My tribe

By Caitlin Kelly

I spent yesterday at the annual conference in New York City of the American Society of Journalists and Authors, a 1,400-member group founded in 1947. There were writers there with Pulitzer prizes and best-selling books and HBO series and made-for-TV movies and options and…

A girl could feel mighty small in that crowd!

The New Yorker (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Not to mention editors from publications like The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, New Republic and the New Yorker, four of the — arguably — most desirable markets for magazine writers in the U.S. (Only one of whom, from VF, was female.)

Instead, it was a terrific day of fierce hugs and nostalgia and excited shrieks over new books, and books currently being looked at by Major Publishers, and awards and pregnancies and a friend’s daughter accepted to a good (if costly!) college.

English: proportion of MRSA human blood isolates from participating countries in 2008 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

There was Greg, who writes great stuff about nature and the outdoors, and Maryn, whose book Superbug, about MRSA (flesh eating bacteria) is absolutely riveting and terrifying, and Dan, with his new book about endangered wildlife of Vietnam.

In the hallway, I bumped into a woman with a suitcase and recognized Helaine Olen, whose fantastic book about how we’ve all been conned by the financial services industry I gave a rave review a few months ago in The New York Times.

Helaine Olen (Photo credit: New America Foundation)

I served on the ASJA board for six years and still volunteer as a trustee of the Writers Emergency Assistance Fund, which can write a check of up to $4,000 — a grant — to a needy non-fiction writer within a week. (If you can ever spare even $20 for the cause of decent journalism and the freelancers who produce so much of it, I’d be thrilled if you’d donate to WEAF.)

So I know lots of people through that, and have given back some of my time and talents to the industry I’ve been working in since 1978.

I went out for dinner that night with Maryn and three new-to-me women writers, all crazy accomplished and of course the conversation quickly turned to — female serial killers. That’s what happens when you get a bunch of newshounds at the same table; four of us had worked for major dailies and all miss the adrenaline rush of working a Big Story. So we do it now for magazines and books and newspapers and websites.

It was, in the most satisfying and nurturing way, a gathering of the tribe — people who had come from Geneva and Paris and San Diego and Toronto and Atlanta and Minneapolis and Vermont and New Hampshire and Maine, all hungry to be in some small, crowded stuffy meeting rooms to talk about what it is we do and how to do it better.

We write. We tell stories. We wake up bursting to share the cool, moving, sad, powerful, holy-shit-can-you-believe-it? richness of the world, all the untold tales that surround us every day, just there, waiting for us to capture, pitch, sell and tell them.

That’s my tribe.

What’s yours?

How many women experts did you hear today? Not enough!

Now this is a bloody brilliant idea — the BBC has gone out and actively sought women experts and trained them how to work effectively with journalists:

The BBC, and other broadcasters, have faced consistent criticism about the lack of female experts on air. Last year a report by Sound Women, a pressure group set up to represent women working in radio, found that 84 per cent of the reporters and guests on Radio 4’s flagship Today programme are men….

The ‘expert women database’ contains the details of the 60 women who have so far received free training via these days, as well as the contacts of a further 120 women who “showed promise” in their applications to the BBC Academy. More than 2,000 women applied for the first BBC Academy female expert training day but there were only 30 spaces. The BBC Expert Women YouTube channel features videos of successful Expert Women trainees presenting to the camera on their specialist topic.

This is an urgent matter. American women face the same challenge, as VIDA catalogs each year; here’s a longer story about this four-year-old group’s efforts.

I am a woman… (Photo credit: Nono Fara)

In the United States, reputational power relies on a web of relationships, and media visibility is a direct result of this. If your work, and ideas, are not audible or visible, you’re unlikely to win grants and fellowships or get your book(s) published. You have to prove your “platform”, that you have an audience eager to hear your thoughts.

And if you’re an ambitious, smart writer focusing on politics, economics or social commentary, you’ll also want your work, at some point, to appear in Harper’s, The Atlantic or The New Republic, to name three.

I interviewed for a staff job, unsuccessfully, at Newsweek three times. I was told (seriously!), they only wanted writers who write for The Atlantic, which I hadn’t then and still haven’t. What a bullshit barrier to erect!

Here’s the stats for 2012:

Harper’s — female bylines, 31, male bylines 158

The New Republic –male  book reviewers, 79; female 9

The New Republic — female bylines, 77; male bylines 389.

So, what’s the deal?

Women don’t speak up?

Male editors?

Women have no ideas suitable for these publications?

Or their ideas are getting shot down?

Or they haven’t built/created the networks of (Ivy educated men) gatekeepers to these publications?

A few months ago, I saw something that made me want to weep with excitement — all six columns of the front page of The New York Times were stories written by women.

For those of you not working in journalism, there is no better placement in a newspaper than front page, above the fold — i.e. the first place readers look, on paper or on-line.

Women’s voices need to be heard. We have wisdom, humor, insights, analysis and ideas to share. We vote. We run companies. We’re raising the next generation, or teaching them or nursing them or selling them stuff.

The gatekeepers to media — the radio and television producers, the editors and reporters and freelancers — are busy, overwhelmed and/or lazy. They reach for who they know. So that’s a hurdle of inertia we all have to leap.

If you’re a female journo, aim high(er)!

If you’re a woman expert, reach out to your local newspaper, websites, television and radio stations.

Add your voice!

Related articles

• No progress for female bylines (cjr.org)
• More Grim News For Women In Media (huffingtonpost.com)

The writer’s week: six editors, two attorneys, an agent and…

What a week it was…

As I write this, our windows are piled high with snow from a huge storm. I was to have driven 90 minutes each way to do an interview at Yale University, but decided to do it by phone instead. I’d planned to do it next week — and had filled my day with other tasks accordingly, but the source will be in South Korea during the time I have to do the piece.

Harkness Tower, situated in the Memorial Quadrangle at Yale (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

These sudden shifts are becoming routine. I find them exhausting. The story is about a new method for de-salination and he is an award-winning professor of engineering. I’m an English major who has never studied physics, chemistry or engineering. I take a deep breath and give it my best, asking him to review it for accuracy later. He’s a sweetheart,  and agrees.

Monday

I finish up a story for a design magazine, for which I’ve interviewed several architects and interior designers. This one had to wait a month until we found more interesting and up-to-date sources, thereby delaying the income I’d expected to have earned and paid by the time I finish this now. The editor is one of the nicest I’ve ever worked with, and we spend some time on the phone just getting to know one another — where we grew up, her kids and their ages. This sort of conversation is now so rare! Few editors have the time or interest to create and nurture work relationships with the freelancers they so rely on.

Tuesday

I visit The New York Times to meet the new editor taking over the section I’ve produced five stories for since April 2012. It’s been a great run: high visibility, decent pay, fun stories to produce and extremely well-read, often third or fourth of the entire day’s paper. I also just really like my outgoing editor enormously. Sigh.

It’s a tough meeting — every editor is so different in their style, manners, expectations. We go over a copy of my story and she wants major changes, which is rare for me. I’ll have to carve out time already allotted to competing clients. Juggling my time is perhaps my greatest ongoing challenge: finding new client, learning their needs, pitching them and producing.

While there, I catch up with friends in the business section, editors I’ve worked for, a few staff colleagues who have become good friends — and my husband. It’s odd to hug my sweetie in the middle of the newsroom, but he’s OK with it and so are his two male bosses. Bless them!

I meet another editor, a veteran of our industry working on-line of late, for the first time, over lunch. She has just (!) quit her job, almost unimaginable in this awful economy and our troubled industry. “Were they making it stupid?” I ask. Yes, they were. I admire her guts and her principles, and tell her so. We agree to connect on LinkedIn and hope to stay in touch.

We both wonder aloud how long we’ll be able to stay in this industry. We’ve established our reputations, both love writing and are both passionate about the same issues. But passion and desire won’t cut it, we know.

Wednesday

I’d planned to spend the next three days doing nothing but work on my two book proposals. So much for that idea.

I decide to follow up with “Malled”, my retail memoir that almost became a CBS sitcom. But it didn’t go to pilot and I need to find out if, when or how I can revive it. I call a New York agent and email the script-writer in Hollywood. He has to speak to his agent. The number of people one works with in this business is amazing to me sometimes; we all have different timetables and agendas, yet without cooperation, trust and goodwill, we’re toast.

CBS Logo Light (Photo credit: watchwithkristin)

I’m still chasing an $800 payment for a rush job I did weeks ago. I loathe chasing money — and lying assholes who change their tune after making an agreement and getting people to work unpaid until they deign to send out a check. If they ever do.

Thursday

I write another business story for the Times, this one for the automotive section, that I initially researched about two months ago.

I email my editor at Portfolio to get the details on my book’s publication this month in China — and the email bounces back. Has he left the company? I call the PR rep instead.

Half an hour is spent on a phone meeting with a Canadian patent attorney, a friend and colleague of my brother, who is super helpful and blessedly free of charge, advising me of next steps to protect my intellectual property on a new idea I’m discussing with several potential partners. It’s a whole new world, and safeguarding my IP is essential.

I finally find three hours to spend on my book proposal, emailing the agent to reassure her I’m neither dead nor a flake — but scrambling to fit unpaid proposals into an income-producing schedule. She sends a friendly note in reply.

I catch up with my assistant, C., by phone, starting our meeting at 8:45 p.m. I hate working after 5pm, but there’s a time zone difference and we had dinner first. We spend 45 minutes trying to set priorities and strategies. It helps to have someone smart and cheerful to brainstorm with. Working alone at home for almost seven years gets lonely and isolating.

Friday

A phone interview with a scientist. I hope for the best and try to not sound stupid.

An email arrives from someone I haven’t spoken to in a few years, asking me to judge entries for a journalism award. I say yes, and now have work to do on the weekend and a Tuesday night meeting in the city to judge the finalists; it’ll give me a chance to meet two new-to-me writers.

More work on the book proposal.

My latest editor has left Portfolio, I discover. I email the new editor to introduce myself and find out the scoop on my book. Gotta keep an eye on my baby!

If you ever speak to a reporter…

The Interview (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

For those who have never spoken to a reporter, or been media-trained, here are a few basic ground rules that might be helpful.

This first one is a new and — to a veteran like me — really egregious problem:

Pre-publication, social media are off limits! Do NOT tweet or Facebook giving any hint of who is coming to interview you, what about or for which media outlet.

I’ve been working in journalism since 1978 and younger public relations people, as well as journalists and photographers, have done this to me and to Jose, my husband who assigns photographers for The New York Times, causing us personal and professional embarrassment or worse. They seem to have no understanding that journalism — more than ever! — is a highly competitive industry. The second you tip my hand to any of my competitors, I’ve lost the whole point of my story, which is to beat them, possibly handily, to a great piece they have yet to notice or work on themselves.

If a reporter wants to interview you, ask them a few questions before you agree, or begin speaking:

How long is the piece? What section is it running in, or, if a magazine, which issue? What’s your deadline? What’s your angle? Who else are you speaking to? (They may not tell you.) It’s helpful to understand how your comments or views fit into the larger picture.

Don’t insist on reviewing your quotes before publication.

This is taboo for almost all reporters. It wastes their time, it slows down production and — most importantly — it shows ignorance of journalism norms. Many magazines still employ fact-checkers, people who will call you up later to ensure that what is said by or about you is factually accurate. Freelancers tightly budget their reporting time and may be speaking to a dozen sources or more, not just you. We don’t have time!

You can speak on background, off the record, not for attribution or on the record. Make sure you are clear before the interview begins and that both you and the reporter have agreed.

On background means they will never name or identify you in any way. You’re helping them better understand a complex issue and possibly pointing them to other sources, but you won’t be named as the referral source. NFA means I can broadly identify you: “A highly-placed White House source” or “A 20-year employee”, i.e. your name and title are not used, but your credibility or authority is established. If you speak on the record, every word you say can be used and attributed to you by name.

English: Ft. Pierce, FL, September 16, 2008 — FEMA Public Information Officer(PIO) Renee Bafalis and Community Relations(CR) Specialist Rene Haldimann speak on camera with WPTV-TV (5) reporter Bryan Garner at a manufactured home park which was affected by Tropical Storm Fay. George Armstrong/FEMA (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

You can ask for questions in advance — but it’s annoying.

Yes, you want to prepare. But we expect you to know your stuff well enough to anticipate most questions.

Every good interview will also go off on a few tangents. We don’t want to — and won’t — stick to a pre-determined list.

Don’t put us on a choke chain.

It’s annoying, but common, to have a press officer in the room or on the phone with us during an interview, but if you don’t give us enough time, or interrupt us, we’ll just pester you and your staff later.

Don’t haggle or harangue about attribution after you’ve spoken.

Once an interview has begun, unless you say “This is off the record” before you say it, it’s on, and usable. Same with phone interviews. If doing it by email, mark these comments off clearly.

During a phone interview, ask if the reporter is taping or taking notes.

They’re likely doing both. A note-taker (like me) may need additional time to catch up.

Ask how much time they need, and make sure you have no interruptions.

Some may only need five or ten minutes, others an hour or more. I’m suspicious of any reporter who wants only a very brief interview as most issues are too complex for a sound bite. Television and radio interviews demand precise, quick answers — but print interviewers may want a lot more detail, and time.

Research the reporter beforehand.

Everyone is findable now: Google and LinkedIn being the two quickest and easiest ways to get a sense of who you’ll be speaking with. Are they fair-minded? Experienced? Well-regarded in the industry? If you can spare the time to read a few things they’ve written — and can genuinely compliment them on one — why not? It shows us a little respect as well.

What have I left out?

Related articles

• Reporting for rookies (cjr.org) This piece is super helpful for bloggers or anyone new to reporting.
• A Reporter Calls (cmcacorner.com)
• Media Tip: Why You Shouldn’t Speak to Reporters (politicalwire.com)
• Listen Up! Tips for Giving Great Radio Interviews (rickdacri.wordpress.com)

Five essential qualities writers need

Writing exercise 3 (Photo credit: aaipodpics)

Writing — what we read here or elsewhere — is merely the end product, the visible, finished material emerging from a long process that really begins with an idea or a dream or a vision of something. Many people who say they really want to write well and be widely read and maybe even well-paid for it sometimes focus a lot of wasted energy on the wrong things.

They fuss over the font on their blog or their SEO or how to find an agent or what their book cover looks like.

It’s much more basic.

Here are five qualities anyone who wants to write well  — and find a large readership — needs:

Trust

To publish your work requires tremendous trust. First, in yourself, that you have something worth hearing and have the skills to express it clearly and compellingly. Second, in your audience — that there is an audience out there for your work. Third, in your agent, (should you wish to publish  traditionally). Fourth, in your editor(s). Fifth, journalists must also, (with open eyes and a healthy skepticism of “facts”), trust their sources, and their editors and copy editors.

You have to trust in your skills and experience to see you through, even when you’ve never tackled a subject or genre before. It’s like anything else — you can’t grow unless you push yourself into new and untried areas. Given the nature of journalism and publishing right now, being able to move quickly and persuasively into new ways of using your skills is essential to earning a good living.

Humility

Walk into a bookstore or library  — and look around. There are millions of books already in print. In addition to every other form of media out there, from Twitter and Pinterest to movies, TV and video games, these books are competing for your readers’ time and attention. Whose work is currently selling most, to whom, and why? Whose work has lasted for decades or centuries or even millennia and why? Asking readers to give us their time and attention means acknowledging those who have done it so well for so long.

We don’t have to ape them, but the marketplace of ideas is a very, very crowded one.

Confidence

And yet…If you can’t summon the confidence in your voice and ideas and analysis, why would anyone else? If you lack confidence in your skills, take classes and read great writers and see what they do so well. Do whatever is necessary to develop the skill to tell your story. Then do it!

Also have the confidence that your material may have valuable iterations in other paid media, from film and television to theatrical productions to ideas you haven’t even imagined. Re-define “writing” as “intellectual property” and you will start to look at your work very differently, and protectively. (A ferocious agent and skilled entertainment attorney are key to this step.)

Empathy

You can’t be an intelligent or useful journalist without empathy — whether you’re interviewing a politician, a welfare mother, a billionaire banker or a criminal. You have to be able to imagine how the world looks and feels to them and care deeply enough to ask them thoughtful and probing questions.  Same for writers of fiction, whose characters must live and breathe for us as readers.

Decisiveness

What to say, and how to say it and in what detail? There’s no standard metric, no safe dividing line or blinking yellow warning light on our computer or notebook to warn us when we’ve moved from terrific to boring. We choose every word and then we must commit to it, even after the 10th or 20th draft. It has to go the printer! Editors are waiting. Readers expect to hear from you.

Decide what you want to express and get on with it. The only people who can call themselves writers write — they don’t just talk about writing.

I’m finally reading (and loving!) this book, a classic, by Howard Zinsser, “On Writing Well.” It’s funny and filled with fantastic advice. Here are his five tips.

What do you think are other qualities a writer needs most?

Where stories come from

Cover of The Namesake

Unless you’re a journalist — or fairly thoughtful consumer of media — you probably don’t think much about where “the news” comes from. Some of it, like elections, natural disasters and mass shootings, are fairly obvious subjects.

But many of the stories you read or hear or see come about through a fairly wide variety of ways, like multiple tributaries feeding into a river.

Here’s my latest New York Times story, out today, one which I suggested — as I do with about 90 percent of my work. The idea came to me because I was getting weary of hearing the usual tales of woe and misery, that being out of work over the age of 50 means you are essentially utterly screwed.

Having watched my own income almost double in the past two years, and I’m 55, working freelance in a lousy economy in a dying industry, I thought, “Nah. There’s more to it than that.”

I decided to flip the script and go find people over 50 who had indeed seen their jobs disappear — often several times — or their incomes plummet, but who had figured out a way to survive, even thrive.

I like solutions!

So my idea made the paper because I’ve got a year-old relationship with an editor there who likes my stuff — this is my fourth major business story for the Times, and I’m working on my fifth. And, clearly, my work is accurate and reliable and well-read. My last one, about college-age men and women being paid $50,000 a year not to attend university, was the third most emailed story of the entire Sunday paper.

Newspapers traditionally run on a “beat” system; like a policeman’s beat, the area each reporter is individually expected to understand and explain in depth after creating a broad network of sources and acquiring a deep knowledge of the issues. These include cops, courts, city hall, statehouse, health care policy, environment, medicine, etc. Many stories come from beat reporters who hear good stuff from their sources.

Some stories also result from press releases or aggressive courting of reporters by well-paid flacks, i.e. PR experts. Personally, I find much of that “reporting” pretty lazy. You’d be amazed (or not!) to learn how many front-page stories start this way.

As a full-time freelancer, I survive financially by coming up with a steady stream of stories I can sell quickly for decent prices.

Here are some of the ways I find and develop my ideas for blog posts, articles, essays and books:

Conversation

Bright, knowledgeable sources passionate  about their topic may make time for a long (45-60 minute) conversation, and digressions from the interview-at-hand often lead down interesting paths. I find some great story ideas this way. It’s an investment on my part, (unpaid time, since the story might not sell), and theirs (am I credible? worth their energy? have the contacts I say I do?)

Other print media

I read fairly widely, in print and on-line, but rarely find much there for me to work on. By the time the national press is on it, what’s new to add? So local or regional outlets are good, as are sources within others’ stories who might have only rated a mention or a few quotes. One of the best sources is letters to the editor — often written by experts in their field who know a topic but may not have a national platform for their insights or views.

Broadcast media

I listen to NPR fairly consistently, to political, arts and business programs, all of which offer good stuff. When I have time, BBC World News (an hour) always covers stories that rarely show up in American coverage.  Ditto for Canada.

Films

On of my most fun stories came about because I sit through the very end of almost every film’s closing credits. At the end of “The Namesake,” I noticed that the film was shot in a town near where I live, which made for a great little story for my regional edition of the Times when I visited the house and interviewed the production designer and homeowner.

Pattern recognition

This demands a lot of consistent reading/attention/linking/clipping. Old school journalists call it “saving string”, as we accumulate verything we think useful to future stories on a specific subject. Only when you pay sustained attention to an issue and read/listen widely to sources about it can you begin to see distinct and interesting patters or trends  — often overlooked by other journo’s constrained by their beats and/ or by daily or even hourly deadlines.

Random encounters

You never know where you’ll find a story. Two of my best came to me out of the blue. My story about Google’s class in mindfulness, a heavily-read national exclusive for the Times, was a tip I got in July 2011 from someone teaching those classes, and for which I negotiated for six months to ensure it was mine alone.

As I buckled my seatbelt for the descent into Atlanta on my way to speak at the Decatur Literary Festival, I casually asked my seatmate, a woman my age, what she does does for a living. Cha-ching! Great business story.

Books

Sometimes a well-written book sparks an idea or helps me better understand an issue.

Blogs and websites

I don’t carve out a lot of time to roam around on-line, even if I should.

Newsletters/trade magazines/conferences

I’m spending tomorrow and Tuesday attending The Big Show, the annual trade show of the National Retail Federation. I know there are all sorts of stories there for me to find.

Observation

I sat in a trendy Lower East Side restaurant this week and saw, several hours apart, two young men wearing almost identical outfits — bare-armed (in 40-degree weather!), thick, furry vests and jeans. One more sighting and I have a trend story!

Walk around your neighborhood and look closely at bulletin boards and signs. Watch what people are wearing and eating and buying. Eavesdrop! When you visit your hair stylist/vet/doctor/dentist/accountant/bike repair shop, ask them what’s going on in their world.

Pay close attention and start asking questions. You’ll soon find great stories all around you.

My own life

Too many new writers moan they have “nothing” to write about. When it comes to selling journalism, at least, you likely have plenty! I recently won an award (details to come) from writing about my injured left hip, which became a magazine cover story. I later sold several stories about the injury and surgery as well. Over my writing career, I’ve sold stories and essays about professors having affairs with students (not me!), getting married, getting divorced, my dog’s death, physical therapy, trying to rest in a noisy hospital room, why retail work is better than journalism.

Much as we are all special little snowflakes, our lives do tend to follow fairly regular paths — so if it’s happened to you, it’s likely happened to thousands or millions of others as well. Find them, talk to them and write it up!

Related articles

• Finding the Story: Advice From a New York Times Reporter (clemson.uloop.com)
• Which newswires do journalists read? 80 journalists surveyed. (vitispr.com)
• Why Most Press Releases Don’t Matter (ereleases.com)
• Survey Results: Do Journalists Actually use Press Releases Sent on Newswires? (prnewswire.com)

The freelance writers’ life, continued…

Vancouver Canucks vs Calgary Flames (Photo credit: iwona_kellie)

I’ve never done this before, but yesterday’s post has, happily, proven popular and provoked some terrific convo…

So here are some additional thoughts:

Stamina

You gotta have it, possibly more than almost any other quality. For four years, I was a nationally ranked saber fencer, a sport I took up in my mid 30s, and had a two-time Olympian as my coach. He pushed me to my limits, and beyond, for which I’m forever grateful. Fencing a tournament means no matter how tired or sore or cut or bruised you are you keep on going. If you drink or drug or stay out late on school nights, you will simply be unable to compete effectively with the boring people like me who are lucid and well-rested enough to eat your lunch.

Freelancing usually means you work alone from home. It doesn’t mean you go all boho and sleep in until  2pm when you maybe make a call or two.

EQ rules

I can’t say this too often; emotional intelligence is the new black.

If you’re unwilling or unable to man up for difficult/scary/terrifying conversations — whether with an editor, your agent, a source, a PR gatekeeper — you will starve. I guarantee it. You must locate your cojones and use them whenever necessary. The challenge is knowing when to be a total bitch, (I was told I made one personal assistant cry. Puhleeze), and when to be a sweetie and a cajoler and a charmer. Because you will need to be all of these, quite possibly within the same hour!

Today I made a call that I’d been putting off for weeks, to my current agent, with whom some things have been sub-optimal. She also just buried her father, having lost her mother in May 2009. So I waited, and sent a condolence card, because no matter what other shit we’ve been through, she’s a human being and losing your parents is sad and painful.

But I still pressed hard on the many issues that we have to get a handle on right away. You gotta figure out (it’s not easy) how to be tough enough to consistently look out for your interests professionally — and how to be kind, but not a doormat people take advantage of all the time.

If you’re too scared of rejection to make the call or take the meeting or send the email, you will not make a living in this game.  Handling conflict, disappointment, deceit and sudden turns of fortune are all part of this lifestyle (as they are in any job!)

Know what’s happening in this industry, today

I learned a lot from a conversation with my agent this afternoon. It wasn’t a lot of fabulous news, but I needed to hear it and I need to know it in order to sell this book and my next one and, I hope, the one(s) after that. Read industry blogs, newsletters, journals, books, magazines. Go to conferences and pay attention (or buy the CDs or podcasts.)

What did I learn? Ugh….the book industry is totally screwed in new and fresh ways. Paperbacks are not selling. Hardcovers are barely beating them. Because e-books rule.

Make friends in your industry and keep them for decades

Do not make enemies. Once you’ve found a wise and helpful pal, be good to them. Remember their birthday and anniversary and know when they’re celebrating or mourning and send flowers. Yes, it’s expensive — hello, that’s a deductible business expense!

If you’re young, get to know some older veterans and vice versa

The very first thing I did, when I was 19 and starting out as a freelancer, (I had a column in a national newspaper before I left college), was volunteer to help put out a book of interviews with some of Canada’s most established journalists.  I wanted to hear their wisdom, but also, selfishly, wanted to get my name out there, early, as someone passionate about the biz and willing to show up and be useful.

Barely two weeks ago, I interviewed a woman for my financial blog whose husband remembered me from that gig.

Do not be a suck or a user or a sycophant.

But I’ve seen time and again that forging cross-generational alliances is often a very good thing for both people involved. I got a young friend (30, maybe) a fantastic job in Ottawa a year ago while he was still living in Vancouver — because the hiring manager who needed someone smart, stat, took over my apartment in Montreal in 1988 and reconnected with me on LinkedIn. (See above.)

I got my young journo a gig because he’s classy, smart and presents well; the other day, completely desperate on deadline for a source I called him. He came through for me. Yay!

Keep your nose clean

Do not lie, steal ideas, cut corners, plagiarize or “forget” that you heard that great book idea from someone you met last week at a conference. It’s a small world and we have elephantine memories. Someone once tried to spread a lie that I’d been canned from a job. A journalist visiting India from Canada told a local stringer — ie. young, powerless, unconnected — that lie. She, actually being a pal of mine, defended me and told him he was a nasty asshole.

Like that.

Glad this has been helpful….feel free to ask any questions you like!

Where does a New York Times story come from? Idea to print…

My notebook

For those who don’t work in the media, it can be a bit of mystery how a story, (short of politics or a natural disaster),  becomes a piece in a magazine, newspaper or broadcast.

I’ve been writing, freelance and staff, for national publications since college, so the process of:

1) coming up with an idea; 2) selling to an editor; 3) reporting it; 4) writing it; 5) revising it; 6) arranging art is pretty routine.

Here’s how my latest story for The New York Times Sunday business section came about and took shape.

Here’s the story.

The idea

I sit on the board of an American writers’ group, WEAF, that makes emergency grants to writers of non-fiction so I’m aware that freelancers, too, need financial aid they cannot get from unemployment insurance, paid sick days or any other form of standard financial help — and have access to resources others might find useful. I had never read a story about this. The U.S. still has millions of people struggling financially, many of them self-employed artists, who rarely receive coverage as the businesspeople we are.

Selling it to the editor

I’ve written only two stories for this specific editor at the Times, but I’d also written for 20 years for 10 other editors at the paper so he could easily check my credentials and personal reputation before relying on me. It takes trust to hand an assignment to a new writer.

Reporting 

This is the part I love: deciding who to talk to, how to find them and trying to do it efficiently. I don’t have weeks or months to produce a story of 1,800 words. I have, at most a week, and that’s a five-day week of about four or five hours a day as I juggle other work.  So I need to find sources offering me all of these story elements: anecdotes, color, a great story or two to illustrate my point, data points and statistics or surveys or polls. It’s like making a movie: I need tight and medium close-ups and long establishing shots; i.e. I need at least two sources with the wisdom and experience to give me an overview of the issue.

On this story, I found several of my best sources just by reading my Facebook news feed; I have 552 friends there, not thousands.

I never use a tape recorder because I can’t spend additional time transcribing.  I take good notes — that’s my notebook in the photo above with some of the notes for this story.

Writing

I write very fast. I can write 1,000 words in an hour and have written as much as 3,000 within two days — while a 3,000-word story is a very different animal (structure, pacing, tone, etc.) than even one of 1,200 words. This piece was assigned at 1,200 to 1,800 words. I get paid by the word, (weird, but still a common journalism practice in the U.S. and Canada), so of course I’m happier if it runs longer.

Art

It might be a chart or map, photo or illustration or combination of these. From the start of this story, like everything I work on, I’m also thinking about its visual components and suggesting these to the photo editor. (In this section — my husband!)

The better the art, often the better play (i.e. story placement and more space) I can get. I began my career as a photographer, and have sold my images to places like Time and the Times, so this is an easy and fun piece of it for me.

I also considered age/racial/income/geographic diversity? The Times is a national publication, (international, really) so ideally my story sources and images reflect the diversity of our readers.

Revising

Stories for the Times typically go through several revisions. Every question they ask of me must be answered to the editors’ satisfaction, whether the wording or placement of a quote, an unclear phrase, questionable numbers.

Each new version of the story is sent back to me as a playback to read, review and make sure it is still accurate. If I hate a change they’ve made, this is my time to fight for it, and I sometimes do. While time-consuming, it insures the copy is clean. Copy editors, by nature and profession, are extremely methodical and insanely nit-picky. I think of them, gratefully, as airplane maintenance crew — tightening every screw and bolt to make sure the thing can fly safely.

I’ve had more than 100 pieces in the paper and not one has needed a printed, public correction.

(When editors don’t do this, your final version of the piece can have errors edited in -- like the story in which my stepmother became my stepfather instead.)

And, yes, even after 100 stories in the paper, and decades of doing this for a living, I still get excited and a little nervous when it hits print and goes up on the web. Showtime!

We won! Take the trivia test The New York Times team killed this week

So much fun!

On Friday night — in the same ABC TV studio on West 67th. where “Who Wants to Be A Millionaire” was once shot — I joined The New York Times trivia team in the 16-team competition for Trivia Bowl, created in 1994 by the Los Angeles chapter of the Asian-American Journalists Association.

My husband, who works at the Times, told me they were seeking competitors and I had qualified for Jeopardy (a popular American quiz show), back in 2006, so what the hell?

Our team of 10 included a copy editor, a former page designer, a reporter and me, a 20-year Times freelancer. I knew only one person on the team, who I’d met a decade earlier at a picnic and hadn’t seen since.

This was the first time the contest was held in New York, and teams came out from CNN, ABC, The Wall Street Journal, Newsday, Time and others. It was fun to see colleagues…as I reached for a spring roll in the food line-up, a man reached in front of me — the former national editor at the New York Daily News, now at ABC. I hadn’t seen him since 2006.

We’d worked together on a bunch of stories, including one that the Times’ kicked our ass on, but we kicked back. (A helicopter had fallen off a mountain in Afghanistan and the Army refused to give the News access to the military base in NY where many of the soldiers’ families were from. There are few American cities as competitive for news than New York! I once did a stake-out for 12 hours in 80 degree heat outside a midtown hotel and it was crazy. The Times guy even followed me into the elevator to see where I was going.)

So you can imagine the geek-fueled adrenaline in the room on Friday. Of course, no tools or aids were allowed.

I loved that our judges were, in their daily life, professional judges — six men and women who adjudicate cases in housing court and even the Supreme Court of New York. Cool!

We competed in five rounds: Entertainment; Geography/Science/Literature; Current Events/Sports; History/Elections;Presidents; New York.

Yes, the questions are both North America-centric and New York-centric. Good luck!

So, (working from memory!) here are some of the 80 questions. The ones I knew are marked with a C:

What was the original name of New York City? C

Name two musicals that won both a Tony and a Pulitzer prize

Name the two men who won Oscars in successive years

What do you call someone who studies dinosaurs? C

In which state is the town of Truth or Consequences? C

Which president was born in New York City?

Of the city’s five boroughs, which is the smallest in area?

What is the name of Kate Middleton’s dog?

What is the title of JK Rowling’s newest book?

Which Presidents are on Mt. Rushmore?

Which magazine sparked the Occupy Wall Street movement? C

On the 1970s television show All in The Family, which Queens neighborhood did they live in?

Which Asian designer created Michelle Obama’s dress for the inauguration ball? C

Two First Ladies have graced the cover of American Vogue. Michelle Obama was the second — who was the first? C

Which two countries lie directly below Saudi Arabia? C

Which is the third most-spoken language in Canada?

Who first recorded the song “New York, New York?”

Which hockey team has won the most Stanley Cups? C

What is the chemical symbol for salt? C

Who were the Three Musketeers? C

No Googling allowed!

Your answers….?

“Are you still writing?”

Homework Session (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

They always ask this with a little chirpy voice. Like…really?

They’re usually people with office jobs and big paychecks and paid sick days. People who line up every morning to catch the bus or train or subway and some of whom pray for reprieve from the vocational choice they’ve made.

Writing for a living looks so damn easy. No stress! No boss! No demands or deadlines!

Anyone can do it, right?

I thought I was alone in hearing this annoying question after spending my entire life as a journalist and author.

But Roger Rosenblatt, a much bigger name than I here in the U.S., gets it too, as he writes in The New York Times Book Review:

And, as far as anyone in the family can see, I do nothing, or next to it. This is the lot of the writer. You will hear someone referred to as “the writer in the family” — usually a quiet child who dresses strangely and shows inclinations to do nothing in the future. But when a supposedly grown-up writer is a member of the family, who knows what to make of him? A friend of my son-in-law’s asked me the other day, “You still writing?” — as if the profession were a new sport I’d picked up, like curling, or a disease I was trying to get rid of. Alexander Pope: “This long disease, my life.”

Writers cannot fairly object to being seen in this way. Since, in the nothing we do — the “nothing that is not there and the nothing that is” (Wallace Stevens) — we do not live in the real world, or wish to, it is fruitless and dishonest to protest that we do. When family members introduce us to one of their friends, it is always with bewilderment camouflaged by hyperbole. “This is so-and-so,” they will say, too heartily. “He’s a great and esteemed writer.” To which their friend will reply, “Would I have read anything you’ve written?” To which I reply, “How should I know?”

Everyone wants to be a writer — it looks like so much fun! Sit around the house in your pajamas all day waiting for inspiration. Sign me up!

Even the plumber who recently came to my apartment, and socked me with a $225.00 bill for fixing our only toilet, said “Oh, when I retire I want to be a writer.”

“You don’t,” I warned him, wincing as I wrote the check. “Most of us don’t make a lot of money.”

“Oh, I just want to be a successful writer,” he replied. “You know, like John Grisham.” (Who last year raked in a cool $18 million.)

Those of us who’ve been cranking out journalism or book-focused copy for a few decades, even with some nice reviews, (my first book was called [swoon!] “groundbreaking and invaluable” by one influential publication), know it’s a risky way to make a living. Because your “living” can vary from $4,000 a day to $4,000 a year.

Last year I made more money from public speaking engagements and a TV option from CBS for my memoir, “Malled” than I did from the book itself. It cost me 10 percent of the option income to have an entertainment attorney review the inch-thick contract with CBS negotiated by two agents — now taking 20 percent of the option cash for their input.

I waited 12 months after publication for the final instalment of my advance, which, after my agent took her standard 15 percent cut, came to $8,500. That’s a year’s income, or more, in sub-Saharan Africa. In suburban New York, (with no kids to support), that lasts quite a bit less.

Here’s a great list from Forbes.com, and fellow journo/blogger Jeff Bercovici, why journalism still kicks ass as a way to make a living. Because it just does.

(Here’s a brilliant blog post with a visual of how “success” appears to different people, including writers.)

So, why do so many people long to be writers?

People want to be rich. If writing doesn’t make you rich (and it certainly can for those who hit and stay on the best-seller list and/or sell their work to film or television), then why the hell are you bothering?

People want to be famous. If your book is on a shelf in a store, you’re the bomb! (So is weed-killer and diapers, but hey, retail exposure is cool, right?)

People want to be on TV/radio/blogs. They crave global attention. Because then life will be so different. (Not!)

People want to feel cool and creative. As opposed to cube life with 10 days of vacation.

People want to have other people quote them as wise and witty experts. Not just their Mom.

People want to feel validated as having something compelling to say, with millions eager to listen to them. Not just their Mom.

So, having published two non-fiction books (so far), is any of this true? Does it happen?

Sort of. I’ve met a few people who knew my name before I walked into the room. That can be pleasant.

I write because it’s how I make sense of the world.

I write because it stitches me back into the crazy quilt of other people’s ideas and feelings.

I write because my skill and talent and hard work, even working freelance for most of my life, have still allowed me to earn and save more than the average American with a steady paycheck.

I write because it allows me to indulge my insatiable curiosity about the world and get paid to do so.

I write because it has allowed me to meet everyone from Queen Elizabeth to convicted felons to Olympic athletes to a female admiral to the Inuk man who greeted me on a snowmobile when our tiny plane landed in his village just south of the Arctic circle.

I write because…

I’m a writer.

Why do you write?