Interview How to: Two common mistakes writers make

First off, let me say that I’ve never been a newspaper reporter, have never set foot inside a journalism school and only know who William Allen White is because there’s a building named after him at my alma mater.  I do write for magazines, but that does not make up the majority of my writing. …

8 thoughts on writing about personal experience

Yesterday I wrote about how I think it’s important to be fair in writing about others when describing our personal experiences, but at the same time not letting those concerns stop us from writing about ourselves.  Over the years, I’ve developed some rules of thumb for these kinds of essays:   1.  Is it necessary…

On writing about personal experiences

Why did you have to write about that moment? A friend of mine wrote and published online a moving essay about her sister’s death, and this is the response she got from a family member.  My friend did some soul-searching afterwards, trying to find an answer.  She reported the question to me the other day…

How to distinguish between useful and useless perseverance

Yesterday, I talked about how difficult it can be to distinguish between useful perseverance (you’ll eventually find the right person for your project if you just keep trying) and useless perseverance (you’ll never find anyone who’ll want this project, so you should move on to the next one.)  Through experience, I have come up with…

Why publishing isn’t a numbers game

I hear this over and over among people who should know better: “It’s just a numbers game.”  The idea is that success in freelancing (whether that’s writing for magazines, doing corporate writing or publishing books) is basically the result of knocking on a lot of doors.  If you send out enough pitch letters or LOIs…

Things that make me smile

I usually skate over typos in books (Columbia for Colombia, for example) although as I’ve mentioned before sometimes these things pull me out of a story.  But this week, I ran across a typo made repeatedly in a book that just made me laugh (not the response the writer was hoping for, I am sure.):  “He…