By Way of Introduction

I had a problem. A grave problem. An existential disaster requiring careful analysis and meditation. But I was in high school at the time, so I just muttered a few obscenities into the coffee I was drinking to look cool and went back to my Bukowski book.

I didn’t know it back then, but I was confronting a common curse bestowed upon many an aspiring scribe: I knew I wanted to write. I knew I had to write. But I had no way to prove that I could actually do it.

All I had at the time was badly written music reviews for the high school newspaper I edited and a spectacularly large cache of poetry that is now hidden under my childhood bed at my parents’ house, where it (thankfully, truly thankfully) can’t find its way to the Internet.

I wanted to be a novelist, and I figured a sound career path would be to apply to college for journalism and write for newspapers like all my heroes did (Hemingway, Hunter S. Thompson, Twain, and, seemingly, everyone else). Thus I’d be able to make a living by writing nonfiction in some newsroom or another, while writing fiction on the side. After that, I’d become a best-selling novelist, and so on and so forth.

The more I dug in and learned, though, the more the nonfiction world at large seemed to be teeming with barriers and catch-22s. How could you break into writing for publications if you had no writing to show for yourself, only a feeling, a knowing?

But like all writers, I had no choice. I knew this thing was inside me and that the only logical way to avoid living my life with a used car salesman’s sense of fulfillment was to follow it. I believe that we have no choice but to do what we do. So we keep trying at it until we break the glass barrier, or at least begin to scratch its surface.

In my case, I got accepted into journalism school. I wrote for the school newspaper and tried my hand at some feature stories; wrote some movie reviews, op-eds, and event recaps; and even continued writing my (praise God, not online) poetry for a bit. One Journalism 101 teacher flat out told me to quit because she didn’t think I had the chops. I didn’t take her advice: It was becoming clear to me that I got a thrill out of writing nonfiction, even if I wasn’t any good at it yet. It made me feel electric. It made me feel alive. The real world is imbued with amazing and terrifying and hilarious and strange stories, and people will pay you to write about them. What writer wouldn’t want to do that? Moreover, magazines offered a venue that equally favored creativity and storytelling alongside the principles of reportage found in newspapers. I was sold. I wanted to write nonfiction that read like fiction.

So I applied for fellowships and programs at a handful of prestigious schools and societies. I didn’t get them. The writing world, again, seemed like an exclusive club—one that, at times, didn’t even seem worth all the trouble. (Get ready for an introductory salary equivalent to what you made working as a cashier at Toys “R” Us last summer!)1Don’t tell anyone, but I made as much in my first reporter job as I did selling Barbies under the looming specter of a giant smiling giraffe.

But, eventually, I caught a break (as we all do, if we keep at it long enough): National Geographic magazine hired me as an intern. They even gave me a shot at a small article for the print edition, which made my life when it came out. (I sometimes wonder if I should have called it a day when I was nineteen.) While there, I asked a staff writer how to become a staff writer at a magazine like National Geographic. His advice: “Work for newspapers for ten years.” It was like a journalistic boot camp, he said. It makes you fast. It teaches you to produce. It trains you to interview and read sources. And it begins to instill in you all the basic narrative elements inherent to magazine writing.

I figured, what the hell? I wanted to write for magazines, but if this guy said that’s what I had to do, then that’s what I had to do. So after I graduated I began applying for newspaper jobs.

Again, I got rejected. Or, more accurately, and perhaps marginally worse: I received no response. I queried paper after paper. From the swampy stretches of Beaumont, Texas, to the glacier-flanked town of Juneau, Alaska, my résumé rode the rails of a country on an economic downturn alongside innumerable fellow bindle stick-toting candidates. The newspaper industry was teetering its way to its own obituary pages. I imagined scores of journalism grads like myself sitting at their parents’ Compaqs, Sallie Mae looming over their shoulders, all in a cutthroat battle for the same hilariously tiny pool of bad-paying jobs.

After giving up on competitive metropolitan markets, I began targeting a paper in Northern Ohio. I e-mailed the editor to follow up on my résumé. No response. I called the editor. I harassed the editor. I begged the editor. Finally, either recognizing my bulldog, reporter-worthy tenacity, or simply succumbing to it, he conceded and offered me an interview. I drove three-and-a-half hours past endless cornfields and attempted to convince him of my passion, despite my lack of stellar clips. I got the gig. I moved into the second floor of a dilapidated mansion that was decades past its prime.

What followed was one of the greatest years of my life. The editors didn’t seem to care too much what I wrote, so long as it filled pages and didn’t result in a lawsuit, so I wrote everything I’d always wanted to—narrative features, news, Q&As, investigative pieces. I went on drug raids. I roamed prisons and abandoned schools that were allegedly haunted. It was everything I’d hoped and imagined journalism would be: life as adventure, simply waiting for someone to document it.

I built up a clip portfolio. From my crumbling Victorian and my dying laptop, I lived like a king on $18,000 a year. I’d finally been given a chance to prove that I could do what I always knew I could do.

Later, I took a job as a staff writer at an alt-weekly and eventually caught wind of an opening for a managing editor at Writer’s Digest, the longest-running and biggest publication in the world for writers.2Note: This is not a shameless plug for the publisher of this book—I’ve read Writer’s Digest magazine and Writer’s Digest Books since high school. Starstruck, I figured that while I was vastly underqualified for such a gig, I’d hate myself if I didn’t at least throw my hat in the ring. (Interview writers all day long? Yes. Yes, please.)

In the interview, I told the editor at the time, Maria Schneider, that while I didn’t have a lot of editing experience (read: close to none), I knew I could do it. And, moreover, I was a writer. Wasn’t that more important for a staff member at Writer’s Digest? She asked me who my favorite author was. I said Vonnegut. We clicked. To this day, I still credit Vonnegut (and Maria) for launching my magazine career.

But let’s stop for a moment and address the seeming narcissist in the room: What’s the point of all this rambling?

To me, instructional books often read like a dry oration from a man behind the curtain. You don’t know who that person really is. He speaks from a perceived podium of authority, cloaking the failures and rejections that truly made him who he is while proselytizing a set of best practices gleaned from an invisible pool of unspoken experience.

Writing is not easy. It’s never easy. It’s all about passion. You can never reach too high. Rejection happens, constantly. It’s inherent to the field. It’ll happen to you. But it doesn’t mean anything. It’ll make you sharper. It’ll make you angrier. It’ll draw the best out of you.

Moreover, my story is an example of one of many paths. The great beauty of writing is that everyone gets there in their own way. You don’t have to do what I did, or what anyone else did. Just as you have your own writing method, everyone reaches their goals in a way that only they could have done. You are never too young or too old. You need no formal schooling. You need no literary pedigree. (My family is in the medical field; I’m a literary bastard and proud of it.)

When I was starting out, I searched for a book like this on magazines and the freelance world, and found none. That’s why I pitched it to WD. Using honest insights from my years as a magazine editor, a staff writer, and a freelance writer, I want to present to you the fundamentals of the craft and a set of best practices for writing for publications, regardless of whether you want to do it full-time, part-time, or simply on occasion to get some good nonfiction credits to promote your fiction. The end result is your decision. The important thing to know is that there is a starting point—and that anyone can get there.

Freelancing is one of the greatest things on Earth.3No dress code! No employees! Make your own hours! For more musings on the awesomeness of freelancing, visit writersdigest.com/essential-guide-to-freelance-writing and read the article "10 Reasons the Freelance Life Is a Good Life" by Art Spikol.

1Don’t tell anyone, but I made as much in my first reporter job as I did selling Barbies under the looming specter of a giant smiling giraffe.

2Note: This is not a shameless plug for the publisher of this book—I’ve read Writer’s Digest magazine and Writer’s Digest Books since high school.

3No dress code! No employees! Make your own hours! For more musings on the awesomeness of freelancing, visit writersdigest.com/essential-guide-to-freelance-writing and read the article "10 Reasons the Freelance Life Is a Good Life" by Art Spikol.