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A month ago I shared some thoughts on writing, unscientific theories about how to sound like yourself sooner. This is the next in that series, it’s less personal and a little more tactical: How to get your work in magazines and websites.
I’ve told this story a few times, but I’ll tell it again. For many years I only wrote about art. I started writing exhibition reviews, then I interviewed artists, wrote catalog essays and longer pieces. I wrote cover stories for Art in America, and one of the early large features on Ai Weiwei, which I reported from Beijing. It was nice. My mom was proud.
But I wanted something else. I wanted to write about other things I cared about: travel, tailoring, fly fishing, wine. I pitched editors and they turned me down. “Show us examples of your wine stories,” they said. I didn’t have any. “You can see plenty of my art pieces,” I told them. It never worked.
I had to write the stories. So I did. I wrote for websites for little money or, sometimes, no money. There are hilariously earnest columns of mine in the Huffington Post, a lot of things on A Continuous Lean (I will always be grateful to Michael for giving me the space to do that). Finally, Owen Phillips, the art editor at The New Yorker, became an editor at Men’s Vogue, of all places. He knew my art writing and needed content for their new website. It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship. I wrote often (and quickly) about everything from auctions of Sopranos memorabilia to Donald Judd’s Land Rover to the first restaurant that had their wine list on an iPad (what a novelty!).
I was used to the serious tone of art magazines and Owen loosened me up. “It doesn’t have to be so…controlled,” he noted drily. Not everything had to be analysis. Eventually I wrote a story for the print edition of Men’s Vogue, on fly fishing in Idaho, if you can believe it. My dad told me to print out all these stories for my records, an old-fashioned idea I laughed at. The joke was on my because the site was completely wiped from the internet when Men’s Vogue folded. The entire archive, including print stories, was gone overnight. That’s a shame, because there were some serious stories from serious writers, like Michael Lewis and James Stewart.
Anyway, that got me started. I started writing for more magazines, I met more editors, I worked with Glenn O’Brien, who showed me a whole new way of writing and a way of approaching a creative career. Over time I expanded what I wrote about and introduced characters from my family or other obscure interests that I once felt were too personal. Now The Optimist is coming out in a few weeks (yikes!), and that’s another step too.
So, well, here we are.
Here are a few things that might be helpful, in no particular order.
-Make an editor’s life easier. Know what a magazine or site needs and offer them that. If they feature hotel reviews, pitch them a hotel review, not a complete travel guide to the Yucatan. Tell them you’re going to be there so they don’t have to buy you a plane ticket. “I’ll be near this new hotel designed by x, with a restaurant by y, and I thought that would make sense for your review section.” If that sounds like an equation that’s because a lot of publishing is an equation.
-Three things make a trend. Trend pieces can be deadly, but, for better or worse, they’re still quite common, even if they go by a different name. If a lot of interesting people leave Copenhagen to move to some small Danish town to open restaurants, an art gallery and a ceramics studio, now that’s a story. People hiking across Bhutan or tracking down some obscure Japanese Jeep. Again an equation. Editors want to know what’s new and good and engaging. You should know those things too.
-Get your work out there. There are so many ways to get your work online—Medium, a personal site, whatever. An editor will still want to have a sense of your tone and the way you write, regardless of the topic. And probably they won’t want it in a Word attachment at the end of an email.
-There’s nothing wrong with starting small. An editor doesn’t want your monumental theories about Porsche design (sorry!), that’s why Bloomberg has Hannah Elliott on staff. Pitch a small piece that makes sense for the publication. You’re starting a relationship that will hopefully develop into something larger.
-Have interests and communicate them. If you talk to an editor and they politely turn down your story, tell them something else you’re into they might need in the future. “I spend a lot of time in Spain. If you ever need something from there please let me know.” It helps if this is true, but it should at least be half true. I told my editor at Art in America that Ai Weiwei had agreed to talk to me when I was in Beijing. This was essentially true. When I stood outside the walls of his studio compound, it occurred to me that I hadn’t heard from him in a few weeks and that if something had changed then the whole thing could fall apart. It was a tense few minutes before an assistant opened the gate and let me in.
-Ask questions. “What are you looking for?” is good to ask an editor. If they are covering a topic then figure out how you can do that for them. I don’t want to make editors seem lazy or harsh—they are balancing many things at once often under deadline pressure. You’re essentially trying to insinuate yourself into a dinner party where nobody knows who you are.
-It’s not about you. Hard to believe, right? If you get the hotel review (congratulations!) then don’t write an epic. Stick to the form. People want to know what the hotel looks like, what the lobby and rooms feels like, how the staff is, what’s surprising about it, what the neighborhood’s like. They don’t want a novel, they don’t want jokes. They don’t want theories about what Venice means to you, or lines that start with “Henry James always said London felt like...” Get as quickly as possible to why we’re all here.
Phew. Thanks for hanging in there. I hope this is helpful.
Good luck out there!