Flashes of Panic

For reasons I won’t get in to here, I thought it might be a good idea to trace the steps that got me to my current level of writer-hood.

(I will leave aside, for now, the many more-refined words to describe what I do, and their differences; let’s say that I provide words in an easily-readable order which describe an event, a person, or a group of people, based on notes and interviews gathered at the scene or over the phone. I also sometimes provide words, also in an easily-readable order, designed to present an argument or opinion surrounding an issue. The common shorthand for this is “track writer.”)

I started out running a website for a magazine. I wanted to write for the magazine, of course, but so do 75% of the other people who’ve ever read it and have constructed a complete English sentence in their lifetime. The stories look like so much fun (or, at least, they did when I used to read them. I don’t read (m)any magazines nowadays.) It turned out that the writers tended to be well-established wordsmiths with a history of previously-published articles behind them and, usually, a contract with the magazine to provide X articles of Y length in a given year. Not early-twenties web geeks with a feeble grip on the magazine’s audience.

Eventually I did have a short piece published in the magazine, alongside several other of my co-workers. It was a personal-experience bit about two hundred words long, not the usual “service journalism” we published. Still, I’m getting a bit ahead of myself.

I started out with one event. The Maine Distance Festival ran annually on the weekend of the 4th of July, from 1994 or so until 2003, at the Bowdoin College track. (They say someday it will happen again, but two years is quite a hiatus in the track world, especially when one of them is an Olympic year.) I was going to be there anyway, so I offered to file a report for the website. I got myself a media credential, borrowed a tape recorder, and followed the real reporters around until I got the drift of how it worked. I produced a meet report and an interview, now sadly lost when the site’s archives went offline a few years ago.

I did this annually for a few years, often enough that I stopped being excessively nervous when talking with the athletes. I also stopped being excessively nervous about my writing, once I realized that it was barely being edited. I even put two more personal-experience articles up, one about my first USATF cross-country meet and one about the Boston marathon (before I DNFed there; I still haven’t finished it. The race, not the article.) I started going to more events, with A, with the understanding that if I paid my own expenses and wrote an article, I wouldn’t be charged vacation days for my time out of the office.

When I left, it seemed pretty natural for me to keep freelancing with reporting for the site. Over the intervening years, they started paying less for articles, then eventually stopped almost entirely, but since then I’ve moved on. It certainly didn’t hurt that I was writing regularly for two other sites right away.

The thing was, the work I’d done on the site had made me an “established” writer. The pros were used to seeing me in the press box, the media coordinators knew who I was and where to look for my stories. They knew I wasn’t just a fanboy with a digital point-and-shoot and a voice recorder. And when they were contacted by editors looking for freelancers, they’d drop my name. I got a few more print publications in other magazines mostly on the strength of the reputation I’d built. It didn’t hurt to be able to supply links to my other articles, allowing editors to check out the quality of my work before hiring me.

I could probably work more than I do. Right now, it’s primarily an excuse for being at events and seeing them first-hand. I like doing a good job, and I like working with the others I see at the events, but over the course of a year I probably break even at best, with travel expenses eating up my paychecks. If I was determined, I could send out a few more query letters, do a few more interviews and non-event work, but I lack the motivation to do so.

Now, if you’ll notice, there are two very large strokes of luck here that make it unlikely that anyone else will follow this path into the field: First, I landed an editorial (if somewhat technical) job with a magazine and website which ran the kind of writing I wanted to do. Second, I had an event nearby which was both low-key enough that they had few other reporters there, yet important enough that we’d want a first-hand story.

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