Notes to aspiring writers

I had a fella email me today that is trying to break into writing, specifically travel writing. I decided to paste my response here. I’ll continue to update this and use it to direct future “how the hell do I get published” queries.

I think that every writer has their own path to getting published. No book or website or email can tell you what exactly will work for you; in fact, they often distract us from what’s most important – actually writing.

My path went something like this…

At first, I traveled for traveling’s sake. To experience the freedom of the open road and all that jazz. I was a bum. It was pure. It was beautiful. And then, the writing bug bit me and now travel plays second fiddle to writing. I can no longer bum. If I’m not working on a story, or what could become a story, I’ve got to move on to one or I’ll go nuts. Damned writing anyhow. It had to go a screw with the bum gig.

I was living in Key West and wrote a column for the local weekly paper. I got paid $0. My column was titled Travelin’ Light and I give any credit of what success I’ve had writing to the obligation of writing a weekly column. I probably wrote over 100 columns and I started to place them in a couple of other papers – small ones in random places in Ohio and Illinois. During this period of time I emailed about every paper with a circulation over 50,000. I’m not kidding. It was a monumental waste of time, but it taught me a lot about marketing my work. Occasionally I submitted individual stories to newspaper travel section and got published in Raleigh, NC, and Indianapolis, IN. I met an editor of the Christian Science Monitor at a writer’s conference and landed several publications there. This led to some radio work and by far my most impressive writing clips. I planned the Where am I wearing? trip and right before I left an agent contacted me if I had thought about writing a book about the trip to which I responded, “holy crap I just crapped myself.” I’m eloquent like that. I came back from the trip with a lot clearer idea of what the book was. I went to a local writer’s conference here in Indiana and met another agent. While I was asking her questions about how to work with the original agent, she asked me what my book was. The other agent lost interest and she became my agent. A few months later she sold my book. That’s it.

Some tips:

* We need deadlines to actually make us write, no excuses. By far the most important thing is writing. From my first column until now, I’ve come a long way. Everybody knows that practice sucks so try to find yourself something that you can contribute to on a regular basis. Even if it is only your personal blog or local paper, you need something that people are going to read so you hold yourself to higher standards.

* Dave Barry on writing: “Do things not think things.” I still think I have a long way to go as a writer, but I think what success I have had is just as much a credit to doing interesting things as writing well about them. Unfortunately or fortunately depending on your perspective, a good idea will sell bad writing.

* Go to writer’s conferences and make contacts. I’ve only been to a few, but all of my “breaks” (Christian Science Monitor, landing and agent) have resulted from writer’s conferences.

* Be completely indifferent to rejection. When I submit something I make sure that it’s my best work, but once it is out of my hands, I don’t expect anything to come of it. I call this being cautiously pessimistic. I have stacks of paper rejections and MB worth of email rejections.

* Don’t do it for the money. I do it because I just love writing. I’ve always had other work and still do. If I would have taken a year off to make a go at the writing thing I probably would have said screw it a long time ago. Patience is required.

Getting your book published:

Subscribe to publisher’s marketplace for their daily deals email. They report what agent sold what to what editor. Pay attention to agents that are selling stuff like yours. Visit their website to see what their submission guidelines are and submit away. I was in the process of doing this, but got lucky that agents found me before I went looking for them.

Here are some links to more bits on writing:

On editors
Websites to check out about industry
Exploiting aspiring writers
Getting an agent

The narrative journalism oath

1/29/08
Karl Schoenberger author of Levi’s Children: coming to terms with human rights in the global marketplace on narrative journalism:

“When the human rights narrative abandons the pretext of objectivity and crosses over into the realm of pure entertainment, it can become as preposterous as it is insidious.

The problem begins with the occasional purple-prose narrative journalism that reveals shocking tales of egregious human rights violations but neglects to follow up on the factual chain of events or to place the sordid tale into a broader context. The consumer of a newspaper article or a TV newsmagazine expose feels absolved of personal responsibility after experiencing a delicious emotional revulsion to the outrage, without being asked to think about how to prevent it from happening again. For an ephemeral moment, the passive audience for cheesy entertainment journalism can feel good about detesting Nike shoes or virtual slavery on Saipan without any obligation to revisit the intellectual and more challenges of the issue the next day.”

I Kelsey Timmerman, soon-to-be author of Where am I Wearing? do solemnly swear to not use purple-prose (or any other color of prose) in my narrative, to place all sordid tales in a broad context, to avoid having my readers experience any delicious emotional revulsion to outrage, and to cut the cheese out of my journalism.

Thank you.

Pray to Jesus, Obama ain’t one of ‘em Muslims

Barak Obama isn’t Muslim.

You can ask him. He’ll tell you.

Neither am I. But I’ve spent a lot of time around Muslims whose moral fabric, ethics, and patriotism were as good, if not better than most Americans.

The emails circulating around the country saying that Obama is a Muslim are a blight on our political process and an insult to the American people.

It’s disturbing that accusations of belonging to a certain religion have any positive or negative value whatsoever in politics. Whatever happened to religious freedom or all that equality mumbo jumbo in the constitution?

Obama vehemently denies the accusations, stating that he has attended the same Christian church for over twenty years and that he prays to Jesus. He does it eloquently and, unfortunately, he has had to do it often.

But wouldn’t it be great if he could say, “I’m not Muslim, but what if I was? What would be wrong with that?” Insert any religion: “I’m not Jewish, but what if I was?” Wouldn’t it be great if a candidate’s take on the issues and their character mattered more than what god they look to for guidance?

There has been a lot of talk this primary season about if America was ready for a woman or black president. It looks like we’re closer than we’ve ever been. We’ve come a long way and should be proud as a country.

But when will America be ready for a non-Christian President?

What are we to tell the young, American girl in the hijab or the American boy in the Jewish skullcap who say that when they grow up they want to be President?

“Kid, you’ll never be President. You aren’t Christian.”

Obama isn’t Muslim. But if he were, I would still vote for him.

A thousand words…a game, a smoke, and some groceries

Things I’m excited about: Finding Osama at Sundance & Bliss

1. Morgan Spurlock’s new film Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden recently debuted at the Sundance Film festival. I probably won’t be able to see it for some time since films like this don’t come to a theater near me in Muncie, Indiana. So, I’ll have to wait for the DVD. Until then here’s a taste:

2. Eric Weiner’s book The Geography of Bliss. Weiner a former NPR correspondent banished to report from the world’s most depressing places visits the happiest places on Earth. I’m all about chasing an idea from culture to culture and trying to make sense of it. It’s a bold move looking for something as abstract as happiness, but from what I’ve heard about the book, he does a good job of it.

Here’s a question for you:

Which is easier to find Osama Bin Laden or Bliss?

The end of Litmus-gate

Let’s retire the use of “gate” as a suffix to signify a scandal. It’s overdone, uncreative, and annoys the crap out of me. This morning on the news they talked about “boot-gate,” which is about Tom Brady, the New England Patriots QB who was seen in New York wearing a walking cast. The original gate of course was Watergate, which is the name of the hotel that Nixon’s flunkies broke into and eventually led to his impeachment. Tom Brady’s boot has nothing to do with paper shredding, hotels, the President, or a scandal. Hell, it’s two weeks until the Superbowl.

Let’s stop the madness before some famous person scandalously hops a gate, steals a gate, or is hit with a gate and we are subjected to the Gate-gate scandal. And if that famous person was Antonio Gates, the Pro Bowl Tight-end for the San Diego Chargers, we’d end up with the ridiculosity that’d be Gates-Gate-Gate scandal. And if that took place at the Watergate Hotel…

While we are retiring annoying language habits, let’s put an end to the use of “Rorschach test” and “litmus test” used to describe anything but staring at ink blots on paper or testing for an acid or base. I suppose sports journalists are the worst at using these. Many of them are retired former athletes and I think they like to show off the fact that they showed up for Science class in Junior High where they turned a blue paper red and to Psychology 101 when they saw a naked girl in the ink blots in their textbook.

“Bill, this game is going to be a litmus test to see if the Patriots can overcome the Spy-gate controversy.”

Isn’t that sentence just an inflated version of: “Bill, this game is going to be a test to see if the Patriots can overcome controversy.”?

So if you don’t use these and I don’t use these, bit by bit we can change the world.

China wants cheap stuff

At the Davos Economic Forum in Switzerland the world complained that China doesn’t buy enough stuff from the rest of us.

China’s response: “Just sell more things to us cheaper than made in China!”

Reported on the NY Times Davos Diary.

American Apparel Ad

American Apparel, operator of the largest garment factory in the USA, is known for its controversial, racy ads. Now they are venturing into the controversial world of politics. Their new ad takes immigration head on.

In the NY Times:

In a new series of ads, American Apparel is moving in a political direction. The cause is immigration reform, and the ads say in part that the status quo “amounts to an apartheid system” and should be overhauled to create a legal path for undocumented workers to gain citizenship in the United States.

I don’t feel educated enough to praise or criticize AA’s stance in the complex immigration debate. But I do think that if more clothing companies and/or brands would not try to distance themselves from the political issues they operate in, consumers could make more informed decisions.

Quote: Britney Spears vs. Bill Gates

From Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat about the promise of China’s future:

In China today, Bill Gates is Britney Spears. In America today, Britney Spears is Britney Spear – and that is our problem.

Reasons I love writing…

#45 Research on YouTube

And then killing time on YouTube