As freelance writers, we are all about drumming up business. I’m not quite a query free freelancer yet, so I tend to be open to many different jobs. But, even if my bottom line was suffering, and my husband and cat were looking at me with big, sorrowful hungry eyes, there are some jobs I just would not take. How about you?

I’m not really talking about the jobs with horrifying pay (like the .90/300 words posting I saw on Twitter last week) or the ones that are blantantly unethical (like helping some kid cheat his way through college). I’m more curious about whether you refuse to take jobs doing a particular type or writing or writing in a certain industry. I have a two hard and fast ones:

Freelance Grant writing – If I worked for a non-profit, I would write grants for them like there was no tomorrow, but I do not ever foresee myself becoming a freelance grant writer. After taking an intensive Master’s level grant writing class and writing three grants in three short months, I have to tell you that half the pain of grant writing is the fact that you do not work within the organization. A grant is all about capturing a company or nonprofit’s character, its history, and its current goings-on (often insider, only semi-public information, like budgets and plans). Grant writing takes a lot more insider knowledge than even marketing or PR. While it is by no means impossible to write a grant for an organization that you don’t report to every day, it is (and this is just my estimation), about 20 zillion times harder, simply for the reasons I just stated. Nope, I just won’t write it.

Pharmaceutical Companies – This one is for personal reasons. Someone in my immediate family was harmed irreparably by a pharmaceutical company that decided to skip human testing and FDA approval (even though its drug obviously, obviously fell into the category of drugs that needed FDA approval) and market to doctors, who then used it on helpless, premature babies.  Sadly, upon doing research, I found that this dishonesty is not at all rare in the pharmaceutical industry. Yes, I see both sides of the coin where they are trying to keep their R&D funding by producing lots of good drugs, but I feel that there are enough bad apples out there that I can’t in good conscience write for a pharmaceutical company client.

And you know what? The fact that I don’t have to write grants or shill for Big Pharma is the great thing about being self-employed. We don’t have bosses handing work down to us. We choose our own clients. If we have a moral or personal restriction, then we move on to the next client and leave that one to another freelancer.

So how about you? Do you have any “No! I just won’t write it” scenarios?