Writing for mags like The New Yorker, GQ, Esquire, etc.

[WaylonJennings]

Just found out that Ryan Lizza, The New Yorker's chief political guy right now, is only 33 years old.

Curious about how writers - and we have a few of them here - end up writing for mags like these? Is it a don't-call-us-we'll-call-you situation? A "If you have to ask ..." type of thing? Are they all mucho credentialed (grad degrees in their beat, maybe an MFA, etc.)? Does the fork in the road come at age 20-22 when most of us decided to go into newspapers?

I'm curious. How does someone break in?

[Mizzougrad96]

I've done freelance for one of the magazines you listed and for several other similar magazines.

Early in my career, through some connections, I got very well-paid freelance gigs doing researched charts, team capsules, top 10 lists, essentially glorified agate for magazines like Maxim, GQ, ESPN the Magazine, TSN, Street and Smith, as well as a zillion magazines that have since folded. Maxim paid me $800 to do a top 10 list that was about 600 words and took about three hours to research. ESPN paid me $1 a word for team capsules for a preview section. I did contract work for SI.

In most cases, doing this kind of work led to writing assignments.

I know these types of freelance gigs are a lot harder to come by than they were a decade ago, but that's how I started doing magazine work.

[JR]

Ask Jones.

[Mizzougrad96]

Ask Jones.

Well, in his case, the answer would be, "Be insanely talented..."

Not all of us can claim that.

[WaylonJennings]

I've heard the Jones story. How he basically begged "Esquire" to give him a shot until they wouldn't let him leave. (Though I wouldn't mind hearing it again).

I guess I wonder if someone risks getting stigmatized/pigeon-holed from working in newspapers.

[Goldeaston]

Waylon brings up a good point regarding pigeon-holing. Many, maybe even most, sportswriters fall victim to this crap. Somehow, if you cover sports, you're not a "real" journalist in the eyes of many in the field. Likewise, if you've "only" worked for a daily, you're somehow unqualified to write longform for a magazine. I'm not sure I get that. A beat writer in a given week may write five stories and five notbooks, for instance. At about 500 words apiece, that's 5000 words a week. How that does not prepare you to write longform, I have no idea.

I realize the two forms and their construction are done in different ways. But a typical good sportswriter can put together some pretty nice prose while writing on deadline after a weeknight baseball game. I would think that, given a few days or even weeks to come up with 3000 words for a magazine story, by comparison, would be relatively easy. Maybe it's just me.

[partain]

I'm a former sports/newspaper guy who spent 7-plus years at various non-profit associations and parlayed that into a job with a magazine that covers the two associations I used to work for. At the time I was hired, the magazine never even advertised editorial openings. If a position became available, the staff simply compiled a list of four or five names of people they knew. I was lucky enough to know several people on staff. We're no where near some of the magazines listed, but we are a 75-year-old publication with circulation of 200,000 in a niche sports market.

As for the writing end, I had no formal training in magazine writing. Of course, we're starting to see shrinking newsholes as well, which means features have dropped from 3,500 words to 1,800 to 2,000 in most cases. So the writing side really isn't that difficult, especially considering the time allotted for pulling these stories together. I also write and compile several departments each month that aren't all that different from daily newspaper work.

I had done some freelance stuff for the magazine, as well, before coming on full-time. So I think that's a great way to get in the door at many places. But the best thing you can do is find a way to your name in front of people. My editor doesn't like to take calls in the first place, much less ones from people he doesn't know.

[buckweaver]

I would think that, given a few days or even weeks to come up with 3000 words for a magazine story, by comparison, would be relatively easy. 

I agree with almost all of what you said ... except the above. It's never easy; just a different kind of hard. Churning out 5,000 words a week on the same topic doesn't really prepare you for writing long-form, because it's not the same kind of writing. Not the same kind of focus. But it does give you the confidence that you can do it, and maybe can help to organize your ideas.

[Goldeaston]

I guess the key word is relatively. Nothing in this profession is easy. At least nothing done with any amount of quality.

[Jones]

Fuck, I'm 34 and a has-been.

A different kind of hard is exactly right. Less deadline pressure, more space, more time, often better access... But longer stories, a higher writing standard, stories that stand up over time, and really no room for error. The pressure isn't from the clock; it's from a bunch of empty pages that are worth a lot of money.

But to answer the question, Waylon, I started in newspapers, and have never felt any sort of stigma after I made my move to magazines. In fact, the opposite is probably true -- I think, if I can say this without sounding like an asshole, my time in newspapers made me a better reporter and a faster writer than the average magaziner. I turn something around in a week, and people are like, How can you do that? Well, if you're used to turning around baseball gamers in ten minutes, a week feels like an eternity. But seeing as some magazine stories take eight months, a week in that world can seem to flash by in a few beer farts. It's weird.

Now, all that being said, it's a rare writer who can make the adjustment without a hiccup or two. It really is a different art, and it takes a little while to beat some of the newspaper habits out of yourself. I know I took a while to find my footing. But it can be done, absolutely.

Local hero Wright Thompson is a great example of a young guy who worked his way into magazines after doing good work at newspapers.

Unfortunately, the freelance opportunities have been the first casualty of this little downturn we're in, and like Mizzou said, that was once the best way into magazines. It's harder than it used to be (and it was never easy) to convince an editor to pay a stranger to write a story that he's already paying his staff to write. As I've always said, and it's more true than ever: You need to pitch a story that he can't possibly turn down, and that only you can write. It's a tough trick, but if you do that, and then you hit a home run, you're in.

Because it's a small world, magazines. It's tough to crack, but once you crack it, you're part of the gang of thieves. After I got my job at Esquire, I got offers from a bunch of magazines who'd turned me down only months before. They just didn't want to take the chance on me that Esquire did. And, yeah, I wasn't too proud to beg.

Bottom line? You've got to find the guy who's still willing to give a guy a chance, and you have to convince him that you're the guy who deserves it.

Of course, I can say that, because I'm insanely talented.

That's a joke, by the way. I wake up every day thinking that today's the day they call my bluff, and I'm left blowing old fat guys for ten bucks a throw.

[Goldeaston]

Jones, I am finding that as the economy causes staff reductions at newspapers, freelancing opportunities are actually on the rise. Do you think the same may be true of magazines at some point?

[Inky_Wretch]

To get my foot in the door, I'd be willing to do background for you Jones in exchange for beer.

[Jones]

Goldeaston: Well, at least so far, most high-end magazines haven't reduced writing staff -- gulp! -- so that demand for freelance material to fill the void hasn't happened in magazines yet. Plus, there's also been a decline in editorial pages, pretty much across the board, so there's less space to fill in the first place.

Don't get me wrong -- I think there's still room for good and motivated freelancers to work their way into magazines. I just think it's harder than it was.

Will that change? I hope so, for sure, but because the economy turns around and magazines start growing again, not because we've started losing full-time staff. I'm selfish that way.

Inky: What do you think they pay me with? Money?

[Inky_Wretch]

I always suspected black-tar heroin, 2-for-1 coupons to the strip club and maple syrup.

[21]

I'm left blowing old fat guys for ten bucks a throw.

I'd be willing to do background for you Jones in exchange for beer.

Not exactly the same thing.

[Bubbler]

Can I sleep my way to the top?

[GB-Hack]

Can I sleep my way to the top?

Only if you want to work for Cosmopolitan.

[jgmacg]

     A couple of things to add to what The Jones posted:

    Yes, he's insanely talented. And because he's modest and lovable and a mensch he'll mock that in himself, and play it off. National Magazine Award? Ha ha! Waiter! Another round of cherry schnapps for my friends and me and put it on my tab! Now photograph my buttocks!

     The more important truth for those trying to move into the orbit of glossy titles like The New Yorker/Esquire/GQ/RS/etc is that The Jones works harder than you do. Much harder. At everything. That's how he got the job at Esquire. By working his ass off to get it. Now he works those sturdy Canadian glutes off to do better work than his colleagues and contemporaries.

     We can't control the magnitude of our gifts, but we're certainly in charge of how much time and effort we devote to refining them. Updike is a giant, and will absolutely batter you with his work ethic. So will Oates and Stone and Packer and Pierce and Boo and Mayer and Singer -  and on and on and on across the range of marquee names in the field. This was true of our late friends Halberstam and Heinz and DFW, too.

     So. First. No matter how hard you think you're working right now, you need to work way harder.

     He's also right in saying that a newspaper background carries no stigma with it into the magazine world. Great writing is great writing, and editors don't much care where you came from if you can deliver high-quality work. That said, the two disciplines share almost nothing in common and are not interchangeable. Newspaper folks often find it impossible to sustain a 10,000-word piece, and many magazine writers can't deliver 700 words on a 20-minute deadline. Apples and oranges.

     Thus the broader and deeper your interest in the craft of writing - regardless of venue - the better your chances of success across a range of platforms.

     Now, to the point of the thread, how do you break in?

     It's different for everyone.

     A couple of weeks ago I was lucky enough to be sitting around a table late one night with some of the best writers I know, some of the best in America, including The Jones.  And everyone at that table had a completely different origin story.

      In my case, very briefly, I just kept submitting work to places I had no business submitting to. I came in over the transom and got noticed. And eventually published. Not so much fearless as clueless, I got into the glossy magazine rotation because I persisted in putting my work in front of people, taking their tips and criticisms to mind but not to heart, rewriting, and putting my work in front of them again.

     The other good folks at that table have all trod their own weird and unmappable paths forward. From the North and the South, younger and older, out of the worlds of fiction or politics or sports. We're very different, so we've all suffered our unique failures or won our peculiar successes. But this we hold in common: every one of us is passionate about the craft of writing. And every one of us from that drunken loving table has a single ambition - to write good sentences.

     Write good sentences and the rest comes.

     That's a terribly reductionist strategy, I know. I sound like Pollyanna whenever I say it in the Workshop here, or in front of a class or to a young colleague. Write good sentences, and the rest - the respect, the fame, the attention, the money, the satisfaction, whatever it is you seek - comes to you.

     How do you break in?

     Write good sentences.
     

[BYH]

^^^^^^ Like those.

[In Exile]

In the mid to late 1980s I was doing a great deal of magazine work - small time national and big time regional - when that recession hit.  It took a few months, but once the water started running down the drain there was no stopping it, and I went from selling every idea I had to selling none of them in about six months.  When magazine pages (meaning ad pages) start to drop, so do most freelance opportunities - my money maker went from 400 pages plus to barely one hundred in less than a year, and when they rebounded a few years later it was with an entirely new, stripped down staff that didn't want anything to do with me or my kind of work.  Look for that to happen beginning in the post-December issues.  Book publishing is already getting tight, too.  All they want are blockbusters or low advance gambles.  Some big imprints will disappear in the next 6-12 months.  Gonna be a rough few years as a freelancer, because of you are under fifty you have probably not experienced what is about to come.

Your sentences have to be even better than before.

[BYH]

On a much, much, MUCH smaller scale, the same thing happened to me when the bottom fell out of everything (online and print) for a short time earlier this decade.

You can do everything right and still end up on the outside looking in. Which kinda sums up this whole racket.

[funky_mountain]

my favorite days here are when jgmacg and jones post on these kinds of threads.

now back to writing my average-to-sometimes-good sentences.

[Inky_Wretch]

my favorite days here are when jgmacg and jones post on these kinds of threads.

Agreed.

[WaylonJennings]

Jones, jgmacg, etc. - I'm wondering if when you broke in, did you pitch specific stories? Or did you send in samples of your work and ask for a chance to do something for them?

Not to brag, but I'm pretty sure I've got the chops. I'm working on the credibility. I wrote a feature this summer for an alternative weekly in a major, major, major market. I pitched it myself - and I absolutely loved the editing process they put it through. I mean, these people give a shit about writing and reporting. I'm also THIS close to closing a deal with a fairly major book publisher (agented submission).

My last day in the newspaper racket will be the day my team plays in a bowl game, so I'll have the rest of the winter and spring to write my book and try to gain some sort of freelance traction before I begin school.

I mean, is it worth it to try to make myself known to big-name mags? Or just keep trying to pound away at the book and the alternative weeklies? Is a writer's first Esquire/Atlantic/NYT Mag/NYer piece one they submitted on spec?

[Jones]

I didn't pitch a specific story. When I went into Esquire, I had a few of my best long clips and a book I'd written about boxing. I sat down with an editor, the awesome Andy Ward, who was kind enough to see me, and I said, I'm not asking for anything now, I'm not there yet, but one day I would like to work for you, and I'd like it if you kept an eye on me. That meeting was really an introduction, that's all.

Then, I had him read one of my stories while I sat there. It was a weird moment, but basically I said, I just want to know if there's any chance. I gave him what I thought at the time was one of my better newspaper stories, and I thought, if he reads this and says, Not so much, then I know I should shelve the dream and work harder at what I'm doing. So I watched Andy read my story, and after Andy said, We wouldn't have so many one-sentence paragraphs, but yeah, there's something there.

That was all I needed. I left him a copy of my book, and off I went. (And Waylon, write the book -- mine wasn't very good, and it sold fewer than 1,000 copies, but I'm certain that it kept me closer to the top of the pile than I might have been otherwise. It meant I could write long, if nothing else.) Six months later, I got an email about an opening. They asked for ten ideas. They picked one, I wrote it, wrote another one, and a couple more, and then I finally landed a contract, probably six stories in.

So, that's how I did it. But like jgmacg says -- and jgmacg is the pinnacle of menschdom, really one of the best people I know -- it's a different story for all of us. At Esquire, for instance, Tom Junod started out writing for Atlanta magazine; Charlie Pierce was at the Boston Phoenix, I believe; Scott Raab was many things, none of them close to a writer; Tom Chiarella was a short-story writer and college professor. Some people, their first story would be a spec. Other people would pitch an idea. Other people would meet someone through someone and see an opening. Who knows?

But there are universal truths:

1) No one is going to do the work for you. You have to make yourself visible, either by being outgoing and unafraid, or by doing work that's so good, someone else takes notice. Preferably both.

2) Again, like jgmacg says, it is hard work. I work hard. He works hard. Charlie Pierce works hard. The lazy ones either don't get in or they don't last. There are a lot of talented people out there. Working hard is the best way to separate yourself from them.

3) You really do have to love writing. Newspapers, you can get by on loving being a reporter. Magazines, you have to love to write. (Especially when you're on edit no. 9.) You have to study other writers. You have to work to get better. You have to take time. You have to read. You have to care about craft. When jgmacg talks about that group of us sitting around the table, which really was one of the great summits of my life, what linked all of us, as different as we are on the surface, was our love of words.

And last, and feel free to mock me for this, but I believe in my heart that it's true:

4) Be a good person. It's a small world. It's also a world of intense relationships -- especially the relationship between writer and editor. If people hear that you're an asshole, they're not going to want to hang out with you at the bar. The same goes for work. There's this weird thing among writers, the legends always seem to be bad seeds somehow, brawlers and drunks and wife-stabbers, and young writers sometimes feel the need to prove that they can belong in that class of reprobate. (Easy for the drunk to say.) But it's the good-hearted guys who get along in the business, especially in an environment like today's. Treat people well, with respect, with kindness and generosity and optimism -- be the jgmacg of your little universe -- and that will come back to you.

Write good sentences, and don't stab your wife.