A Senior's Guide to Finding the Right Business Model for Your Content Creativity - Part One

A Senior's Guide to Finding the Right Business Model for Your Content Creativity - Part One

When it comes to launching a second career, many seniors find that they have a knack for creating content. They may have accumulated this talent during their service for a corporation or earlier in high school or college.
 

“The State of Gig Work in 2021” - 16% of Americans have ever earned money from an online gig platform.

But now, they have the opportunity to put it to use for online earnings. There are many different business models that you can consider if you want to tap into your creative talent and make content for others to consume or even use as their own.

“Earning money through these apps or websites varies by a number of factors – most notably by age, race and ethnicity, and household income. Three-in-ten 18- to 29-year-olds have ever earned money through an online gig platform, but that share drops to 18% among those ages 30 to 49 and even smaller for those ages 50 and up.”

 

The market is wide-open for seniors. You bring talent, drive, and wisdom to the online experience. There are seniors, like yourself who are looking for services and content from someone who understands their unique perspective.

In fact, you aren’t limited to just one business model. You can create multiple businesses that help you gain even more revenue. It’s important to choose whichever business model you feel will work best for your schedule.

Not all of them allow the same freedom in terms of flexibility and consistency. You might want to analyze each one and rank them in order of what you feel will deliver the most in terms of personal satisfaction as well as profits.

The State of Gig Work in 2021 | Pew Research Center

#howto, #seniorbusiness #seniorguide

All works are the content of Sandra Lee Schubert.

Works are not to be used except with permission from the author, Sandra Lee Schubert, or with a link back to this site- Creativevagabond.com

Works have been published in more than one location by the author.

Photo Credit: Sandra Lee Schubert

 

 

Poetic Spam? The Quest for Inspiration

Write A Way: Journey to Creativity

 "You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some with you."   ~ Joseph Joubert

 Poetic Spam? The Quest for Inspiration

Where do you find your inspiration? Some people pull it deep from inside them. Others glean it from life experience. Or you can find it on the side of the road. When you are ready to express your creativity how do you do it? Do you write for two hours every day or grab your time on the bank line? Do rules govern your creativity? In a writing workshop, a participant refused to do one of the exercises because she didn't create it that way. She couldn't write unless she did it just her way, thus missing the opportunity for exploration. A schedule can provide you with a successful framework for a writing life or it can make writing dull and ordinary. Keep to your schedule but shake the tree every now and then and see what kind of fruit hits you on the head.

 "Creativity is piercing the mundane to find the marvelous." ~ Bill Moyers

Inspiration can be found anywhere if you look for it. Daily I weed through emails, separating out the friendly from the Spam. This task has frustrated, annoyed, and offended me. One day while visiting the Spam folder to see if friendly mail had been sucked into the void I noticed something. The subject lines of the offensive mail had some interesting configurations of words. At first, the poetry in them was not obvious. Taking the lines and linking them together I was able to create spontaneous poetry. Thinking outside of how you view the mundane can take you into these new avenues of expression. Poetry can be found anywhere if you aren't limited by what you think it should be. Just by looking at what before was annoying became an experiment in creativity that I might have missed.

"Creativity is the power to connect the seemingly unconnected." - William Plomer

We all have hidden or wide-open prejudices about what is good art, writing, performing. We have set ideas about how our own art should be created. Sometimes the most free-spirited artist can be the one that is the most restricted never allowing for a different point of view about what is good. Is your idea of good art limited to the masters like Da Vinci or Rembrandt? Do you find avant-garde theater is the only true theater? Someone's great art maybe a velvet Elvis portrait or dogs playing poker. Is your point of view limiting? Open your eyes to new possibilities and you may discover inspiration is everywhere. The trees speak to you, the sky paints you colors the earth opens up her secrets. The idea is to take what you normally do and change it around a little. Make life an adventure and be the grandmaster explorer of all the riches possible to you.

"The world is full of poetry. - The air is living with its spirit; and the waves dance to the music of its melodies, And sparkle in its brightness." ~ James Percival

Found Poetry is the rearrangement of words or phrases taken randomly from other sources (example: clipped newspaper headlines, bits of advertising copy, handwritten cards pulled from a hat) in a manner that gives the rearranged words a completely new meaning.

Creative Writing Prompts:

Be creative and read your own Spam mail subject lines (please don't open them - an adventure in virus-dom is not the goal). See if any of the words or lines interests you. Or using my Spam email subject lines see if you can create some poetry or even a tiny story out of them.

A swinish

Guys, feel eighteen again!

Stop fruit down

Small cap promo mover alert

Saleslady knee hole

Finally there's a way

Culprit erodible

Hot women doing crazy things

Sad dependent spoon

Autoregressive

Underbooked

Underwitholding

Authority relieve your strongest pain light

Spumoni taxi

Muscle bound guys become the biggest bottoms

while pole in wall is glory whole

Aching reckon apollonian declarator workplace civic

Here are my sample poems

Web-tribution: finding words all around

Muscle bound guys become the biggest bottoms

Underbooked and underwitholding

Take spumoni taxi

~*~

Autoregressive

Sad dependent spoon

Culprit erodible

Guys feel eighteen again

Finally, there's a way!

 ~*~

 Saleslady knee hole

A swinish

Stop fruit down

Lane of careful sliding

Depends on the knee

Are these brilliant poems? Not really. The point is to look for inspiration in unexpected ways and be willing to experiment and fail. Be willing to create bad writing. On the other side could be something brilliant.

In her essay Bad Writing, Julia Cameron gives us writers the task of going out and buying the tabloids we usually read secretively on the supermarket line. Julia suggests looking over some of your favorite titles and creating your own "tabloid" story. "Alien baby is my love child", "8,000 year-old man found buried alive in the desert", "Writer's fear stepping out of the ordinary", you get the idea. Have fun with it. Create outrageous tales. If you do it with abandon and a sense of fun you should find you are energized and want to return to your work.

Look for ways to expand how you create. If you paint try coloring with regular crayons or making collages out of found pictures. Create poetry by cutting words out of magazines. Create poetry with found pictures.

Creating should be deep, fun, joyous, exciting, and enlivening. Create with your arms wide open and allow inspiration to meet you in all places. 

Start Your Story Now

Write A Way: Journey to Creativity

Start Your Story Now by Sandra Lee Schubert

Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story. John Barth

When I created the course, Writing for Life: Creating a Story of Your Own, I wanted to give people the opportunity to share their stories in their own way.

Creating your life story is easy. You already know the main characters, the storyline, locations. Not only that you have complete control over how your story unfolds and how it ends. Most people worry about telling the truth, hurting the feelings of family and friends, or that it will be boring. Remember you are valuable. You don’t have to be a rock star or even a good storyteller to share your story. You can keep your story completely private or choose to share it more broadly.

First of all, decide what you would like to do with your story? Do you want to record the events of your life for personal use? Share a family history? Or do you envision your story being an inspiration for a wider audience? When you have decided what form your story will take then the writing will be easier.

Recording your life: 

It will be easier if you break things down into sections-

• Childhood
• Teen years
• Adulthood. Smaller sections will make it easier to take on the task of writing.

Childhood: Do some free writing using a couple of prompts. What is your earliest memory? What did you do on the holidays? Who was your favorite teacher?

Prompts will reveal more memories and allow you to begin a narrative of your early years.

Always be nice to those younger than you, because they are the ones who will be writing about you. Cyril Connolly

Teen years: There is a lot of juice in our teen years. If you have a high school yearbook, use it to trigger some memories. What were your hopes and dreams? Did you have a high school sweetheart or were you a loner?

Adult years: This section is usually the easiest because memories are the freshest. But you also have so many memories that it is a challenge to narrow your focus. Pick a topic that has the most appeal to you. Is there a story you tell all the time? Maybe it is your honeymoon or the day you were promoted.

I can't think of anything to write about except families. They are a metaphor for every other part of society. Anna Quindlen 

Don’t worry about getting things right. Just allow fifteen minutes to an hour every day and you will begin to lay out your story in a short time. At some point, you put it all together and decide whether to share or just have it for your pleasure.

Remember this is your life story. You can pick and choose what you want to write and how you want to share it. The writing for course lays this all out for you. It is up to you to take the first step. Start here and keep going.

Creative Writing Prompts:

Create a memory book. Begin gathering memories by collecting photos, rocks, and seashells from favorite outings. You can use a scrapbook format or a simple journal book, but just make sure the book is big enough to paste things into it.

Start Your Life Story Journey Now: If you have been sitting on the fence about writing your life story- please don’t waste any more time. Take the course and write at your pace and see the value of your life.

Planting Our Creative Garden - Exploring Your Writing Through Your Senses

Spring to me is the perfect time to make plans and set goals. The air vibrates as everything wakes up. The birds are perkier, and lunchtime is for walking outside and not just for huddling in warm offices. The ground has thawed enough for planting to begin. What we plant now will blossom and bear fruit in the summer and the fall. It is also the time to seed our creative gardens.

My grandmother’s garden took two forms. Her front lawn was manicured and beautiful. A wayward dandelion knew not to rest in her grass. Flowers lined her house, leading to the backyard. At first glance, it mirrored the front lawn with well-placed bushes and trimmed grass. But toward the back, there was a line of demarcation. Behind the careful planning, she gave her garden over to its natural desires. The garden was a riot of color and textures, a cornucopia of sensory pleasure. Wildflowers grew with abandon, trees linking with shrubs. Bees had their choice of nectar. My grandmother loved her perfect garden but relished her wild one, as did her grandchildren. We could walk through her wild garden and deeper into the woods where we reached a stream we followed to many adventures. We literally entered the creative world, wild, free, and full of possibility.

As with gardening, plan your writing life. Goals can provide a foundation for even greater creativity. Think about what you want to accomplish through writing. What do you have to say? Whom do you want to reach? Words, like seeds, are ready to take root and flower. How will you let them blossom? As with my grandmother’s garden, there is a wild side we can cultivate. In her book, Fruitflesh: Seeds of Inspiration for Women Who Write, Gayle Brandeis, asks us to connect again with our organic roots, our bodies, and our creative nature.

Creative Writing Prompts: Planting Our Creative Garden

• Create your own wild garden of creativity. First, get outside. Take along your pen and paper, even a camera or drawing pad. Walk around your neighborhood and see it for the first time. Imagine you are a tourist. What is your first impression? Notice the colors, smells, and sounds of where you live. Write about it from that point of view. If you brought along a camera and something to draw, take some photos or sketch your next-door neighbor. Later create a collage of what you wrote, add any photos and drawings.

• In the coming weeks; choose a flower or fruit of the week and write about it. Describe the color, smell, and shape of it.

• Create a collage that represents the flower or fruit. For example, if you picked a rose, your collage might reflect images of love, flashes of red or pink, maybe a wedding photo. Try to recreate your writing visually. It doesn’t have to be perfect. Like my grandmother’s garden, it can be unordered.

• What can thrive in your garden of creativity? You might even write out your writing goals and add them to your collages as flowers or plants ready to blossom. Be outrageous and see where it leads you.