Writing Boots

On communication, professional and otherwise.

I’m a writer. Don’t you want to know my daily routine?

01.02.2013 by David Murray // Leave a Comment

When I was in college and wanted to be a writer, I read a book called Writers on Writing. It was a collection of interviews with famous writers—Isaac Asimov, Ellen Goodman, Ray Bradbury are three that I recall.

Many of those interviews contained writers' accounts of their daily routine. Which surprised me, because who cared how a writer arranged the day? Except, I cared, a lot. Because I still thought then that there was a writer-y way to be in the world, and it seemed like a good way to begin to be that way was to learn how a writer spent the day.

Like Kurt Vonnegut, whose writing routine was recently revealed in a letter to his wife, most writers did most of their writing in the morning. As they still do.

As I do.

I've been writing professionally for two decades. I even have a book out. I bet you want to hear all about my writing day.

I rise at about 6:30. (Note that because I'm a writer, I don't "get up." I "rise.")

I make the coffee and let the dog out and joke with my daughter while my wife urges her to brush her teeth and hair so they can get out the door. (Notice that all these mundane activities are suddenly charming to think of, because it is a writer doing them. He must be doing them in a droll and charming way.)

When the house is empty and quiet, the dog follows me upstairs to my study—(yes, my study)—and curls up on the floor, perhaps hoping, fruitfully today, that I will include him in a warm anecdote about the writer's life. His name is Charlie, and he's an English Springer Spaniel (a sufficiently writer-ish breed, wouldn't you agree?).

I procrastinate the way a writer procrastinates: by writing something other than what he's being paid to write. A nasty letter to someone who has it coming. A less soaring version of the national anthem, called The Rational Anthem. A blog post. Just to sharpen my knives for the real writing.

Then I write—(I do not, as far as you're concerned, go online to check my bank balance, do not call around for weekend tee times, do not call the motorcycle mechanic to check on my bike, do not check email every 10 minutes and Facebook every 15 and visits to this blog every hour, do not scour the Internet looking for a simpler Sloppy Joe recipe)—until about 11:30. 

Then I go for a run outside or I hit the heavy bag in the basement, depending on which you think is a more literary thing to do. (And often more literary doesn't translate to more eccentric. It's cool for a writer to have some regular-guy hobbies. Hunter S. Thompson was a big pro football fan, and I hear Ernest Hemingway liked to fish.)

I eat in front of MSNBC. If Andrea Mitchell is on, I know nothing important can be happening in the world. Then spend 20 minutes answering the routine emails I did not answer (as far as you were concerned) in the morning, while I was WRITING.

Then I lie down. The dog lies down next to me. We sleep. Usually after about 20 minutes, I wake up with a shame-filled panic feeling that years of daily routine have not dulled: Jesus Christ, I am in the prime of my earning years, and sleeping during the workday on a Tuesday!

The dog does not share this feeling, but follows me downstairs as I make a new pot of coffee or to microwave what I didn't drink this morning.

The afternoon, unless I am under an unholy deadline, is an essential winding down, tying up loose ends, making phone calls, gaping at PDF page proofs, or coolly editing the morning's frantic work. There is preparation for tomorrow's main creative task, which looms on a list written in active verbs—"hammer Vital Speeches," "attack video script." And finally, there is listing the ingredients for that "weekday" Sloppy Joe. Molasses is nice-to-have, not need-to-have.

And then I motor off to pick up my daughter at school, and we practice her spelling on the way to the grocery store and she gets the produce and I get the rest and we argue about who's the grossest skinny model on the magazine covers at the checkout line. If I'm feeling especially writer-y, in the parking lot I honk my horn at some jagoff in and teach her what "marplot" means (and how only a jamoke would use marplot when jagoff would do) and I go home and make dinner while having just the right number of drinks to satisfy the expectations of the reading public. (Vonnegut drank to "numb my twanging intellect," he said. I'll go with that.)

Depending on what I have left, a book or TV with my wife.

The writer-y life? As Woody Guthrie would write: There's no such a thing.

Writing is no more and no less than what my novelist mother wrote once in a diary: "Am a writer. Get to call myself that because I write."

How about you?

Categories // Uncategorized Tags // Kurt Vonnegut, the writing life, writer's daily routine, writers, writers on writing

How to sell a stranger a story (or anything else, I guess)

04.10.2012 by David Murray // 1 Comment

A young videojournalist friend of mine asked me to send him some sample "story pitches"—ideas sent to editors to convince them they'll want to publish a story you haven't yet written or even researched. It's a tall order when you think of it. And it keeps some people from even trying. Which is good, because that keeps the competition down.

But for people who are simply mystified by the pitching process—and at the risk of offering something useful here at Writing Boots—I thought I'd deconstruct a successful pitch of mine, and try to figure out why the editor bought it.

It's my most recent pitch, actually, to Automobile Magazine; they took it, and the article hits newsstands later this month.

***

Hi Jackie, I appreciate your forwarding this to Jean, who I hope will remember some correspondence with me a few years ago about a profile of her. We never got it together, but we tried hard.

Why risk reminding the magazine's publisher, Jean Jennings, of a failed project? Because it's better to be a partial failure than a total stranger. Without any connection whatsoever, it is hideously rare to get an editor to go for your story. Conversely, any introduction you can get, even through an editorial assistant, seems to help your chances an inordinate amount.

For the last few months, as Mitt Romney’s nomination has slowly begun to look inevitable, I’ve been wondering why there’s so little coverage of his Detroit upbringing, and the influence his father George, and his attitudes about the automobile industry, must have had on Mitt’s worldview.

And I’ve been thinking maybe a car magazine could turn over some fresh soil in this area.

Quickly establish your story idea, and your relationship to it. Editors do not sit around wishing they had good story ideas. They rush around fixing the stories they have coming in, and wrestling with designers and fact-checkers to get issues to bed. They don't have time to savor your pitch, so don't fuck around.

Also: One advantage an editor does have in assigning a story to a stranger is a measure of control, the editor's feeling that this is her story, acquired outside the editorial bullpen. In fact, that's one reason you're sending her a pitch and not the finished story—so you can make the editor feel involved in the process. Indicate in your pitch that you're open to her guidance and even in some need of her help.

This angle hasn’t been well covered because most reporters are not from Detroit, not of Detroit, and don’t understand how car-centric a universe Detroit is, and certainly was in the 1950s and 1960s, when Mitt was growing up. (I understand, because my dad Tom Murray wrote ads for Corvette in the 50s and was creative director at Campbell-Ewald in the 60s.)

Here I begin to answer the editor's next question: Why should I hire THIS writer to do this piece? I've never heard of the guy. Sometimes the answer is obvious—I had all these Detroit connections and can talk with some authority about the city's golden years. Other times, all you bring to the equation is a desperate thirst for the subject and a requisite willingness to put in way more time than any other writer. Go with what you got—but don't leave the editor thinking she can just as well put one of her staffers onto the story. I did once—and that's exactly what the editor did.

When you look at the world from Detroit, you have a few questions about Mitt Romney that don’t occur to other people: How could he have so brazenly called for the death of the American automobile industry? Is he so disloyal to his roots? Or did he actually grow up hostile to the Big Three because his dad ran American Motors, and so calling for the abandonment of the Big Three tasted like revenge?

Here I'm getting the editor curious to read the story, by sharing my own genuine curiosity. I'm an editor, too; and the stories I green-light are the ones that I myself am excited to read. (I once got an editor to agree to let me write about life on a little small-town nine-hole golf course. Do you think his "yes" to what became an award-winning piece had anything to do with the fact that he himself grew up on a little snall-town nine-hole golf course?)

I’m personally curious about Mitt and his Detroit years because my Democrat mother, a copywriter who worked for my dad, was briefly assigned to do some speaker-coaching for presidential candidate George Romney, who was a friend of Campbell-Ewald’s chairman at the time. (How did she like it? I once asked my dad. “How do you think she liked it?” he replied.)

This story offered me a rare chance to make the case that no one but me could write this story. Usually you can't get there in a pitch, but you really should be pitching stories that connect with your life's experience.

As for me, I’d like to explore George and Mitt and American Motors and the Big Three and ask Mitt and anyone else who might be an authority, to talk about those years, and how they may have affected Mitt’s economic and social thinking today. I actually think he might be interested in talking about that, and we might see a direct connection between the car industry, the father, and the son.

The one thing I didn't do well in this pitch was demonstrate my endless willingness to work, by showing off what work I've already done on the subject and spelling out all the people I plan to talk to along the way.

The authors of a new book The Real Romney speculate that the interchangeable planks of Romney’s political platform stem from his Detroit upbringing: “Having grown up around engines, Romney adopted a kind of car hobbyist’s mindset. Almost anything, he believed, could be taken apart, studied, and re-engineered.”

Surely, Jean, we can do better than that.

That's okay, but generally in a pitch I like to include a taste of original reporting. E.g., "I've already talked to one former AMC CEO, and he says Mitt Romney is nothing like his father. 'George was terribly charismatic,' says so-and-so. 'You'd get lost in his hand.'"

Let me know if you have any interest in a story along these lines.

David Murray

P.S. A brief bio on me follows:

I'm editor of Vital Speeches of the Day, a 75-year-old collection of the best oral communication in the U.S. and the world.

I also write feature stories on politics, golf, murder, hairpiece making, boxing, ballet, homelessness, motorcycling, the state supreme court, sailing, dinosaurs, professional poker and other related subjects.

My work has appeared in publications and media outlets including The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, Sailing Magazine, Golf Magazine, Car Collector Magazine, Chicago Magazine, Advertising Age, Vibe.com, the Huffington Post and Chicago Public Radio. (In all candor, my work has also been rejected or ignored by such august publications as The New Yorker and Modern Drunkard Magazine.)

—
David Murray
1508 W. Ohio #3
Chicago, IL 60622
312-455-2921
writingboots.typepad.com

It's good to have a blog (where your clips can be found), because editors get to snoop on your stuff at their their leisure.

***

In short, every pitch should tell the editor: I'm not a total stranger to you (or you at least know the publication well). I have a story idea that's clear enough to be stated in one paragraph. Beyond solid, my story has a chance to uncover some real insights (and get attention for the magazine). After all, I've only made a little investigation and look what I've already uncovered. Anyway, I've written bigger stories for better publications than this, and I'm just the guy to do this story. And I've been around the block, so you know I''ll be a pro to work with. And I have a sense of humor, thank God.

That's all you gotta do—and I recommend you do it in under 500 words.

If you can do that, you might get the story on your first pitch or your tenth. (I nailed this one on the first, but I've had good pitches go through many editors, and die anyway.)

And if you can't do this—well, why should anybody publish you, Stranger?

Categories // Uncategorized Tags // editors, getting published, publish, story pitch guide, writers

A writer, working late

05.03.2011 by David Murray // 4 Comments

One evening last week I drank a whole bottle of wine and watched "Born Into This," a wild documentary on the poet Charles Bukowski. He's one of a number of writers I dip into occasionally, because he has some medicine that's good for me if I take it in the right doses.

I found myself scribbling notes, writing down Bukowski quotes. "Love is a fog that burns with the first daylight of reality," said Bukowski. "Love is a drug from hell," he added.   Images

Talking about why he turned from prose to poetry early in his career, he called poetry "a seflish form where you can scream a little bit. I guess I needed to scream a little bit."

Bukowski once said that Walt Disney and Mickey Mouse ruined America. In the documentary, a friend explained that Bukowski "could not handle the fact that the power over multimillions of human beings was in the hands of this three-fingered foolish creature that taught you nothing whatsoever, that expressed nothing real, total absurd fucking fantasy—not even good, not even creative. He was appalled by Mickey Mouse."

But reality, he could deal with. He suffered from ulcers as a young man. "Blood came out of my mouth and out of my ass," he recalls. "You'd be surprised how much blood there is in a person. It keeps coming. And it's purple."

"You know what I think I ought to think?" I wrote, swept off by good language. "I shouldn't feel sheepish about having once believed that I could be a better writer than Ernest Hemingway and as good as F. Scott Fitzgerald and maybe E.E. Cummings. I should be glad I once felt that way. And any writer who never did feel that way ought to be jealous of David Murray, age 20. He was a great writer in the making—and he lived to tell the tale!"

I also wrote a short letter to the current appalling foolish creature:

Dear Donald Trump,

Quit wiping your shit all over me, and my country.

Sincerely,

David Murray

It was quite an evening. I awoke the next day not feeling hungover, as much as feeling I'd been up late, working.

Categories // Uncategorized Tags // " poets, "Born Into This, Charles Bukowski, Mickey Mouse, novelists, Walt Disney, writers

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