The Perspiring Writer Magazine

Do you ever stretch yourself and write outside of your genre?

I started out writing poetry way back in the 1960s. But my audience was very small—just family and friends. 

You see, as a young married woman with small children, I didn’t have the money to buy gifts for family members at Christmastime or birthdays. So I wrote personalized poems inside homemade cards to give.

After a few years, I began sewing, knitting and embroidering gifts for everyone on my list. However I continued writing poetry and also children’s stories, which I read to my three young daughters. But my dream was to someday write article for magazines. I was intrigued by the way articles were designed—how they were structured—how they worked depending on the way the words were strung together.

In the early 1970s, I signed up for a creative writing class at the college. Our teacher had us writing poetry—but not the rhyming kind that I was used to writing. She taught us out to create word pictures. I wrote a poem depicting the history of cats and called it, “Cat Eternal.”

The class experience gave me the confidence I needed to strike out as a career writer and the first thing I did was to study the local hometown newspaper with a critical eye. What was missing from the line-up of columns? What was going on in this small town that was under-reported? In my view, it was local businesses. 

Being a small town and relying a lot on tourists, we’ve always had a smattering of interesting businesses opening and closing. I thought that readers would enjoy knowing more about some of the businesses and their proprietors and, certainly, local business owners would love to be featured in the newspaper.

I went out and interviewed a few business owners, wrote their stories and approached the newspaper publisher with my samples and my idea for a business column. Profiles in Business was launched and I was the columnist for the next three years. At the same time, I started submitting articles to magazines.

Some of the stories I did for the newspaper—with a little tweaking—were also suitable for magazines. So my 5 cents per column inch from the newspaper was sometimes expanded to $100 or $200.

Over the years, people have asked how I managed to earn a living through magazine article-writing. I mean, it is pretty much unheard of in most writing circles. Here are my thoughts:

• I believe that my timing was good—not so much from the standpoint of the industry or the era, but in that I didn’t need to support myself when I started writing for publication. That came later. I eased into my career on a part-time basis.

• I was highly motivated to write. I loved the process and felt a need to justify the time I spent writing. Publication, acknowledgement and monetary compensation were the justification I required.

• I was so motivated that I was also willing to do the enormous amount of work that didn’t involve writing—coming up with story ideas, interviewing people, selling myself and my ideas to editors and so forth.

• I maintained a good rapport with the editors I worked with. I always did as I said I would do.

• When there came a time in my life when I had to earn a living, I wasn’t afraid to make some sacrifices in order to build on my article-writing career. That’s when I had to get a regular job, so I began getting up every morning at 4 in order to write for a few hours before going to work. This is how I built my article-writing career to the point that I could finally quit the job and work full-time as a writer.

• I’ve been willing to shift with the times and circumstances in order to remain in the writing field. Becoming a writer or an author is a matter of choosing—choosing your area of interest and skill, choosing to do what it takes in order to follow your dream, choosing to conform and choosing to make sacrifices along the way. Does this describe you and your writing/publishing path?

If you need a nudge and some instruction toward building your freelance article-writing career, self-publishing your book, learning to self-edit your work, writing a book proposal, writing your memoir or promoting your book, sign up for one of my on-demand, online courses today. http://www.matilijapress.com/courses.htm

*Visit my new website: http://www.patriciafry.com

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The Art of Essay Writing

By Susan Kassel