better in Business

1. Less Stress

Having any hobby that allows you to let loose and enjoy yourself has a positive effect on your stress levels.

Non-stressful activities, like writing, allow your body to release endorphins which make you feel happy, even when you have big projects looming at work. Creative writing is a superb hobby, even if you never strive to improve or hope to publish.

Plus, writing about stressful experiences has been shown to lessen the impact of trauma on the mind and body. In a group of 70 individuals suffering from asthma and arthritis, those who were allowed to write about their stress rated substantially better on their measures of disease severity than those who were instructed to write about non-stressful situations.

Thus, setting your pen to paper and creatively chronicling your daily stresses can make you healthier and happier.

2. Better Critical Thinking

There are two ways to get better at writing: reading and sharing your writing with others.

Reading voraciously, regardless of the genre or style, is bound to expand your field of experience, which will help you develop different stories for your future creative writing.

However, reading also allows you to enhance your ability to evaluate characters and situations and gain knowledge from them — in other words, it develops your ability to think critically.

Critical thinking is crucial in every business at every level.

Leaders expect their employees to be competent critical thinkers, able to make effective and efficient decisions using the right information. By learning to parse through your emotions to understand exactly how a certain novel or short story is effective, you will be able to master your emotions in the business sphere as well.

3. Better Communication

If you recall, the second way you can improve your writing skill is by inviting others to read and review your work.

Without others’ input, you will never learn the mistakes in your writing; it is unlikely that you will be able to catch repeated grammar mistakes, plot holes, inconsistencies, and other glaring issues without another person to point them out.

In the digital age, many creative writers create websites and interact on forums in order to connect with like-minded writers all over the world.

You can gain many crucial communication skills by engaging with other writers on the Web. First, you can dramatically improve your basic spelling and grammar, making simple business messages easier for others to understand. Additionally, you will learn how to take other’s feedback, positive and negative, and apply that information to improve.

In business, utilizing critiques to the best of your ability will provide you a substantial advantage over your peers.

4. Better Retention

As early as elementary school, students learn how much easier it is to remember facts once they have written them down.

Writing solidifies certain information in your brain, which is why note-takers tend to excel in school more than listeners: In one study, an entire group of students remembered the same amount of information from a particular video (about 40 percent) but those allowed to take notes were able to recall the more important points.

This boon to retention seems to extend to all forms of writing, including the creative variety, because it engages the spatial memory of the brain, which is the strongest. Therefore, you may be able to increase your ability to recall key facts by putting pen to paper every once in a while.

5. More Empathy

The best creative writing includes characters that seem to leap off the page with outstanding depth and authenticity; it is easy for readers to believe that these characters are real people.

Crafting such well-rounded characters is far from effortless. In fact, it requires a finely honed sense of intuition and perception that most people unfortunately lack. Creative writers, with time and effort, can develop stronger senses of empathy to generate more meaningful characters — and more meaningful relationships in real life.

Though the phrase “It’s not personal” is exceedingly common in business, the truth is that the most successful people remain constantly aware of the humanity of their employees and consumers.

Being empathetic allows you to better understand what encourages your employees to be better and what drives your target audience to act, which ultimately makes your business more profitable.

See our pages: Understanding Others and Types of Empathy for more.

6. More Originality

Finally, we come to the “creative” part of creative writing. Whether you are drawing on your own experiences or imagining completely new universes, when you write creatively you are encouraging your brain to stretch and unfold.

With practice, you will become faster and more capable at thinking outside the box — or thinking as though there is no box — so you can come up with more fascinating storylines and more captivating characters. The habit of creativity will extend into every facet of your life, including work, where you will be able to solve problems in new and exciting ways.

The brain is a muscle — or else it acts like one. The more you exercise it with challenging activities, the faster, stronger, and better it can perform in the future.

Creative writing is perhaps the brain’s equivalent of a decathlon: It forces you to think, feel, perceive, and remember, to communicate effectively and to make smart decisions, to be innovative as well as feasible, and to let loose all with the purpose of generating a product you can be proud of.

When one activity provides all these benefits, it is easy to see why creative writing can help you succeed in any endeavor — especially business.

How Creative Writing Will Make You Better in Business