So You Want My Job
Hey! My elepolo piece on Slate is up!
A friend of mine emailed yesterday. "Tell me again how you get a job like yours?"
OK. How you get a job like mine:
1. Spend 35 years devouring every written thing from Ayn Rand to Andy Rooney while having no idea what you want to "be" when you "grow up." (Bonus points for an adolescence filled with self-indulgent poetry and journals.) If you want to be a "travel writer" - I think of myself as a writer who travels - then white-hot wanderlust is pretty much a prerequisite.
2. Write a lot of corporate stuff in your "real job" whilst composing moody personal essays and drinking with writerly friends in your spare time.
3. Submit a few of these essays and be brutally rejected. My first submission, on succumbing to Cubs fandom, was dismissed by the Chicago Reader thusly: "This is so not the sort of thing we're interested in." Not that I'm bitter.
4. Believe that your stuff is better than two-thirds of the crap you read and keep trying.
5. Educate yourself about markets and the business. There are worse places to start than Writer's Market.
6. Upon getting one's first real assignment, knock that sucker out of the park. (All this is presumed, of course, on having at least a smidgeon of native talent.)
7. Use that clip and your natural chutzpah to work your way into bigger pubs. Work fast, because you're not a kid. Use this to your advantage and aim high.
8. Network like mad. From personal experience, I've found good journalists to be generous with both advice and contacts. Most of us benefit from this, and we like to repay our karmic bar bills.
9. Write every day. If I don't have an assignment (I have a deadline today that I'm procrastinating - can't you tell?) I write on my blog or emails to friends or in a journal or (very, very last resort) a bit on my book.
10. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
A friend of mine emailed yesterday. "Tell me again how you get a job like yours?"
OK. How you get a job like mine:
1. Spend 35 years devouring every written thing from Ayn Rand to Andy Rooney while having no idea what you want to "be" when you "grow up." (Bonus points for an adolescence filled with self-indulgent poetry and journals.) If you want to be a "travel writer" - I think of myself as a writer who travels - then white-hot wanderlust is pretty much a prerequisite.
2. Write a lot of corporate stuff in your "real job" whilst composing moody personal essays and drinking with writerly friends in your spare time.
3. Submit a few of these essays and be brutally rejected. My first submission, on succumbing to Cubs fandom, was dismissed by the Chicago Reader thusly: "This is so not the sort of thing we're interested in." Not that I'm bitter.
4. Believe that your stuff is better than two-thirds of the crap you read and keep trying.
5. Educate yourself about markets and the business. There are worse places to start than Writer's Market.
6. Upon getting one's first real assignment, knock that sucker out of the park. (All this is presumed, of course, on having at least a smidgeon of native talent.)
7. Use that clip and your natural chutzpah to work your way into bigger pubs. Work fast, because you're not a kid. Use this to your advantage and aim high.
8. Network like mad. From personal experience, I've found good journalists to be generous with both advice and contacts. Most of us benefit from this, and we like to repay our karmic bar bills.
9. Write every day. If I don't have an assignment (I have a deadline today that I'm procrastinating - can't you tell?) I write on my blog or emails to friends or in a journal or (very, very last resort) a bit on my book.
10. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
posted by Cyn at 10:32 PM
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