In the past few years and, in particular, since I’ve become a beta tester for Open Salon, I’ve made no secret of my desire to become a professional writer. Writing has been a catharsis of mine since youth. When my first serious boyfriend broke up with me to go out with my best friend, I wrote him pages of railing anger and hurt in letter form, finished it off with song lyrics, and never gave it to him. When I was saddened by repeat and unexplainable miscarriages, I dropped my despair on paper and, when I finally had my beautiful Jessica, I unleashed my joy. I write silly poems, dim shades of the great Ogden Nash; and I pen serious prose, aiming for the great Maya Angelou. I enjoy writing. Whether I am good and/or marketable remains to be seen.
Always the knowledge-seeker, I have begun researching the process of becoming a freelance writer and find myself already discouraged. The word “business” pops up everywhere. It’s not enough to be a good writer; one has to be a one man sales and marketing force. And even that is just the beginning, business plans, paperwork, taxes, and ad nauseam work searches.
Want to write a novel or non-fiction book instead of magazine and website submissions? Learn how to compile a book proposal with introduction, synopsis, plot outline, three complete chapters, market value, your competition (I assume in case they like them better), and approximate word count among other things.
Did Hemmingway do all this? When did he have time to hang out in the Keys and carouse, tipple, fish, and raise six-toed cats?
Two nights ago, I was discussing this subject with my husband. With prices rising and a multitude of human, ruminant, and fowl mouths to feed, we have become good Americans and are living beyond our means. My husband, as senior project manager of the Arizona Division of his company, already works 12+ hours a day in addition to coaching the high school diving team. It’s up to me to find another source of income yet we haven’t set up our lives for me to be away from the farm. The toddler needs care and supervision as do the many animals. The teenagers need transportation to and from the bus stop, their friends’ houses, and their extra-curricular activities.
Sitting down with David, brainstorming about viable solutions and finding no quick fixes, I released a held sigh and offered to go back to the hospitality business. Once again, I would work at night in order to take care of things here during the day. Tips are usually good; it would at least keep us afloat.
Matching my sigh in both despair and resolution, David looked at me, with eyes large and glistening, and said, “But I don’t want you to go back to restaurants. I see the middle-aged women that work the lunch functions I attend and they’re, well, sad.”
The tears welled up in my eyes as I looked at him, this wonderful man who has tried his best to support us all and, through no fault of his own, is falling short of his own expectations.
And I said, “I know; but I might not have a choice.”
The silence and strain between us was palpable. We didn’t speak again until the morning, both still wounded and diminished.
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MissOjib
Ann Nichols
Beth Fortune
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Outside Myself
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Comments
I know nothing about freelance writing but my friends who are "pro-am" writers seem to rely heavily on persistence. One local friend, for instance, just kept sending essays to a local alternative newsweekly until they finally published one. He did get paid a little for it. Now he's been published a few times but they don't publish everything he sends in.
"Writing is a hard buck." Hunter S. Thompson said that in one of his more serious moments. It's never going to be easy. You could be head and shoulders above the competition and still never get a break.
I'm glad you brought up Hemingway. He had the great luck to be 17 or 18 years old when WW I broke out and he went over there as an ambulance driver and conned his way into becoming a war correspondent. He was not a born writer. He had an extremely lucky life filled with serendipitous turns of fate that put him in the right place at the right time.
Hunter S. Thompson too. Not that it matters but they both ended their careers the same way. I guess they ran out of words.
But the problem today seems to be one of supply and demand. There are legions of good writers and the demand side is drying up and doesn't pay all that well. That's what happens when there is more supply than demand.
Of course your first stop should be to get yourself the latest edition of Writer's Market and sit down with a legal pad and start noting what the market is paying for different types of stories. Then figure how much writing you would have to do on a steady, week in, week out basis, with no rejections in order to make say, $12,000 a year. Figure if you are an unknown, your rejection pile is going to be substantial. It takes an ego made of titanium to get slapping in the face repeatedly when you have worked your ass off.
Then the fucking IRS is going to want self-employment tax out of you and the last time I looked, that was running at about 30 percent, including FICA and SS.
But if you are undaunted, then just start writing and submitting query emails to editors. Eventually you will sell some stuff and even though the check might be small, it's so gratifying when somebody other than your friends and family tell you with hard cash that they think you are worthy. That's a great feeling and it takes away all the pain, or most of it, from the times you got hit in the face.
But all you need is one good break and maybe Salon is a good starting point. Joan is offering to at least look at the best submissions on Open Salon and maybe take the best of the best and put it on Salon. You need what we used to call in the paper and ink days, "tear sheets" -- copies of stories you've had published. This can get you credentialed eventually. There is no feeling in the world quite like calling up someone important to interview them for a piece you are writing and say, "Hi, my name is ..... and I'm writing for Salon dot com." I know this because back in my freelancing days I could call people up and say, "I'm a stringer for Rolling Stone and I'd like to talk to ... ." How did I get that gig? One lucky break. I met music critic Chet Flippo down in Austin in 1975 and he got me credentialed to shoot some photography for a story he was writing on Austin bands. RS never used the photos (get used to it), but I sold part of the take to whatever record label was making Commander Cody's most commercially successful album "Live from Deep in the Heart of Texas." Check it out on the cut-racks. You'll see Photos by J.D. Black on the back cover.
Anyway through Chet Flippo I was introduced to the managing editor of RS at the time, Robert Wallace. He left RS and started Rocky Mountain Magazine (didn't last long) but I got a freelance writing gig out that connection and I met the art director who subsequently moved on to doing some projects and he used some of my stock photos. So what I'm getting at is that you need to get your first published work out there and meet people and be extremely NICE to them, unlike me who has the personality of razor wire.
But from all my hard work and giving my best shot, I never made much money -- just a lot of fun. I ran away to the oil patch in 1980 and started making some real money. We all have to grow up sometime.
Write a bunch of stuff, Farmer. Write what moves you. Do not write stuff that you think will sell, because that's going at it ass-backwards. You write what you love and you put it out there and who knows, I may be seeing your byline all over the place one of these days.
That's about all of it, Farmer. It's not much for 60 years on the planet. It goes like this, Army, Journalism, Boring Communications Director, Free lance conference and convention director and then ... pffft. House husband. I haven't done a lot of stuff, and I don't know it all. I just have done what I've done and I know what I know.
And every May, I have a birthday and I think back on all the miles and all the years and all the opportunities that didn't work out, or that did work out and I fucked it up, and all the guilt and recrimination we neurotics put ourselves through around their birthday. But it's not so bad this year. I am glad I have made some interesting acquaintances here along with a few close friends in the non-cyber space and it's all good.
That, and read some of what Cary Tennis has to say on writing over on OtherSalon. There is also a link to a literary agent whose information on writing and getting published I found very helpful in Steven Axelrod's links here at OpenSalon.
You and I are in such a similar boat it's uncanny. I'm not in a space to write about it now because I'm in an ICU waiting room in Pittsburgh, where my birth mom had a laryngectomy today to excise a tumor from her throat, and I can barely put two thoughts together.
But I feel certain we'll have plenty of opportunity to chop it up about writing and tons of other stuff here in the weeks and months to come, and I'm really looking forward to that.