Dan Baum has written for Rolling Stone, Playboy, Wired, and other big-name magazines, and is a former staff writer for The New Yorker; on his website, you can download proposals that landed assignments with these magazines. Baum is the author of Nine Lives, and runs a blog called WordWork. The account of his “short career at The New Yorker“ ran as a series of Tweets in May. Thanks to writer Greg Korgeski, who supplied some of the questions.
Many freelancers fantasize about doing the kinds of pieces that you’ve written. What does it take to succeed in that kind of long-form journalism?
The biggest mistake I see other freelancers make is that they don’t work hard enough. I know that seems odd because if feels like we all work really hard. But it always seemed to me that getting the assignment was the hard part; researching and writing the story is the easy part.
The trick is, proposals have to be really detailed. You have to do a substantial amount of the reporting and the writing just to get the assignment. So you’ve got to be clever about that, because if you spend weeks working on a proposal, you’re going to go broke because you might not sell the story.
On the other hand, if you don’t make the proposal really good, really dense, really packed with information and really well thought out, you’re not going to get the assignments. I’ve been doing this now since 1987, that’s 22 years, and I still write proposals that don’t sell. My website has a bunch of them.
Somebody pointed out on some blog that if you read my proposals that did sell and my proposals that didn’t sell, you’d be hard pressed to tell which is which, because there’s just a lot of luck in this business.
Margaret [my wife] and I used to do freelance for newspapers when we were living in Africa and in Montana, and they would only pay us like $150 per story, but they might also pay a little bit of travel expenses. So we would use the reporting that we did for the newspaper story to finance the writing of a magazine proposal; but it’s always this balancing act between doing enough work on a proposal to sell it but not so much that you’re doing too much work for free.
Generally, by the time I get an assignment, a third of the research is done, and at the very least, I know the parameters of where the research is going to take me and I have a sense of the universe of sources and documents that are going to be available. So I can pretty quickly and easily get the story reported and written.
It may be that you don’t need to do that. I’ve never had much success writing shorter proposals. This is just what works for me, and it’s not necessarily what works for everybody. I don’t want anybody to think that I’m saying that these are the be-all-end-all of story proposals, there are plenty up on the site that haven’t worked.
Well, you’re going to laugh because I cowrote a book called The Renegade Writer about breaking the rules of freelancing, and one of the rules you read in all the writing books is that your queries have to be one page long. But when I started writing longer pitches, I started getting into the national magazines.
Portfolio had a rule that all proposals had to be one page, and Portfolio just went out of business. I don’t think they went out of business because they demanded one-page proposals; I think they went out of business because they didn’t have a very clear vision of what the magazine was. But maybe their insistence on one-page proposals was indicative of a short attention span and a certain amount of panic that things had to move so fast. And that was a monthly, so they could have really taken their time.
Your proposals are a lot of work. When you come up with a proposal idea, do you target it only to one magazine or do you say “if it doesn’t work for magazine A I’m going to send it to magazine B”?
Well, you have to write a proposal for the sensibilities of a particular magazine, so when people tell me “I have an idea for a story,” my first question is “You have an idea for a story for what magazine?” Because you can’t say, “I have an idea for a story, and if I can’t sell it Playboy I’m going to sell it to Rolling Stone, and if I can’t sell it to Rolling Stone I’m going to sell it to Harper’s,” because it just doesn’t work that way.
The story and the magazine go together and it’s very hard to re-write a proposal that doesn’t sell at one magazine for another magazine. I don’t think I’ve ever done that.
If you don’t sell that story to the magazine you originally have in mind, probably the smartest thing to do is put it aside, cut your losses, and go on to the next thing. Some people may try to recycle proposals for different magazines; I don’t think I’ve ever been able to do it.
Do you think that’s only for the type of writing you do? Because if I don’t sell something to Family Circle then I’m tweaking that thing for Woman’s Day.
It may be. I want to keep saying this that this is just my experience. Family Circle and Woman’s Day might be similar enough. In the small number of magazines that I wrote for, you just couldn’t do it. I mean, if you were writing a proposal for Wired, there’s just nobody else you could sell it to. I tried, I’ve tried, I really have. I really have tried and it just never worked for me.
What does it take to make it — what kind of interests and background do you need to be able to do the kind of journalism that you do? What is your background?
I worked for six years in newspapers and then we’ve been freelancing ever since. What does it take? I used to say that for people getting out of college, working at a newspaper is great training, but newspaper jobs are getting hard to get.
I think it takes relentlessness. When I’m starting to work on a story, I’ll start reading about something, and I’ll just follow every link, and as I’m doing it I’ll make a list in a Word document of the people that I need to find.
I start calling them immediately, and talking to them and taking notes on my computer. The expression I use with Margaret is “I had a red dog day today,” which means I had my nose down on the ground and I was going after everything today. Just hoovering in enormous amounts of information. And when I start a proposal, I try to have a series of red dog days where I am just relentless, going after everybody, and as soon as I encounter somebody’s name I pick up the phone and I call. When I finish the interview I say, Who else should I talk to? Then I call those people.
I don’t put it off — I don’t say these are people I’m going to call later — I do it right then. Man, there are times when in one day I can get enough information to write a proposal that will get me a $12,000 magazine assignment.
When you are calling people and you don’t have an assignment yet, how do you convince them to talk to you?
I say, “I’m working on a story for The New York Times Magazine.” Or “I’m working on a story for Wired magazine.”
So you don’t let them know you don’t have the assignment in hand?
No, I say I’m working on a story for Wired magazine and I am. My relationship with Wired magazine at that point is none of their business.
What do you do if they ask when the publication date is?
I say “I don’t know, that’s out of my hands; it’s above my pay grade.”
On to another topic: You have such a broad range of things that you write about. How do you know, when you come up with an idea, that it’s going to fly? If it’s already all over the Internet, how do you know it isn’t already too much in the public consciousness for somebody to want to run it?
Yeah, that’s what you always face. I want to write a story about Masdar, which is this city being built in Abu Dhabi — a zero energy city being built from scratch. I thought this would be a great story for Wired.
It turned out Wired never heard of it but they said they were suffering from Abu Dhabi fatigue — they have too many stories on Abu Dhabi. Then I tried to talk to The New York Times Magazine and didn’t get anywhere. So I dropped it. It’s a great story, but I just dropped it.
I look for stories with interesting people in them, and one of the tricks that I’m always trying to impress upon young writers is that when you’re interviewing somebody, like if I was interviewing the chief solar engineer at Masdar, a big mistake people make is talking to that guy only about solar engineering. You have to throw in questions that have nothing to do with the subject. How many siblings do you have and what number are you? What do you read? What are your hobbies? Are you married? How many kids do you have? Have you ever been divorced? You’ve got to get them talking about themselves. I’m asking these questions that are just none of my business, really personal questions, and I’ll just keep getting in closer and closer and closer.
I’ll ask, What do you earn? And you’ll see this kind of shock of recognition on the person’s face. Sometimes people say “Well, that’s none of your business,” but rarely. I can barely think of a time that’s happened to me. Usually you see the shock of recognition when the person goes, “Oh, that’s the level we’re talking on.”
People like it, when you get them talking about themselves and unrelated stuff. You need time for this, and it’s a hard thing to do on the phone. But when you’re getting all of that then you know this person as a whole person, and then you can fit them into the story in a way that you’re still writing about Masdar and solar engineering, but you can just throw in a few licks to just make that person real.
It’s kind of a New Yorker trick. When you read about people in The New Yorker, they are somehow more three-dimensional than sources in other magazines. They’re not just a font of quotes, or a representative of a point of view — they’re people.
You also mentioned that you pick up the phone and call people. How do you find them?
Oh, people are easy to find. On the net, you can Google them, and you may not find their phone number but you’ll find organizations that they’ve been attached to. It may take two or three calls. I just tracked down Oliver North and it took three or four phone calls.
It takes a certain relentlessness. It takes not being discouraged. Sometimes you’ve got to call 40 people until you find the right one. If you’re looking for somebody’s who’s obscure, you use an online phone book. If you know Mark Riseman lives somewhere in the Midwest, and you look up Mark Riseman and up come with 400 of them, you’ve got to go through and call all the ones that are in the Midwest. That can take an hour and a half and it’s tedious, but you’ll find him. That’s what I’m talking about a red dog day. You just have your nose down on the ground, and you’re on the trail all day.
Do you worry about competition — other writers coming in and horning in on your gigs?
No. For one thing, we’re kind of out of magazines. I think in a way, it’s over. I think the days of being able to make a living as a magazine writer are rapidly coming to a close.
That is so sad.
It is. I’m not boasting here, but I should be able to get work, right? I was on staff to The New Yorker for 3 years, I worked for Rolling Stone for a long time. I have written for the biggest and most prestigious magazines out there and I can’t get work. Magazines are closing, they’re shrinking, they’re going from 12 issues a year to 10 issues a year, and they’re going from 300 pages to 140 pages.
Some of them are cutting their rates.
Some of them are cutting their rates. You know, when we started magazine work in 1989, a dollar a word was middling pay. A lot of magazines are still paying $1 a word.
And for a lot of freelancers, that’s the Holy Grail. “If I get $1 a word, that means I’ve made it.”
Yeah, well that’s what we were getting in 1989. But you know that whole question of dollars per word is a terrible way to judge an assignment.
You really have to think in dollars per hour. Is that how you do it?
I think of dollars per assignment. This is kind of dollars per hour…if a magazine assignment is going to pay me $3000, then I can figure out exactly how many days I can work on that. The LA Times Magazine is a pretty good outlet for me. They paid a dollar a word but they took 5,000-word stories; I could work on that for two or three weeks, and make a living. I don’t care; it’s just as easy for me to write 5,000 words as it is for me to write 2,000 words. In some ways it’s easier. So I don’t worry about competition. People tell me that they like seeing my pitches, and it helps them. If it helps other people, if it improves the quality of writing out there, if it helps younger reporters get started, I’m happy to do it.
How do you feel about what’s going on in the industry?
My sense is this — and this may be optimistic — I think we writers are in for a few bad years, because right now the public is used to getting everything for free. So the magazines are dying and the newspapers are dying and the quality of work is going to decline because nobody has yet figured out how to get the public to pay for quality reporting.
I don’t know how long it’s going to take for the public to say we really miss reading the results of two and three weeks worth of investigative work, and that’s worth paying for. Somebody will figure out a business model to get people to pay for it. Then I think we’re going to be a golden era in journalism. I think it’s going to be spectacular some day.
When newspapers and magazines and even book publishers are no longer saddled with the expense of manufacturing, handling, and shipping atoms, it’s going to free up a huge amount of money and I think it’s going to let a whole lot more people get into this business — and there are going to be a whole lot more venues to write for, and it’s going to be great.
I think we’re going to go through a swale of no work. Until the public figures out that it has to pay for quality research and writing, we’re going to face some lean years.
I’m being optimistic. Maybe the public will never say that, maybe quality journalism is over. I kind of don’t think so.
The paper The New York Times is going to disappear; all papers are going to vanish. I don’t worry about that — I don’t really care what medium people are reading in, if it’s a Kindle or if it’s a reader, I don’t think that’s the issue. I think the issue is, how do we get the public to pay for quality research and writing? Nobody’s figured that out yet because right now the public is excited about getting all this stuff for free. It’s just going to take a little while and I don’t know how long it’s going to take.
Some day it’s going to be great for us.
I hope it’s soon…I make my living almost 100% from magazines.
Yes, we make our living 100% from our freelance writing. I’m 53, Margaret is 55, and right now it feels like we’re back at the beginning of our careers.
It’s scary, but it’s kind of exciting in a way.
Well, it’s exciting when I think about what’s going to follow this period. Although yesterday the Times had a story about digital book piracy, and that’s going to be a problem.
There’s a lot of interesting stuff out there to write about — we just have to figure out how to get the public to pay for it.
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When I started out in corporate writing in 1997, I relied heavily on Bob Bly’s book Secrets of a Freelance Writer. Now that I’m getting back into the field, I’m reading his book again. It’s brimming with useful information.
You can sign up for Bly’s free monthly e-newsletter called The Direct Response Letter and get a free marketing library worth over $100 at www.bly.com/reports.
With the economy as crazy as it is, many writers are considering diversifying into corporate writing to boost their income. Here, Bly talks about the benefits of corporate writing and how magazine writers can break in.
Q. Can you tell us how you got started as a corporate writer?
A. I majored in chemical engineering but writing was always something that appealed to me. When the corporate recruiters came on campus to recruit us engineering majors, one offered me a job as a technical marketing writer with Westinghouse — and since it was writing instead of engineering, I took it.
Q. What are the benefits of corporate writing (pay, working conditions, etc.)?
A. For many writers, it is pay. Corporate writing, as a rule, is much more lucrative than article or nonfiction book writing. My annual writing income is over $600,000 a year.
I also like the work conditions. There is no speculative work. The client hires you to write something specific, at their request, so you are paid for everything you do. This is the polar opposite of magazine and book writing, where you spend time without getting paid writing queries and proposals, hoping a publisher will accept it.
Q. What characteristics does a writer need to have to become a successful corporate writer?
A. There are many, but the key is that a corporate writer is writing to sell, especially if you are a marcom (marketing communications) writer.
St. John Ervine said, “The artist is not a man who gives the public what it wants; he is a man who makes the public wants what he gives it.”
Corporate writers are not artists. We are marketers and craftpeople. We give our clients what they want.
Q. Is it possible for magazine writers or book authors with no corporate writing experience to break in?
A. Yes. The best place to start is writing content for Web sites related to the topics of your magazine articles and books. Corporations need content for Web sites, and if you are a published magazine writer or book author, they will view you as a subject matter expert. For instance, if you write health articles, you can write content on health issues for a pharmaceutical manufacturer’s Web site.
Q. How can a writer break into this field if she has no corporate writing samples? Is it okay to use magazine clips?
A. Yes, as I said earlier, start with either Web content writing or PR writing. These assignments are more editorial in nature, which makes your clips relevant, particularly if they are in the same subject matter as the client’s business.
Q. What is the biggest challenge for corporate writers, and how can you overcome it?
A. More writers are going into corporate writing than ever, so the challenge is how you, as a novice, can differentiate yourself from all the other novice copywriters out there.
The solution is to be a specialist instead of a generalist. You can specialize in an industry (e.g., software) or a medium (e.g., Web copy).
Q. What’s your best piece of advice for aspiring corporate writers?
A. 1. Get good at it.
2. Specialize in a niche, preferably one with solid demand and not too much competition (e.g., grant writing, annual report writing). [lf]
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Eve Adamson is the co-author of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Zen Living, a book that I turn to whenever my work is driving me crazy. I interviewed Eve to get her take on the Zen of writing.
How does the practice of Zen relate to magazine writing, book authoring, or copywriting? I think many people see Zen as omm-ing in a corner and chanting in exotic languages, and it doesn’t seem to fit with the deadline-driven, stressful life of a freelance writer.
Actually, I consider a Zen attitude essential for my life as a freelancer. I don’t have a boss looking over my shoulder to impose deadlines. I have to make it happen myself, and if I let myself get too stressed or scattered, I would never be able to produce the volume of work that I do. But a Zen focus helps me work more efficiently and with less stress. I plan what I need to do each day, and then I use that job as a sort of meditation. When your work becomes a point of focus and you get completely immersed in it, you sort of (at the risk of sounding cheesy) “become one” with the task. Boredom, tedium, and stress become non-issues because you *are* the work. When I come out of this kind of “zone,” I’m often surprised, and usually pleased, at what I’ve written. In other words, a Zen approach to work is really just a matter of doing and becoming, without letting all the typical barriers and distractions interfere. It’s not that I don’t sometimes get bored or procrastinate or avoid work I consider tedious. I’m only human. But I really do believe a Zen attitude helps minimize these distractions, and without it, I wouldn’t be able to do what I do.
In your book, you talk a lot about being mindful. Do you have any tips for writers who feel scattered between different projects on how to shut out the mind-clutter and concentrate on the task at hand?
Sometimes it just happens, but most of the time, it requires some practice and effort. Of course, Zen *is* the practice, it *is* the effort. Sometimes, a pause and a focus on the breath can bring the mind back to the task, but mostly, it’s a reframing of attitude. Ask yourself, why are you scattered? Why aren’t you doing? What is getting in your way? Look at whatever that is. Do what you need to do with it, or put it aside. The more you do this with consciousness and intent, the easier it gets. You aren’t a slave to your mind. You are in the driver’s seat. Your mind is just along for the ride, and has no business driving.
One part of the book that resonated with me said that you shouldn’t care what other people think of you because you can’t know what they think and you can’t control what they think. How can writers let go of worrying about what editors, readers, and other writers think of them?
Ah, that’s a good one for a writer! A lot of people give up on this profession because they do care so much what other people think. A rejection letter practically kills them. But if you want to be a writer, you have to want that more than you care about what other people think. You can look at it like this: I write. I learn from writing. Others can teach me and I can teach myself by doing. I can do the best I can at any given moment. But each person is doing what they can do in their own moment, and that has nothing to do with my moment.
You have to just go on, moment by moment, word by word, assignment by assignment, doing your best through practice and effort. You can and certainly must watch and pay attention to what other people do as it relates to your work. And you have to do a good job. But to see the reactions of others as a reflection of you or a judgment of you is really just absurd.
The other part of this is ego. Writers tend to pour a lot of ego into what they write, as if what they write is the very essence of themselves. Of course, this isn’t true. You are writing words that may be work–like doing the dishes, doing an assignment because it’s your job–or it may be inspirational, even genius. But even the best piece of writing in the world is still just a finger pointing to a reflection of the moon in a puddle on the street. Pardon the extended metaphor, but my point is that writing isn’t *you,* and to think what you write is even anything special, although a natural thought for a writer or any human being, is something to notice and then release. Better to think, “It’s interesting how much ego I have tied up in these symbols on the page,” rather than, “If that editor doesn’t love my article/novel/poem, I must be bad at what I do.” You are just doing, you see. It doesn’t mean anything beyond what it is. And it certainly doesn’t mean anything what others think of it.
Earlier, I said that you can get immersed in your work and become the work. Yes. But this is totally different than putting your ego into the work and *being* the work. You have to be the work, without being the work. That really does make sense, in a Zen sort of way.
Can meditation help writers be more creative or succeed in their careers?
Absolutely. When you release your mind, all kinds of amazing things have the space to blossom in there. And creative people are often more successful in their careers. So are hard workers who don’t let a lot of stupid crap get in the way of what has to be done. I also think meditation adds a sense of humor and levity to the mind, and people who are less serious and invested in their own importance tend to be more creative and interesting, and that can boost success.
How can writers meditate at their desks?
Stop writing. Close your eyes. Open your palms. Breathe. Be there for awhile.
You discuss how your home can be conducive to Zen living. How can writers create an office or writing space that helps them live in the now?
I’m not practicing what I preach here, but a clean, clear desk is like a metaphor for a clear mind. Then again, each person works in their own way. In general though, a desk full of distractions will promote a distracted mind, in my opinion. Put in front of you what you need for what you are doing right now, then dive in.
You’ve written a ton of books, and I know many of our readers are interested in writing books as well. What are the top three tips you would give them?
1. Work on your writing and get good at it. Get training, if necessary. Hundreds of thousands of people want to write books, and don’t even know how to write a grammatically correct sentence. Editors aren’t there to fix up your writing. You need to be skilled, and that takes practice and effort. Do the work.
2. Tell people what you do. Meet people whenever you can. Query publishers. Write for magazines with subjects similar to the book you want to write. Get known. Don’t be a snob. You never know when you might meet somebody who needs someone like you to write a book. They might call you up, just because they loved your article in Podunk Weekly. Then again, if you just want to write a book for yourself and you don’t care about making a living at it, then write it. Don’t be one of those people who says, “I’m going to write a book someday.” What are you waiting for? What’s getting in your way? Whatever it is, it’s probably not real, so get over it. Do the work.
3. Don’t limit yourself. If someone gives you a writing project, unless you hate the subject, do it. Don’t turn it down out of fear. A writer with good research skills and self-confidence can write about anything. (But don’t misrepresent yourself, either. Never pretend you know things you don’t know yet.)
Is there anything else you’d like to add?
I think no matter what job you have, Zen can help you do it better, and no matter what skills and talent you have, Zen can help you improve those because it helps clear out all the obstacles. When what you do is nothing special and isn’t about you, and nothing is riding on it, and it isn’t really real, and it doesn’t matter what anybody else thinks about it, but yet you can become totally immersed in it until you become it, your work can become surprisingly fulfilling. At least, that’s the way it is for me. Seeing my work this way makes me happy. [lf]
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In finishing three short stories, novellas really, in the "Elephanta Suite," by Paul Theroux, the crafting of convincing, satisfying endings for a story came to mind. Theroux's stories, all set in India, are engrossing and beautifully written, with the endings for the first two stories powerful and seamless, and convincing, but the ending of the final story, "The Elephant God," seemed not to fit the portagonist's character. The story is gripping until that point, but though the protagonist, an American woman, looking for a spiritual life while living in an ashram and simultaneously working as an instructor of American speech patterns for employees of a technological call-center, is a resourceful, strong-willed woman, her dramatic retaliation against one of the employees who assaulted her is not quite believable. Though she's been stalked and abused by this man, her last, cold, calculating action seemed over the top, though satisfying to some degree.
Endings were on my mind when I read an interesting essay in Writer's Chronicle, Nov. 2007, "A Tale of Two Endings: Dicken's Great Expectations," by Douglas Bauer. Dickens' original manuscript ended on what seemed a contrived, chance meeting between Estelle and Pip in the city, and a parting between them that seemed final. Bauer says, "�if you read Great Expectations as a novel that steadily acquires real emotional and psychological traction, then Dickens's original ending—with its almost contemporary, quietly stated irony, bracingly free of his famous sentimentality; and one that's contemporary too in its powerful truncation (all those what-ifs" that get said in all that isn't said)—is the preferable conclusion."
However, an author friend of Dickens who was asked to review the original manuscript convinced him to write a more hopeful ending. Dickens's rewrite hedged a bit, making it seem like a continued relationship between Estelle and Pip was foreseen, though the final line was left somewhat ambiguous—"I saw the shadow of no parting from her." That version got published, and the following year (1862) in a second printing, apparently now more satisfied with the idea, Dickens made the line less ambiguous: "I saw no shadow of another parting from her."
Perhaps Theroux might also have received suggestions to have his ending less extreme, a more subtle irony, but he went with a powerful truncation concept. It's still got me thinking, so perhaps it did its job.
Some of Bauer's other thoughts on endings were also interesting: "... any ending that succeeds both culminates and at the same time continues the story…the mix of these two factors naturally varies according to whether the writer's principal desire is, on one hand, to bring everything together, or, on the other, to leave matters more elliptically open. But both qualities, culmination and continuation, are fundamentally always present." And, "The question, then, facing the writer is how to write an ending that benefits from all the complicated momentum that has been funneled into it; one that sounds its confidence and retains a narrower but still resounding power, even as it sings its final notes alone." Not bad.
I’ve been scouring the internet for someone who can answer a basic freelancing question for me. Are all these writers who quote “experts” for their stories actually quoting their own interviews with the experts/authors or are they quoting the experts’ books, which are always named. I see so many stories where three different experts are quoted with only a single quote from each. Are they really doing these interviews? And if so, why, when it’s just a repetition of everything in the expert’s book??
My answer:
You need to quote from interviews, not books. And if you get a quote from a book, you need to indicate that it’s from a book; for example, “In her new book Living Young: How to Erase 50 Years from Your Looks, Ima Scamma says, ‘Twinkies are a miracle food that reduce fine lines and wrinkles when applied topically.’” However, most editors frown on quoting from books.
Even if some of the information I’m quoting is available in the expert’s book, I need him to say it in order to get good quotes, which liven up an article and give it credibility. Sometimes before I start an interview I even tell the source, “I know the answers to some of the questions I’ll ask you are available in your book, but I need to get the information from you so I’m not just quoting your book.” They never seem to have a problem with that.
Interviewing is about more than getting quotes — it also helps you better understand the topic you’re writing about so you can explain it for your readers. I typically interview each expert for about 20 minutes to half an hour. I then use the information I learned to inform the article, and may actually quote the expert only a few times. [lf]
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