Right now I’m working on formatting my novel as an ebook. After that’s published, I’ll start formatting the print version. And when I say formatting, it comes down to copying my manuscript into a template that’s already been prepared. It’s really that easy to get your content ready for uploading.
But it is time consuming. So, if you’d rather not have to copy and paste for hours, you can hire someone else to take care of it for you.
Last year, I was a contractor at a very large pharma company in NJ. As a technical writer, I thought I’d get to do a lot of writing. I didn’t. Mostly I wrote functional specs that were dictated to me by others on the team. And I did a lot of copying and pasting of content from old templates into new templates. I did that every day for about 1 year.
You can imagine how fast your brain goes to sleep when all you have to do is copy and paste. Let’s just say, that wasn’t exactly one of my more challenging writing assignments.
But it did prepare me for this. So yes, even the most mundane, boring, tedious activities can be meaningful. Next time you’re stuck doing something truly mind-numbing, don’t forget that perhaps, at some point, it will prepare you for something better.