A Cup of Ambition: The Editor

We've all heard it before, at dinner parties, from relatives, from our therapists: "Oh, you write. Does that mean you'll be a teacher?" Fine, fine. We can't make enough money to "eat" or "live" from our poetry. Every MFA graduate knows the horrible feeling that settles into his/her stomach as graduation approaches. You finished a whole book!, you keep telling people. And still, no prospective employers come a-calling. Here at HFR, we know how you feel. We thought it might be interesting to take a closer look at some jobs we writers and lovers of books might enjoy. Or do enjoy. Or have tried, and regret. This regular post, A Cup of Ambition, will talk to those in-the-know about what the working world is really like. (To see our previous interviewees, click here.)

Introducing...

Rob Spillman, Editor, Tin House. New York.

The Job

I oversee content for thirteen year-old bi-costal literary magazine. I read, solicit, go to literary festivals and readings, literary conferences, basically spend most of my time looking for great stories, poems, essays, and interviews.

Getting Started

I co-founded Tin House in 1998.

The Good

What I love most about my job is being surprised. I love being proven wrong, having my expectations subverted, and discovering new voices, or new gears by established writers.

The Bad

Rejection. I know how hard it is to write, and to make the leap of faith in sending your work out, so I really dislike rejecting anyone. I hate rejecting people I know and respect.

Surprise Me

My other job is being a roadie for my sixteen year-old daughter, who is a drummer in a punk/feminist band.

Who would make a good editor?

Start with being a voracious reader, add curiosity and openness, a willingness to be surprised. Then it is about removing your ego from the process of editing, meaning that you are there to help the writer see their vision through and your job is to help them get there. It isn't how you would revise something, but how they can do it to the best of their ability with your guidance.

How do I become you?

Read. A lot. Then work your way through the system by interning or reading for a magazine. I, like most editors I know, hire from within. All of my editors have worked their way through the system so they know it from the ground up.

Thoughts about this job for writers...

For many writers it is great for their writing. You are exposed to amazing writing all of the time, get to see the minute choices that can have a huge impact. You also get to see what doesn't work, and a lot of that. By analyzing these things on a regular basis, you can't help but get better. That said, some writers can't deal with working on other's work, with switching gears constantly. It isn't for all writers.

Rob Spillman is Editor and Co-founder of Tin House Magazine and the Executive Editor of Tin House Books. His writing has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the Boston Review, Connoisseur, Details, GQ, Nerve, Rolling Stone, Spin, Sports Illustrated, Vanity Fair, and Vogue, among others.

A Cup of Ambition: The Greeting Card Writer

We've all heard it before, at dinner parties, from relatives, from our therapists: "Oh, you write. Does that mean you'll be a teacher?" Fine, fine. We can't make enough money to "eat" or "live" from our poetry. Every MFA graduate knows the horrible feeling that settles into his/her stomach as graduation approaches. You finished a whole book!, you keep telling people. And still, no prospective employers come a-calling. Here at HFR, we know how you feel. We thought it might be interesting to take a closer look at some jobs we writers and lovers of books might enjoy. Or do enjoy. Or have tried, and regret. This regular post, A Cup of Ambition, will talk to those in-the-know about what the working world is really like. (To see our previous interviewees, click here.)

Introducing...
Suzanne Berry; Senior Writer II; Hallmark Cards; Kansas City, Missouri.

The Job
As you might imagine, my job as a Hallmark writer is largely to write greeting cards. I write the messages found on virtually any kind of card you can think of—from Valentine’s Day and Christmas cards to those you’d give a friend who’s celebrating a success or dealing with a setback. I write for all occasions, and in just as many styles or voices—from playful and funny to serious and inspirational. Working at Hallmark, though, I also get involved in lots of stuff beyond writing cards. We have an in-house book publishing division, so I’ve had the chance to write some children’s books, as well as some about moms and holidays. Writers here are also called on for their overall creative and emotional expertise, so we’re regularly brought in to help brainstorm and build on ideas coming through product development, to come up with clever names and taglines for a new product or business, and to write for Hallmark’s online or digital formats.

Getting Started
The simple answer is that I landed a creative writing internship with Hallmark while I was in college. I filled out the portfolio they asked for, got one of the few coveted spots, and spent a summer learning how much goes into this curious but amazing job. When I graduated with my English degree, I gladly came back to work for Hallmark full-time at their headquarters in Kansas City.The whole truth, though—as any English grad knows—is that it wasn’t quite that easy. Attending a small liberal arts college and studying literature and creative writing, I went through the requisite anguish of trying to figure out if I was doing the right thing, and if so... what to do once I graduated. In retrospect, I’m really glad that I stuck with what I loved. Because once I stopped sweating it and started thinking outside the box, I found the perfect job. To anyone who’s still in that squishy place of uncertainty, though, I’m here to tell you there are jobs for our types outside of teaching, and really satisfying ones at that.

The Good
For one, I love the creative environment I work in. Hallmark’s one of the biggest employers for creative professionals in the world—which means there’s a full stable of artists, designers, and wordsmiths to rub elbows with every day. Working alongside that kind of talent automatically makes coming to work about a thousand times better than a number of other jobs I might be doing.But on a deeper level, I love that this job combines so many things that personally matter to me... a love of words, a commitment to caring for others, and this slightly hippie notion that what you do in life really can make a difference and bring about a little more love in the world. It’s a good feeling at the end of the day to know your words will make someone out there smile or feel remembered, cared for, or loved.

The Bad
Like other writers, I think one of the hardest things about doing this for a living is having to face the blank page day after day. And in my particular job, that intimidation factor gets compounded by the little voice reminding me Hallmark’s been in business over 100 years... so how could I possibly come up with a new way to say “happy birthday” or “I love you”?But of course, the not-so-big secret is that there’s always new creative material out there, and the only way to get to it is to just start writing, even if you have to write all the bad stuff out of your system before you get to a seed of something interesting. As a wise mentor once told me, the only cure for writer’s block is to write. It’s as simple and complicated as that.

Surprise Me
I think most people would be surprised by the level of difficulty involved in doing what I do. It seems simple at face-value—just a few nice words and you’ve got a card, right? In reality, the job takes a pretty extraordinary amount of craft. Every single word counts when you’re working with that small of a “canvas,” so you have to hone your writing down to the most essential, most evocative, and most universal elements possible, much the way a poet does. Editing is everything.The other paradox is that we’re not writing for one person; we’re writing for the masses. And yet a card is an intensely personal medium and should feel like it was written just for the two people exchanging it. So finding the right balance—between universal yet personal, accessible yet evocative—is actually not as easy as you’d think. The other thing I think people would be surprised by is that being a writer here isn’t just about being good with words. It also requires having empathetic instincts, emotional intelligence, and some knowledge of psychology. The words on the page are only half of it. Understanding the lives and relationships behind the words is the real job.

Spin a Yarn
To give you an idea of the breadth of stuff I touch within Hallmark, this week alone, I’ve written Christmas cards, romantic cards, and cards for “celebration of life” memorials. I’ve finished a revision on a children’s book coming out later this year, come up with ideas for a new line of gifts, and done some research on both social networking and spirituality. As a native Midwesterner who’s all too familiar with drastic swings in temperature and meteorological events, there’s a common saying we have that also speaks to my experience as a writer at Hallmark: “If you don’t like the weather around here, wait a day.”

Who would make a good greeting card writer?
Personality-wise, I think I’m like a lot of writers in that I’m naturally fascinated by people. I’m an enthusiastic people watcher and—truth be told—eavesdropper. I never get bored paying attention to how people and their relationships tick. As I said earlier, this job also requires a pretty big dose of empathy and emotional smarts so you can step inside another person’s relationship and understand the complicated dynamics going on there. Before I ever write a word, I have to understand what someone’s feeling, why they’re feeling it, and how they want to express it. I’m constantly slipping in and out of other people’s shoes. One other personality quirk well-suited for this job is a willingness to disappear, ego-wise. The writing I do isn’t driven by my voice, personality, or agenda, but by those of thousands of other people who use my words but will never even think about me, much less know who I am. That kind of writing may not be for everyone, but I happen to find it kind of thrilling. It’s like I’m a secret agent in people’s emotional lives, helping them say what needs to be said.

How do I become you?
To quote jazzman Charles Mingus, “Making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.” Not only is that creativity... that’s my job. So if you think you’re up for that challenge, and you enjoy both studying and writing for real-life people, you might consider my line of work. Want to know more? Take a look at the careers section of Hallmark’s website.

A Cup of Ambition: The Video Game Writer

We've all heard it before, at dinner parties, from relatives, from our therapists: "Oh, you write. Does that mean you'll be a teacher?" Fine, fine. We can't make enough money to "eat" or "live" from our poetry. Every MFA graduate knows the horrible feeling that settles into his/her stomach as graduation approaches. You finished a whole book!, you keep telling people. And still, no prospective employers come a-calling. Here at HFR, we know how you feel. We thought it might be interesting to take a closer look at some jobs we writers and lovers of books might enjoy. Or do enjoy. Or have tried, and regret. This regular post, A Cup of Ambition, will talk to those in-the-know about what the working world is really like. (To see our previous interviewees, click here.)

Introducing Mademoiselle...
Emilie Poissenot. I’m also known as Aheïla on the web. I work as a video game designer at Sarbakan, a renowned independent game studio specializing in global cross-platform development services and original game creations. A studio born here, in Quebec city, a little over 12 years ago. I also teach narrative structure for games part time. And when I’m not doing either of those things, I’m an aspiring author posting fiction on The Writeaholic’s Blog.

Game Designer huh, what about it?
The game designer’s job is a little challenging to explain. I don’t program and I don’t produce art. In a way, I write games but not just (and often not even) in a narrative way. I create the rules by which the game is played, the controls, the characters (if any), the scoring system, and the game levels that contain all that. The documentation I write contains the guidelines the team of programmers and artists need to turn an idea into a playable experience. In huge studios, game designer, level designer and game writer are different jobs. Sarbakan falling somewhere between large studio and indie developer, I’m more a jack-of-all-trade.

Getting Started
I’ve always dwelled in artsy things. I took acting classes from 5 and a half to 15, I wrote stories for the local newspaper when I was 10, I dance, I sing, and I studied cinema in college. When my college classes taught me to be a critic instead of a creator, I decided to take a step back from my education. I needed time to figure out the best route to something that would satisfy my urge for creation whilst reassuring the Taurus in me who likes job security. I worked a few very random, non-creative and outright weird jobs before I stumbled upon the idea of developing games. I took a 13 months intensive class to become a game designer. Now, I work in the business and I occasionally teach it. Suffice to say I fell in love with game creation.

Good Stuff
Everything!? Okay, I’ll narrow it down. In the course of my career, which is about to reach the 3 years mark, I have worked mostly on free online Flash projects. These projects are for clients such as Disney, Nickelodeon, Hasbro, MTV, Fisher Price, and others. I designed games for SpongeBob, Transformers, Hot Wheels, etc. There is an undeniable thrill to work with franchises that influenced a generation, brands that made, and are still making, childhood magical. It’s nice to become part of the magic. Moreover, though we do have crunch times and hard days, making game is all about fun. Plus, it’s ever-changing so I don’t get bored!

Bad Stuff
Games have yet to develop their language for storytelling. We rely on cinema’s language or plain text. Since games are interactive in nature, unlike any other medium, it’s not working quite right. Ultimately, we cannot/should not control elements of the story writers usually perceive as the key to storytelling, like pacing or even the main character’s actions for that matter. Since it’s partially charted territory, we’re often required to avoid stories or make them as short as possible. While it’s a great way to learn how to shorten dialog and make it snappy, it also means the depth of stories is limited. As someone who is obsessed with fiction and the way various mediums convey emotions, my biggest challenge at work also is my greatest motivation. One of my career goals would be to broaden the very limited emotional range of games by one emotion.

Something weird, something cool, or something surprising
Writing games allowed me to realize the weight of my words. They convince clients to invest anywhere from five to seven digits sums in our projects. They launch a journey of 2 months to over a year for a team of five to over a hundred people towards the realization of an outstanding product. And yet my words are worth very little. Without the trust of the client, without the budget, time, and technology, or the synergy of the whole team, my words aren’t a game; they’re a silly idea on paper. Who would read twice the story of a plumber jumping on turtles and eating mushrooms on his way to save a princess? A person might have the best idea in the world, if it is not expressed properly, no one will care. When games are concerned, “expressing properly” means molding ideas to constraints and realizing them with a team.

Cool Story, let's hear it
Just one? How am I supposed to pull that off? The working environment in games is prone to anecdotes. How can I choose between Formal Fridays, guys jealous of the Transformer RPM race track Hasbro sent me or chasing the boss with a Super Soaker during the summer party? I’ll use something that has nothing to do with the social aspect of my work. I’ll tell the story of a task I actually had to perform. MTV premiered a new comedy last June entitled The Hard Times of RJ Berger. The lead game designer (aka my immediate superior) worked on a game called Chain of Thoughts to accompany the premiere. One morning, he dropped by my desk to delegate the dialogs of the game to me. “You have to write a few scenes of an awkward teenager flirting with the most beautiful girl in school,” he said. I already had ideas bubbling in my head and a wide grin. “Those will be the good lines. Then change one word to turn the lines into sexual innuendos, dorkish/geekish references or, you know, wrong things to say when you’re flirting.” So I worked for a couple of days on the awkward teenager’s line and the messed up versions of said lines. Both were a lot of fun to write. I even did some extra ones so the lead game designer could choose his favorites. But, you know, my job is very serious.

The Key to Game Designing
The core traits are an interest for games, creativity that can work within specific constraints, teamwork capability, and the capacity to express ideas clearly (written and spoken). Humility is always a plus: people might be working on your idea but they know things that you don’t and you should listen when they speak. Besides that, lots of skills are useful and make each designer unique. I talk “programmer-speak” but I don’t code. Some of my coworkers do. I can devise the flowchart of the behavioral pattern of an artificial intelligence but I don’t enjoy it. My desk neighbor does. So I might drop my flowcharts on his desk and he’ll give me the storytelling required for his game. We work as a team whenever possible to play on everyone’s strength.

Advice for the people of tomorrow
A lot of people think they can be game designers because they have ideas and they play a lot of games. It is not enough. Your creative horizon needs to be wide so you can draw inspiration from an array of things. Expressing yourself clearly is key and learning to let other people alter your ideas is a must. Because like a movie, game development involves a multi-disciplinary team. You should also be prepared to work for it. There aren’t a whole lot of game designers within a company. I’m one of the few of my class who got hired; I went the extra mile during my formation and networked whenever I had the chance.

Thoughts for those people who write poetry or non-fiction
The job itself teaches a few skills that are useful for people who want to pursue publishing. I alter my ideas on a daily basis which is a good trial run for the editing process. I create according to a target audience which contributes to the marketability of any oeuvre. I write proposals to convince people my ideas are worth investing large amounts of money in (query letter, anyone?). As I said before, game stories also teach concision which is something I, personally, constantly need to work on. The work schedule itself being somewhat flexible, except during crunch times, I can find time to work on my blog.

Outside work and the Job, how is that going?
Because storytelling in games is fairly limited, my blog and my other writing projects channel my need to explore emotionally complex narratives but I started them for other reasons too. The primary goals of my blog are to work on my writing flaws and build my confidence in storytelling in English (my first language is French). Unforeseen Dives, my first blog novel, has a rigid structure that forces me to be concise and write steadily. The readers comment right away which gives me instant feedback. Since its inception, my blog has grown to serve other purposes as well, such as giving writing tips and networking to help my attempts at publication. Good writing comes with practice so the time I spend blogging is never lost.

Aheïla wants anyone who has any questions to go to her blog. She is ready and willing to answer.

A Cup of Ambition: The Hollywood Screenwriter

INT. Paradise Valley Mansion. Dinner Party. Night.
You’ve heard it from relatives, from your therapist… "Oh, you write. Does that mean you'll be a teacher?" Fine, fine. We can't make enough money to "eat" or "live" from our poetry. Every MFA graduate knows the horrible feeling that settles into her stomach as graduation approaches. You finished a whole book!, you keep telling people. And still, no prospective employers come a-calling. Here at HFR, we know how you feel. We thought it might be interesting to take a closer look at some jobs we writers and lovers of books might enjoy. Or do enjoy. Or have tried, and regret. This regular post, A Cup of Ambition, will talk to those in-the-know about what the working world is really like. (To see our previous interviewees, click here.)

Enter TREVOR MUNSON, late 30’s, stubble. He sits at his writing desk, and is quickly deep in thought before his typewriter, teeth stained red with cheap burgundy, wondering what to tell aspiring screenwriters. Dare he tell them the truth?
What the hell?

TREVOR

I am a freelance writer/producer for television and film. Along with various assignment work for Fox and Newline over the years, I have had a movie entitled Lone Star State of Mind made by Sony Screen Gems. More recently, I was co-creator and co-executive producer of the CBS vampire show Moonlight which was loosely based on my novel Angel of Vengeance.

My professional writing career got started after finishing grad school for literature. I wrote a script my last semester (Lone Star State of Mind) which I then entered in a handful of screenwriting contests. The script did well in both the Nicholl Fellowship and the Slamdance Screenwriting competition, and as result I got my first Hollywood agent and my start.

The Good…
What I love most about my job are the hours (when not on deadline), and the ability to make a living basically entertaining myself by telling stories. I'm a tough critic, so my basic rule of thumb is if I like what I've done (and I often don't), then others will too. It's an amazing thing to see how the words I fashion into stories and characters affect and impact others I've never met.

The Bad… The Ugly…
The most difficult thing about the job is... well, that it's an incredibly difficult job to do well. There are basically two kinds of people. Those who can write and those who can't. For those who can, the fact that we can do it doesn't make it any easier. Every day you sit down by yourself and wage a battle against mediocrity. In my experience, you often lose that battle. Which means a lot of days where you end up feeling like crap after completing your day's work. That's rough. Writing can be incredibly rewarding, but it's a process. It takes as long as it takes, and the reward can sometimes be a long time in coming...

Surprise Me
Something you might be surprised to know is that I didn't initially set out to write in Hollywood. If you'd asked me growing up I would have told you I was going to be a novelist. I intended to write horror or young adult novels. I didn't even know that you could make a living writing movies.

Spin a Yarn
One of the best moments I've had as a screenwriter was walking onto the set of my first movie and seeing my words come to life. In the script I had described one of the characters as wearing a very specific pair of shiny, black gold-toed boots. When I got there, the actor was wearing the exact pair of boots I had made up in my head while sitting at my computer as a broke grad student two years before. It was an amazing moment because I felt the power of being a writer in a very tangible way. I had made something up and now here it was in the real world created to my exact specifications. I felt like a magician.

Who makes a good screenwriter?
The personality traits that make a person good for this job are a thick skin and the ability to suffer fools. I wish I was kidding, and I hate to sound cynical, but Hollywood truly is the only place I know of where the people who can't actually do your job get to tell you how to do your job. It's a strange way to do things. If I was getting married, I wouldn't hire the caterer and then tell him how to make the food...

Advice for someone interested in becoming you?
For those writers interested in screenwriting, what I recommend is reading as many scripts as you can get your hands on. Read the scripts and then watch the movies to see what was done, what was kept, what was changed. I also recommend reading the underlying novels and then watching the movie to see how things were condensed, streamlined, or made more visual. Then, go write some scripts. If you're like me it will take two or three attempts before you get the hang of it. If you're a novelist, I suggest taking one of your own works and adapting it. Don't be too precious. Get rid of any characters and plot lines you don't need. Make it cinematic. Boiling down a larger work into a more cinematic form can be a great way to create a more layered and complex screenplay.

Once you have a solid script, I recommend entering screenwriting contests. Do a little research and make sure they're "legit". Isolate three or four and then get your script out there. If you do well in a major competition, representation and calls from producers often follow. (Which of course requires a whole new round of research to make sure they too are "legit").

Thoughts about this job for writers...
I like having the option to write both novels and scripts. They are two different writing experiences, and certain stories lend themselves more to one than the other. I realized a while back that it can be a great thing to start out with a novel and then work forward to a script. For one thing, it affords you a greater amount of material to distill into a script. For another, you can get paid several times for the same material. (I learned this lesson after selling my first spec script). You can sell it as a published book, then sell the movies rights, then get them to pay you to adapt it into a script. Also, for whatever reason, buyers in Hollywood will often take a published book a whole lot more seriously than they will a script. As result, novels, short stories, and even articles are easier to set up and sell. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, when Hollywood inevitably screws your story up in the movie-making process, you will still have the creative vision of your novel out in the world for people to enjoy.

A Cup of Ambition: The Ghostwriter

We've all heard it before, at dinner parties, from relatives, from our therapists: "Oh, you write. Does that mean you'll be a teacher?" Fine, fine. We can't make enough money to "eat" or "live" from our poetry. Every MFA graduate knows the horrible feeling that settles into his/her stomach as graduation approaches. You finished a whole book!, you keep telling people. And still, no prospective employers come a-calling. Here at HFR, we know how you feel. We thought it might be interesting to take a closer look at some jobs we writers and lovers of books might enjoy. Or do enjoy. Or have tried, and regret. This regular post, A Cup of Ambition, will talk to those in-the-know about what the working world is really like. (To see our previous interviewees, click here.)

It’s our thirteenth Cup of Ambition, and we’re gonna give you a little salt in your sugar with ghostwriter Neil Strauss, who has co-written the autobiographies of rock stars, a porn star and journalist Joel Stein (who fell into neither category, although he did rock a mullet once). 

Strauss is also an American author, pickup artist and journalist.

It’s hard not to get lost in his feverish speech and profound observations thrown out as casually as the “you know?” he use

s to punctuate most sentences, but it’s impossible to miss 

how much he loves what he does and how far he had to come from his days as a discarded-popcorn scavenger at theaters, which I’m actually only assuming he stopped doing.

Getting started
Twelve years ago Strauss was assigned to interview singer Marilyn Manson for Rolling Stone magazine. Initially, he said, he planned to write an expose about who he assumed to be “some goth rock, phony poser.” However, it became a cover story about the time he spent with a “smart and really interesting” artist. The next year, Manson’s autobiography, The Long Hard Road Out of Hell, ghostwritten by Strauss, was released.

“I never intended to be a ghostwriter,” Strauss said. “I just thought ‘wow, this is a great way to write a book.’”

Having an open mind, he said, reflecting on Manson, is the most important thing about conducting an interview and working as a ghostwriter.

“There’s nothing wrong with going into an interview with preconceptions,” he said. “But you’ve got to be able to throw away those preconceptions in the face of reality. Some people go into an interview trying to prove a point and don’t really care what reality is. You’ve got to let the person be themselves, that’s the point of an interview.”

Before he was even a journalist though, Strauss said he was writing for free for anyone who would take his work (he sent his first book proposal, hand-written, to agents when he was 11 years old).

“I’ve been working on an anthology of my work, and I was looking through all these letters I wrote and seeing all of these rejections…I would do anything just to be around a magazine, to get their coffee, to do their expenses, to do Xeroxes. I would do anything. I had no money. I, literally, would, like, eat discarded popcorn in movies in New York because I had no money for food so I would spend it on movies and culture because I knew it would inform what I was writing…I was so naïve….and it’s fine, we’re built to survive, we’re gonna survive. You’re not gonna die, you’ll find a way to make it happen, you know? So you’ve got to keep doing what you love and not expect to, right away, be writing for some huge magazine or write some huge book, just be willing to write for free for anyone who will have you write. In the meantime, it’s only going to help your craft and get your name out there.”

The Good, The Bad

A lot of things like making a film or cooking, Strauss said, are group efforts between people, but writing is just a relationship between the writer’s head and the page.

“I don’t think of it as a good side and a bad side…I don’t think of it like that. I think it’s a lot of fucking work. Literally, you know, it’s like sitting down and writing 400 or 500 pages on your computer is a hard thing, but the more difficult thing is taking those 500 pages and then making them work. Really tightening them and tightening them and tightening them until everything works…Making sure there’s no repetition in the 500 pages, making sure the story’s moving forward, being willing to take that story you spent a week crafting and just cut it out because it doesn’t work. So, that intense connection you have with 500 pages that only you wrote and only you understand and sort of cleaning and juggling it until it actually becomes a reasonable book is an intensely isolated and time consuming experience.”

And by time consuming, he meant that in the last month he’s worked 16- to 20-hour days. His Mondays alone, he said, are dedicated to “back-to-back” interviews and meetings.

“And every time, I’ll keep telling myself ‘I’m never writing another book again.’ I’m thinking, ‘why do I do this?’”

The morbid motivation
“I’m always thinking about what’s next, but what I’m most proud of is what I’m currently doing. I have four to five books under contract. They’re like a pack of wild dogs chasing me, so I don’t have time to look back or I’ll get eaten alive,” he says with an unsettling laugh. “I know it sounds like an exaggeration, but what motivates me is trying to get all these books done, like, before I die. When I’m excited about a book that I’m writing I think, ‘Oh god, I hope I finish this before I die.’…you just make sure you can express yourself in the right way to everybody.”

HFR: So, is there a pre-written eulogy?

Strauss: “I suppose [my eulogy] may be in ‘Emergency’ somewhere, because that book is a lot about accepting our mortality.”

The key to ghostwriting
The key to ghostwriting is storytelling. And in Strauss’ case, the books he writes are not for fans of a particular person he writes about, but rather are for fans of the world that person represents.

“I try to write the stories for someone who has no interest in that person,” he said. “And then if I can make it interesting, that is the challenge.”

Making a story seem universal doesn’t mean it has to be existentially vague either.

“Fuck the big questions,” he said. “The art is storytelling. Some people want to warm up but if you look at your life, what’s the most interesting thing that happened? Don’t wind up, just throw the reader into a really compelling story that they’re gonna wanna read separate from who you are.”

What makes a good ghostwriter?
You have to be able to listen to editors, he said. Adding that it’s true as long as they’re good. It’s important to accept criticism and be able to determine if it’s right or wrong, he said.

“I think a good ghostwriter will take another person’s words or life and write how they would write if they could write. I think empathy and lack of ego would be a good skill with this,” he said.

The real story, he added, happens when the tape recorder isn’t running.

“The more you can immerse yourself in [the subject’s] world and serve a purpose in their world, the more you can really step into their shoes and see through their eyes.”

This is also good, he said, for getting to know the other “characters” in the subject’s life. Talk to those people and spend time with them so you can see the kinds of things they don’t tell you, he said.

Thoughts about this job for writers…advice

Strauss explained that a lot of people are encouraged to do something safe and sensible that will make money, but it can a sure way to unhappiness if it’s not something you love to do. If you follow your bliss, you can make a lot of money and if you lose that money you have nothing, he said.

“The secure way is really the insecure way,” he said, quoting Joseph Campbell.

“It’s a great way to learn about publishing to get a book out and yet, if I wanted to, not to have any responsibility for it,” he said, laughing. He has a clause in his contract that allows him to withdrawal his name from a book he ghostwrites if he’s unhappy with the final product.

Turning down proposals for books isn’t rare, either. While Strauss said it has little to do with how famous or not famous the person who wants to write a book is, there are just a lot of people who aren’t ready to tell their story.

“[Subjects] have to be willing to tell the truth and the whole truth and hold nothing back. If there’s something you’ve done in your life that’s a really bad thing, whether you’re

 embarrassed about people knowing or don’t want to tell them, then don’t do a book…you know, someone’s going to spend 400 pages in your world. If you’re holding back, then you’re robbing [the readers] of your experience…[Authors] can’t be afraid to make themselves look bad. We all have dark sides, we all have insecurities, we’ve all done bad things; you’ve got to show them and just trust that in the end it’ll paint a complete picture of you as who you are.”

“[Subjects are] pre-screened to make sure they’re cool with the kind of book I want to write, he said. “I want to make sure they wont be their own worst enemy.”

People start with the ending, and most of the time it starts with one person who someone has complicated feelings toward, he said. It’s important to know what’s interesting to readers versus what that person finds interesting, he said. He explained that out of 10 hours of tape on how his subject feels about one particular person, only 30 minutes may be worth using.

A bit of theory

With a degree in psychology from Vassar College, Strauss said he considers himself a social artist as well as a writer.

“I think you’re not doing your job if the other person isn’t learning about themselves,” he said. “When you put your life back to back, end to end, certain things emerge. And you’re probably going to recognize those things before they do, because it is their life. It’s really like a light bulb is going off over the person’s head. There’s a therapy to it, like a ghostwriter.”

Our boundary is truth as that person sees it, he said, you can’t do a book with someone who is self-diluted. They need a certain distance from themselves, he explained. For example, when Strauss did his work with Mötley Crüe, he took the same story from all four members, and each version was a little different.

On James Joyce
“It’s one of the reasons I write; I never knew you could do that much with words,” he said about Joyce’s “Ulysses, which he re-reads every three years.

Inspiration/How To
Strauss and fellow ghostwriter and journalist Anthony Bozza lead the HarperCollins subimprint Igniter, which gives talented unknowns a chance to work with the well-knowns on their autobiographies after some training with Strauss, who also said he edits pieces of their work from time to time.

In an Igniter cinderella story, an out-of-work computer programmer was paired up to write the autobiography of a supermodel, Strauss said. He added that an autobiography about Bozo the Clown is also in the works.

As for future ghostwritten projects by Strauss, who is working on one of his own books right now, his feet are ready to be in the shoes of former Louisiana Gov. Edmund Edwards, whom Strauss could only describe as a “charming crook.”

A Cup of Ambition: The Cartoonist

We've all heard it before, at dinner parties, from relatives, from our therapists: "Oh, you write. Does that mean you'll be a teacher?" Fine, fine. We can't make enough money to "eat" or "live" from our poetry. Every MFA graduate knows the horrible feeling that settles into her stomach as graduation approaches. You finished a whole book!, you keep telling people. And still, no prospective employers come a-calling. Here at HFR, we know how you feel. We thought it might be interesting to take a closer look at some jobs we writers and lovers of books might enjoy. Or do enjoy. Or have tried, and regret. This regular post, A Cup of Ambition, will talk to those in-the-know about what the working world is really like. (To see our previous interviewees, click here.)

My name is Julia Wertz, my place of employment is 5 feet from my bed, sometimes in my bed, and my job is cartoonist, writer and creator of The Fart Party.

How did you get started?
I didn’t have money for a birthday present for a friend one year so I randomly drew her this comic about a hobo spider because I’d just started reading graphic novels. As soon as I finished, I knew making comics was what I wanted to do with my life. For a few more years I continued waiting tables and publishing comics online and with a small press publisher but eventually one of them fancy New York agents started hounding me. I resisted her for awhile and eventually gave her some comics just to make her go away. She sold them to a major publisher and now here I am, living in Brooklyn and making comics as a career.

I know I’m really lucky to get to do this as a career, especially when I didn’t really peruse it, it kind of perused me. But then again, it’s not like it’s incredibly lucrative, I basically live on a teachers wage and there’s no stability in the job whatsoever but I’m just really grateful that I don’t have to wait tables anymore. I have this reoccurring nightmare that I’m working at a restaurant and my section is too full and we just ran out of all the food, and then I wake up and I’m crazed with relief that I don’t ever have to deal with that in real life. Well, at least not that day.

The Good Stuff
a) That I love it. I can work on comics all day, every day and be totally content. I actually sit at my desk working pretty much from after breakfast until I go to bed. Nothing in “real life” makes me happier than looking at finished pages.
b) I don’t have to wear pants

The Bad Stuff
Work wise, the hardest part is probably the physical outcome of working all day on comics. I have horrible posture, my back always aches and my eyes are bloodshot all the time. But it’s a lot better than waiting tables so I can’t complain. I don’t really dislike any part of making comics though.

I dislike parts of going to comic conventions though, which isn’t directly related but is an side effect of the career. No one HAS to attend conventions but it’s just a Good Idea to help build an audience, and I do really enjoy hanging out with other cartoonists. What I don’t enjoy is sitting behind my work all day, begging people to buy it. There’s something very awkward and uncomfortable about that.

Surprise Me
It actually very rarely make fart jokes. Sure I make a few here and there, but people are often mislead by the title so they leave comments or send me emails that are like “I like farts too! braaap!” and I’m like “uh, I don’t really like farts, I just think they’re funny sometimes.” Sometimes I wish I had named the strip something else but I’m stuck with it now.

Spin a Yarn
The first time I went to New York to meet my publishers was a hilarious debacle. I felt all grown up and responsible, but on the subway there, my pen burst all over my clothes and then I threw up in a trash can. I left the address and my wallet at home so I had to call my mom and have her google it. Then I had to buy a really ugly lime green shirt to replace my ink stained one. I showed up late and all frazzled and I sat there in the lobby of the Random House building looking like a street urchin while everyone around me was all smartly dressed and professional looking. Later I tried to go to the bar to drink away my day but I didn’t have any money or an ID, so I had to walk back to Brooklyn. That was my introduction into the world of major publishing.

Who makes a good cartoonist?
Personality traits needed to be a cartoonist most like would include anti social behavior, immaturity and the ability to laugh at oneself. You spend long hours alone so you have to be comfortable with solitude. Also, people are going to criticize your work because it has more than one element to pick apart (art and writing) so you have to have a thick skin. A hearty dose of self depreciation is always good, but don’t over do it. No one likes a whiner.

Thoughts about this job for writers...
Writing for comics is really different than writing for books or short stories. Many of my comics start out as short stories, but in order to turn it into a comic, you have to be willing to cut out a lot of good parts in order to pair it down into just a few boxes. If you’re really into flowery rhetoric and run on sentences, comics probably isn’t for you. You have to be straight and to the point, or if the intention is to be vague, you still have to be very selective about how many words you use. You have to be a strong editor to be a good cartoonist. You also have to be a good writer. People often mistakenly think that comics is just a mediocre output of both writing and art, like “hey, I cant’ draw or write real well but I like doing both so I’ll just be a cartoonist” which isn’t true at all. Comics, unless art comics specifically, is centered on how strong the story and writing is. Without good writing, there is no comic. There’s just a poorly executed drawing on paper.
Something people often never stop to consider is that even a page, or an entire book, of only images of comics, no words, is still pure writing. The story has to be planned and the illustrations have to take the place of the words. If the writing/structure of the story fails, so does the art. A really great example of a really well told story without words is Tom Neely’s The Blot. It’s an entire graphic novel without words, but with beautiful illustrations but at it’s core, it’s about the story. It’s a hard thing to do, and can easily backfire, but The Blot is a great example of one done well. No matter how good the art is, if the writing isn’t strong, the comic is either bad or mediocre at best. This absolutely does not work the other way around.

Advice for someone interested in becoming you?
Don’t do it.
*

Julia Wertz was born on the wrong side of the tracks in Northern California in 1982 to a preacher and a Sunday School teacher. Clearly something went wrong along the way to her becoming the creator of Fart Party vol 1 and vol 2 as well as the upcoming Twenty Five and Drinking at the Movies (2010). She currently resides in a tiny basement studio in Brooklyn, NY but wastes a lot of time on Craigslist looking for cabins in the Pacific Northwest. She doesn't own any house plants. You can read new comics thrice a week at www.fartparty.org.

A Cup of Ambition: The Freelance Writer

We've all heard it before, at dinner parties, from relatives, from our therapists: "Oh, you write. Does that mean you'll be a teacher?" Fine, fine. We can't make enough money to "eat" or "live" from our poetry. Every MFA graduate knows the horrible feeling that settles into her stomach as graduation approaches. You finished a whole book!, you keep telling people. And still, no prospective employers come a-calling. Here at HFR, we know how you feel. We thought it might be interesting to take a closer look at some jobs we writers and lovers of books might enjoy. Or do enjoy. Or have tried, and regret. This regular post, A Cup of Ambition, will talk to those in-the-know about what the working world is really like. (To see our previous interviewees, click here.)

Susan Johnston, freelance writer, self-employed

Tell me what you do
I write for magazines, websites, anthologies, catalogues, brochures, and more. My specialties include writing articles about career and lifestyle topics, as well as marketing copy for nonprofits and retail companies.

How did you get started?
During college, I sent a couple of articles "on spec" to a personal finance magazine for college students (on spec means you're submitting the article already written without getting a contract first). They agreed to publish my articles and assigned more (plus, I got paid, which I wasn't expecting).

I kept writing for that magazine for several more years and started querying other publications once I had a bigger portfolio of writing clips. It's usually best to send a query email before you write the article so you can get a contract and get instructions from your editor, but sometimes writing on spec works if you don't have any published clips.

The Good Stuff
I love the variety and the fact that I control my time and the projects I do. One day I'll be interviewing a CEO for a business profile, and the next I could be writing product descriptions for a jewelry catalogue.

The Bad Stuff
Freelancers don't always get the respect we deserve. I always make sure I have a contract with my editors or clients, because I've learned the hard way that some people do not conduct business ethically. Most clients do, but the ones who don't pay promptly (or at all) mess up our finances and mess with our confidence. I try not to take things personally (it's just business, after all), but when a client jerks you around and refuses to pay, it can be slightly demoralizing.

Surprise Me
You'd think that a freelance writer would be able to spend her days in coffee shops typing up a storm in typical writerly fashion. But there's a lot of paperwork and administrative tasks involved, too. For instance, dealing with contracts, invoices, estimated taxes, etc. In fact, most freelancer writers probably spend at least a third of their time NOT writing.

Spin a Yarn
Earlier this year, I did an hour focus group for people who buy consumer electronics online. I had just bought a new TV, so I qualified. During the focus group, it became obvious that their website needed a better tagline, so I suggested the first one that popped into my head. The CEO liked it.

I thought this might be a little tacky, but the next day I emailed him and said "if you ever need a freelancer, I've done ecommerce copywriting in the past..." I didn't try too hard to sell him, just planted the seed. Sure enough, he emailed me a couple of days later and hired me for a blogging project. You just never know where you might find your next client, so you need to be constantly looking for opportunities!

Who makes a good freelancer?
Freelance writers need to be highly self-disciplined and willing to sell themselves and their writing services. Being a good businessperson is just as important as being a good writer. It also helps if you're able to keep your spending in check, because payment doesn't always come when it's supposed to!

How do I become you?
Read as many books or blogs as you can before you start freelancing full time. I'd recommend both of Michelle Goodman's books (The Anti-9 to 5 Guide and My So-Called Freelance Life) and Kelly James-Enger's Six-Figure Freelancing to name a few.

Thoughts on this job for writers…
Freelance writing has a lot of flexibility, so it can be good for writers with side projects. Of course, many freelancers have trouble finding the time and energy to work on creative writing after doing client work all day, but if you set boundaries and you're highly motivated, it's possible. In fact, NYT bestselling novelist Allison Winn Scotch balanced freelance magazine assignments while writing many of her novels.

Susan Johnston is a Boston-based freelance writer and blogger who has covered business and lifestyle topics for The Boston Globe, The Christian Science Monitor, DailyCandy.com, Yahoo! HotJobs, and many other publications. She also writes marketing materials for nonprofits and small businesses. Want to know more? Check out The Urban Muse or follow her on Twitter.

A Cup of Ambition: Writer, Performer, Playwright

We've all heard it before, at dinner parties, from relatives, from our therapists: "Oh, you write. Does that mean you'll be a teacher?" Fine, fine. We can't make enough money to "eat" or "live" from our poetry. Every MFA graduate knows the horrible feeling that settles into her stomach as graduation approaches. You finished a whole book!, you keep telling people. And still, no prospective employers come a-calling. Here at HFR, we know how you feel. We thought it might be interesting to take a closer look at some jobs we writers and lovers of books might enjoy. Or do enjoy. Or have tried, and regret. This regular post, A Cup of Ambition, will talk to those in-the-know about what the working world is really like. (To see previous posts, click here.)

Meet our tenth guest...
Tania Katan, writer, playwright, performer and instructor for writing workshops held here in Arizona and other locations, such as Italy for the Topography of Memory workshop.

How did you come to have this job?

Well… Being a kept woman isn’t easy, especially when your lady-friend is a professor, you know, with all the furloughs and stuff. Wait, which job were you inquiring about? OH, writing, yeah, that’s a tough one. I’ve been writing since I was six years old and somebody gave me this tiny pink patent leather diary. The covers shut tight and were held in place with a gold lock and key. The lock was the size of my thumbnail and the key was the size of a grain of sand, a gold grain of sand key, and all I wrote in that shiny pink diary was, “I like Brian, but I think he likes Stephanie. My mommy is not making my favorite cake for my birthday. Today was good.” So even at 6 years old I had some innate understanding that my job as a memoirist would be one of finding the light in disappointing situations.

The Good Stuff
Tania Katan is an author, playwright and performer. Her memoir My One-Night Stand With Cancer is the winner of the 2006 Judy Grahn Award in Nonfiction, an honoree of the 2006 American Library Association’s Stonewall Book Award in Non-Fiction, and a finalist for the 2006 Lambda Literary Award. Rock-n-Roller Melissa Etheridge said of Tania’s book, “This book rocks! It’s passionate, playful, and downright beautiful,” and the Library Journal gave the book a Star Review. Since the success of her first book, Tania has been performing her one-woman show, Saving Tania’s Privates (adapted from My One Night Stand With Cancer), which made its European premiere at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in August 2008 where it was a critical success! In the U.S. Saving Tania’s Privates has been seen at such prestigious venues as ACT in Seattle and The Painted Bride Art Center in Philadelphia. Katan is a regular contributor to The Advocate, Compete Magazine, Stand Up To Cancer’s online magazine, and others. And because of her unique ability to write and perform she has become a regular performer at Comedy Central’s Sit-n-Spin. As a public speaker and teacher, Tania is invited to teach writing workshops and give performative lectures around the world. After winning the 700.is Experimental Film and Video Festival in 2007, with a video made by Angela Ellsworth starring Tania called Hot Air: a one-woman all-boy band, Katan and Ellsworth were invited to Iceland to teach a “Performing for the Camera” workshop. She is a regular on the university circuit, speaking at Loyola Marymount, UC Berkeley, University of Connecticut, California College of Arts, Arizona State University, and others. At writing conferences she is seen on panels with Brett Paesel, Bernard Cooper, Laurie Notaro, and Steve Almond. As a playwright, Tania’s plays have been seen at Connecticut Repertory Theatre, Circle Repertory Theatre, Pacific Residence Theatre, Theatre of N.O.T.E., and other venues throughout the United States. Katan has received the American College Theatre Festival Award in Playwriting, the Jane Chambers Playwriting Award, and others. Katan’s work has been written about in The New York Times, Bust, Library Journal, Bitch, Running Times, DIVA, GCN Ireland, The Scotsman, and other national and international publications. In addition to writing and performing, Tania is extremely proud to be a graduate of the New York Artist in Residence program at the Creative Center, an organization that brings the art making process to the bedsides of people in the hospital dealing with cancer. You can usually find Tania running marathons, sipping espresso or in Italy where she teaches a creative writing and drawing workshop with her lady-friend, Angela Ellsworth called Topography of Memory. For more information please visit: www.taniakatan.com or www.twolittlewishbones.com

The Bad Stuff
Having people ask, for a second time, “So, what do you do for a living?” And once again I say, “I’m a writer.” And then they ask, “I know you write, but what do you do for a living?” So now when someone asks what I do for a living I just say, “Sales. I sell signs, like banners, but with more words.”

Surprise Me
I am very hot in Iceland. My band is anyway. Seriously, we’re called: Hot Air: a one woman, all boy band.

Who makes a good writer/playwright/performer?
Someone who practices her/his craft often. Someone who is open to other people challenging their ideas. Someone who is open to being wrong, to learning more, to going deeper than is comfortable. Someone who enjoys being uncomfortable and even if they don’t enjoy being uncomfortable they know that discomfort is part of the creative process and do it anyway. Someone who likes other people making them look smarter than they really are. Someone who delights in collaboration even if they have many moments of fighting it, of protecting their flimsy ego. Someone who loves being present and living the details so that recalling them will be a pleasure, a puzzle, something to chew on and type out. Someone who tells the truth; their truth.

How do I become you?
Approach the counter at the fancy coffeehouse across the street from where you live. You are slightly disheveled, playing the part of the genius writer. So disheveled and genius that you forget to bring money with you to the counter and need to go back to your computer bag to retrieve it.
Back to the counter. The sexy barista, who looks Jewish or Amish, is staring, ish, into your eyes and her full-under-the-age-of-thirty-lips open slowly to ask you a question, “What can I get for you, Tania?”
Ok, ok, you know she knows your name because you get your coffee there 6 times a week, but let’s just pretend that she’s memorized your name, maybe even asked a coworker, “Whose that hot lesbian who appears to be a genius, but always forgets her money?”
You can feel your heart pumping faster than necessary, “I’ll have a double dry cappuccino.”
“Would you like that cold or…hot?”
She punctuates the question by smiling at you too long, staring directly into your eyes and you know if you really thought about it, clearly assessed the situation, she’s just a skilled customer service worker, but you find that thinking sometimes clouds reality and you’re all about creating your own reality, living in the waking dream and all that stuff. Plus, you’re a writer, so it’s your job to either embellish situations or incite embellishments within situations, either way, you get paid to dream, not think. And in your waking dream, when you say to the sexy barista, “Yes, I want it hot.” She says, “How hot do you want it?”
“As hot as you can make it.”
“Scalding, Tania. Scalding.”
OH NO, you’ve awoken from your waking dream with the facial equivalent of a wet dream!
The blood from your heart has swum upstream and into your nerdy face and now all the sexy barista can see is your huge Face Boner! Red and hot, engulfing any indication of your race, the boner has taken over your visage! There’s no hiding it, sure you have some tricks to try and keep your Face Boner down, like taking off your glasses and rubbing your eyes, or pretending that a swarm of bees just bit your face, or itching your red cheeks like you’ve got a rash, or dropping your keys hoping that the sexy barista thinks the blood just rushed to your face upon bending over, and, and, AND… You don’t want to be me; it’s way too embarrassing.

A Cup of Ambition: The Professors (and Literary Power Couple)

Caitlin Horrocks, Assistant Professor of Writing, and Todd Kaneko, Visiting Assistant Professor of Writing, Grand Valley State University, Grand Rapids, MI

How did you come to be a professor?
Caitlin: It’s the classic job, the only job, that an MFA really qualifies you for. But at the same time, all the way through an MFA program, it’s the job you’re told you’re never going to be able to get. I didn’t really allow myself to think about academic jobs too seriously when I was in graduate school, because I assumed I’d end up waiting tables or digging ditches or adjuncting, at best. After grad school I applied for a one-year teaching gig at GVSU, just to see what happened. I got the job, and it lead to my current position.

Todd: I love teaching, and it’s something that I’ve been looking toward since I made a decision to go to grad school when I was an undergraduate at Washington. After I got the MFA, I spent about a year adjuncting. When my partner Caitlin got tapped for a position at GVSU, I decided to go with her. For whatever reason, the Writing Department decided that they didn’t mind me tagging along and gave me a few classes to teach. So now I have a temporary position as a professor with two sets of crossed fingers that I can make something more permanent happen in the near future.

The Good Stuff
Caitlin: My students. My coworkers—I work in a happy, functional department. The flexibility of my schedule. Having a job in which I’m expected to get my own writing done. Having conversations all day about stories, taking them apart and putting them back together and talking about how they work. Reading wonderful stuff and having that be part of my job. Reading stuff that’s not so wonderful yet, and thinking about how it could be. Watching students’ writing, and their conception of who they can be as writers, evolve. On good days, teaching is genuinely fun, and I learn new things about what stories and essays can do.

Todd: I get to teach. The Department of Writing at Grand Valley State is really a great place to work. The people who work in the department are invested in the students and the program, and are awesome to work with. The students, for the most part, are dynamite—they are hard working and willing to invest in classes, which really makes all the difference in terms of the writing that they get done. Moreover, the teaching schedule is more conducive to creative endeavors for me than is the private sector.

The Bad Stuff
Caitlin: It’s not a job you leave behind at the office. I’m always haunted by the essays I haven’t graded, the stories I haven’t read for workshop, the lesson that I haven’t planned, or the assignment that I have planned but am now doubting. This is something anyone who’s taught a class as a TA knows—the teaching part of your life will expand to fill any and all space you give it. This doesn’t change when you have a tenure-track job; the balance just becomes even more unwieldy with new responsibilities like university service or advising.

Todd: The grading gets in the way of writing. The private sector is worse to me, in terms of the time spent on the job outside of the workplace, so I’m not complaining too much. But I love to make my art, and I’ll complain about anything that gets in the way of that. The other bad thing, I think, is the nature of my current position—it’s a one-year position renewable for up to three years. After that, I have to figure out what I am going to do, assuming I don’t find something more permanent before then. And with the economy in the toilet, I’m nervous.

And the Michigan winter sucks big time.

Surprise Me
Caitlin: It may or may not be surprising that I don’t care about grades, and wish I never had to give them. When I was a student I think I suspected teachers of deriving guilty pleasure from assigning grades, especially bad ones. But it’s infinitely more important to me just to have students write, learn from it, and care about what they produce. I know that there usually have to be carrots and sticks involved to keep a class on track. But grading creative work, especially, I struggle with: I can try to grade revision rather than talent, effort rather than idea, but if I didn’t have to do it all, I’d be thrilled.

Todd: I am a painfully slow writer, and it takes me weeks to finish a draft, and up to a year to revise—and sometimes the grading I have makes it tough for me to become as immersed in a story as I like to be when writing fiction. The result is that I have been writing a lot of poetry. No disrespect meant to my poet friends, but I can get a draft of a poem done in a couple of days (of course it takes a bit more time to revise). Because of the conciseness of the poem, I can immerse for less time and more will come of it than when I try and write a story. The result of this is that I’ve not written a story in the last year, but I’ve got just about a half a draft of a poetry manuscript. I never expected to be writing lots of poetry, but here I am. Surprise.

Spin a Yarn
Caitlin: Too many teacher stories are of the “Man, students do the darnedest things!” ilk. I mean, they do, but I don’t want to throw my students under the bus. In public. Anyway, teachers definitely do the darnedest things, too. Like this: a short lesson I give in nonfiction classes involves me sprinting out of the classroom with an object stolen from one of my students. This takes some forethought into footwear but I’ve still slid out of control, smacked into a garbage can, and hit my shoulder on a doorframe. Very dignified.

Todd: I wasted my yarn on the previous question. I’m not sure I have any yarn left, at least none that should be spun here. How about this: I run an exercise when teaching narratives that involves being able to tell a good lie—we tell two truths and one lie and then talk about the evenness of details in a piece of writing. One example I use is the night I met Hulk Hogan in the Detroit airport a couple nights before he bodyslammed Andre the Giant at Wrestlemania III: he was reading a newspaper, I was reading Better Homes & Gardens, and he made me feel his bicep. I’ve been telling this story for years, and last semester, when I ran the exercise, I went for it with gusto—I elaborated on the story over a period of about two weeks until a student asked me point blank if the story was true. When I admitted that it was a lie, the whole class was disappointed, reacting as if they had just found out that the world really was flat after all.

Who makes a good teacher?
Caitlin: Don’t teach unless you actually like it and care about it. You’ll make yourself miserable and take roomfuls of students with you. Enjoy working with students, and be willing to work at it: you have to be pretty self-reflective about what you’re doing in the classroom and how effective it is. You’re also not a sell-out if you care about being entertaining. If my students have to listen to me for hours on end, I should put some thought into what combinations of activities, exercises or discussions are going to keep things interesting. You also have to be able to read hundreds of pages of student work without going cross-eyed.

Todd: Teachers cannot be robots. I am not here to entertain students, but when I am in the room, I am in the room 100%—bad traffic, the poem that has been eluding me, the argument I just had with my neighbor about their yappy dogs—when I am in the classroom, all of that stuff gets set aside so I can pay attention to the class. I think it comes down to respect: I work under the assumption that students are in the class because they want to learn and I think that a good teacher teaches the class as if the students are completely invested in the subject at hand—to do otherwise is insulting to the student. And students aren’t robots either, they have lives outside of the class. For me, teaching isn’t about force-feeding anyone knowledge—it’s about creating an environment in which students be sparked to claim and create knowledge for themselves. No robots with Powerpoint, I say.

How do I become you?
Caitlin: Teach and publish as much and as well as you can. (Easier said than done, I know.) Beyond that, be savvy about the academic job market. You can have great credentials, but if you don’t know the difference between an academic CV and a resume, or what your cover letter should include for a university teaching job, you’re not going to get far. Most MFA programs don’t give us this knowledge, so go out there and inform yourself, and know that that will set you apart from a lot of other applicants.

Todd: You don’t want to be me. I’ve got allergies and asthma, and I’m too short to see the stage at concerts. But if you really want to be me, in addition to what Caitlin says, you have to make good decisions and look for opportunities to make yourself marketable. There are basically three different kind of writing that happens at Grand Valley—there are the two majors in Creative Writing and Professional Writing, and there are the composition classes that all students have to go through. Because I’ve made the right decisions, and partly because I’ve taken advantage of a few opportunities that have fallen into my lap, I am able to teach nearly anything in any of these three areas. As a result, I can be a valuable resource for the department in a way that most professors can’t.

Thoughts on this job for writers...
Caitlin: Some people find teaching really energizing and some find it draining, and some a bit of both. Sometimes the energy it takes to read and respond to student writing, or to lead a workshop, comes from the same well as writing energy. Sometimes it soaks up the whole well, and I spend my evening sitting on the couch watching bad reality television. Or maybe I’d do that anyway, and the teaching is my excuse. There are other nights when the student stories I’ve read give me an idea for a project, or help me see a current project in a new way. If you organize your life right (and I’m still working on that part), this can be an ideal job for writers: you get to work with interesting people (both students and colleagues) in a flexible environment where your creative work is a valued and direct part of what you do.

Todd: Get any job you can. You need to pay the rent and buy groceries. Outside of that, creative writers sometimes suffer from reputation of being un-academic. We are artists and not expected to be academically savvy—we have overdeveloped right brains that are the sources that fuel our creative work. But if you want to work in the academy, you have to be academically savvy. You can’t rely on your status as a writer to excuse your weirdness. You have to be on top of things in terms of what a CV should look like, how to read a job ad, and how to make yourself into a job candidate that other faculty members want to have as a colleague, as opposed to the crazy guy that produces great work but needs a handler. You’re a professional, so act like one.

Caitlin Horrocks' short stories appear in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2009, Tin House, The Southern Review, The Gettysburg Review, Epoch, and elsewhere. Her work has been recognized by the Atlantic Monthly and the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and short-listed in Best American Short Stories.

W. Todd Kaneko lives and writes in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He was a Peter Taylor Fellow at the 2007 Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. His poems and stories have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Fugue, Passages North, Harpur Palate, The Comstock Review, Crab Creek Review, and other journals. Check out Todd's work at Writer-on-Line and Word Riot.

A Cup of Ambition: Writers Center Director

We've all heard it before, at dinner parties, from relatives, from our therapists: "Oh, you write. Does that mean you'll be a teacher?" Fine, fine. We can't make enough money to "eat" or "live" from our poetry. Every MFA graduate knows the horrible feeling that settles into her stomach as graduation approaches. You finished a whole book!, you keep telling people. And still, no prospective employers come a-calling. Here at HFR, we know how you feel. We thought it might be interesting to take a closer look at some jobs we writers and lovers of books might enjoy. Or do enjoy. Or have tried, and regret. This regular post, A Cup of Ambition, will talk to those in-the-know about what the working world is really like.

Meet our eighth guest...
Charles Jensen, Director, The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland. The Writer’s Center hosts over 300 writing workshops and 50 public events each year, runs a small bookstore, houses a small theatre space, publishes Poet Lore (the oldest continually published literary magazine in the United States) and works to develop a literary community in the metro DC area. I oversee all the operations, artistically and functionally, and make sure it all works.

How did you come to have this job?
It was actually a very cosmic experience. Although I fell into the arts administration field itself much by accident, I was unintentionally preparing for it for many years. It started in college when I ran the campus movie theatre; over the years, I worked in architecture marketing, as a residence hall director at two enormous colleges, and I taught English. During my MFA program, I started working with the Piper Center for Creative Writing, which turned into a full time gig. The rest of the story follows the plot of Showgirls: as the people above me started to clear up, I moved up the totem pole there, gaining tons of experience along the way. But I always felt strongly that the work I did represented a culmination of all my previous work experience. I was lucky enough to find The Writer’s Center, whose programs matched my experience and who, frankly, was looking for the kind of experience I had: an eye for branding, a commitment to developing and sustaining community, and a strong educational background in literature and writing.

The Good Stuff
The most gratifying thing is working in the community on behalf of the art I love. I get to be a part of opening people’s eyes to the joy and challenges of writing, of encouraging them to attend readings, read books, form groups, and dedicate themselves to writing. DC is a city built by and for the arts (because, after all, isn’t politics an art?), so being in this place and working in this field feels even more unique.

And, although it’s geeky and weird, I get a real kick out of working toward creating a cohesive brand identity, cultivating clear and concise mission and vision statements, and determining if/how specific programs fulfill the mission. Organizational design and development, to me, is like brain candy. I could talk about it all day. Which is why I’m often left standing alone at cocktail parties.

The Bad Stuff
Ensuring the business aspects will survive, or hopefully even thrive. From the outside, organizations like this one seem to run very smoothly and appear to be self-sufficient, but like all arts organizations, it’s just not the case. We are absolutely dependent on the investments of donors and foundations to keep doing what we’re doing at the level at which we do it. In my biased opinion, I feel like performing and visual arts organizations have less difficulty raising funds from donors because there’s a greater sense of cache for being involved with them. The literary arts are often overlooked—even by the arts community itself—and so I feel in my work just as I did in my childhood—the youngest, smallest child clamoring for the attention of the rest of the household. Luckily, the techniques to get attention in childhood are easily translatable to arts administration.

Surprise Me
Well, it might surprise you to know that behind my chipper, happy-go-lucky demeanor exists a risk-obsessed, suspicious inner voice, and this is absolutely critical to my job. I’ve discovered I have a particular knack for discerning the many ways in which someone (or several people in collusion) could commit fraud or embezzle money from the places where I work, but I do use this power for the forces of good by creating policies and safeguards to protect employees from accusations of impropriety. In taking over my new role here, I spent several weeks sounding like an overprotective mother who won’t let her child play on the monkey bars. “You’ll fall! You’ll split your head open! You’ll sprain a wrist!” I didn’t say those things, of course, but you get the idea. Although I frequently sounded like I could only see the worst in people, it’s not true. I want to ensure that all the good people in our community get the best experience possible from us. Frequently, that means battening down the hatches before setting sail. To mix some metaphors.

Spin a Yarn
Arts administration can be a circus. Just this week I had to go looking for a grant check we were due. The state granting agency confirmed they had sent a check request out already, but that a second state agency who had assessed a fee of us might have been holding it. We called the second state agency who said, No, we’re not holding it. The following morning, we got a letter in the mail from a third state agency that read, We are holding your check from state agency 1 on behalf of state agency 2, to whom you owe money. I called the third state agency to remind them we had appealed the ruling of state agency 2, and the person there said, Oh, you can disregard that letter. It’s automatically generated. We cut your check today and it’ll be mailed tomorrow.

I could tell you some other stories, like the time I failed to arrange a formal introduction for A. S. Byatt, but didn’t realize it until A. S. Byatt was sitting in the front row of the event waiting to be welcomed to the podium, but I’m saving that one for my tell-all.

Who makes a good administrator?
I think the most important thing for someone in my position is to remember you aren’t doing it alone. Wherever I have worked, I’ve stood on the shoulders of giants, the staff members in the organization who keep things going. My job is really just to motivate them, recognize their accomplishments, and perhaps gently guide them when they need it.

It also helps if you can maintain a cool demeanor. When I met my staff here, I showed them my “panicked” face, which was expressionless. And remembering that it’s unlikely any failures we commit in our day-to-day work rarely result in death or injury for others; most mistakes we can correct quickly, so there’s no need to worry too much.

I often dream that I will wake up with stunning attention to detail, but so far it hasn’t happened. But allowing yourself a few obsessive-compulsive traits wouldn’t hurt you in working in arts administration.

How do I become you?
I think so many people, students even, are doing work right now that would translate into arts administration experience, but they don’t realize it. Planning a reading series, running a student group—even pulling together a workshop of friends and colleagues are all examples of the kind of work we do in arts administration. The scale is just larger, but the skills, the passion, and the motivations are really the same.

If you’re not getting that kind of experience now, it’s easy to go out and find it. State Arts Commissions and other nonprofit agencies are always looking for volunteers or interns, and the service provided to the organizations is absolutely invaluable. The experience gained, priceless.

It’s also never too late to start. There’s actually an odd rift in many arts agencies between people just starting out and people ready to retire. In the next decade or so, a lot of Executive Director and top-tier management seats are going to empty out—and we will desperately need smart, committed artists taking the helms of organizations in every discipline.

Thoughts on this job for writers...
It can be a risk. I don’t write as much as I could, but I think I write more than the poet working for State Farm Auto Insurance, for example (no offense to Wallace Stevens). The benefit for me is that I get to exist in a world where literature is valued, where people take art seriously, and where engaging in conversations about books, writers, and individual works is part of my job. It might be harder to find that kind of support in other professions. In that way, my work does inspire me to write, or at least stay engaged with my own work. I exist permanently within a community of writers. That alone is gift enough for me.

Charles Jensen is the author of three chapbooks, including Living Things, which won the 2006 Frank O’Hara Chapbook Award (read a review at The Blood Orange Review), and The Strange Case of Maribel Dixon (New Michigan Press, 2007). A past recipient of an Artist’s Project Grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, his poetry has appeared in Bloom, Columbia Poetry Review, Copper Nickel, The Journal, New England Review, spork, and West Branch. He holds an MFA in poetry from Arizona State University and is currently pursuing an MA in Nonprofit Leadership and Management. He is the founding editor of the online poetry magazine LOCUSPOINT, which explores creative work on a city-by-city basis.

A Cup of Ambition: The Copy Editor

We've all heard it before, at dinner parties, from relatives, from our therapists: "Oh, you write. Does that mean you'll be a teacher?" Fine, fine. We can't make enough money to "eat" or "live" from our poetry. Every MFA graduate knows the horrible feeling that settles into her stomach as graduation approaches. You finished a whole book!, you keep telling people. And still, no prospective employers come a-calling. Here at HFR, we know how you feel. We thought it might be interesting to take a closer look at some jobs we writers and lovers of books might enjoy. Or do enjoy. Or have tried, and regret. This regular post, A Cup of Ambition, will talk to those in-the-know about what the working world is really like.

Meet our seventh guest...
Jocelyn Humelsine, Copy Editor, American Meteorological Society, Boston, MA.
I copy edit, proofread, and reference scientific journals, society bulletins, and book titles.

How did you come to be a copy editor?
I have the classic lament that I didn’t think I could make writing a career, and since I was really “a writer,” I would just have to do something else to earn an income. I was going to go into copywriting (advertising) and apparently the universe and I confused it with copyediting. I started out at a third-party publisher after college, then spent the next 11 years freelancing mainly for textbooks and magazines, and any other media opportunities that arose. In a nutshell, I fell into it and was lucky enough to have several fantastic mentors at the very beginning and along the way. From that first job, I was fortunate to remain networked to my coworkers, who hired me on freelance as they also moved on to their respective publishing jobs. And so it went.

The Good Stuff
Aside from my coworkers, who are all creative and kind and smart, I love making words make sense. I adore the play of fitting words almost mathematically into style “equations” but having the option to maneuver within that space. Ode to Chicago Manual. I also love the process of development, copy editing, proofreading, being able to see from whence it came. AMS, in particular, is a nonprofit who really contributes and is dedicated to the betterment of the science community. It makes you feel a part of a much much bigger picture. The nature of editing requires an inordinate amount of research and fact-checking. You’re constantly learning new things and being required to look into subjects you might otherwise never have thought to look into, i.e., I know a lot more about hurricanes, cyclones, and the climate than I ever would have researched on my own.

The Bad Stuff
It’s a love/hate relationship of sorts, in that as much as I love to edit, I spend too much time editing others’ work and not enough time writing my own work; the unfortunate combination of procrastination and needing to take on a lot of freelance work to supplement the infamous income of the publishing industry doesn’t help, I suppose. Also, all the detailed knowledge in your head can become obsessive—on the hourlong-plus bus rides to and from the city, I can’t help but read road signs with chagrin, not to mention the city rags that are completely irreverent of any type of rules, just structured unto themselves. Doesn’t the Chateau restaurant know it takes an accent on the a? That gas sign takes an Em dash, not a hyphen! By the time you get off the bus, it’s been self-decided that you are the biggest nerd on the planet.

Surprise Me
Not one copy editor is a scientist (not to worry, there are technical editors who read it after us for science/math content). That said, I was surprised at the amount of new lingo and information you can pick up, enough to truly do a thorough copyedit. It is satisfying after having read an article to have grasped all the experiments and concepts. Also, the science community uses a massive amount of acronyms (all of which need expanding on first use). Interoffice e-mails no doubt contain a like massive amount of acronyms.

Spin a Yarn
The production and editorial departments of AMS work in the last remaining carriage house (CH) on Beacon Hill, which was built in 1806 by Charles Bulfinch as the home for the third mayor of Boston, Harrison Gray Otis. The public is welcome for a private tour, and at least once a week, we get history junkies combing our digs. We can all pretty much recite the explanatory speech verbatim. My coworker cracked me up when she said she’s never sure if she should acknowledge their presence, or be in character like Plimoth Plantation, keep churning the butter. Are we inhaling 19th-century brick dust, and is the window above my desk crooked because the Masons were drunk? Alas, we work where the horses were kept, indeed.

Who makes a good copy editor?
It’s very intensive work, the combination of copy editing and the science content, and the minute you’re finished with one article, there’s 100 more in the queue waiting for you. You need to be a little whacky, with that odd sense of humor where names or misread combinations of sentences crack you up. Also important is a superb memory and patience to keep track, for instance, if you hyphenated that word on page 1, you have to do the same on page 30. The same is true if you’re working on simultaneous projects with different style guides: copyeditor or copy editor; E-mail or e-mail; data are or data is; spell-out under 10 or under 100? I always say in my cover letters, “I am passionate about the written word,” however cliché, I think you need that drive.

How do I become you?
Be willing to accept all types of editing work within all types of media, especially at first, to learn the innuendos and rules and exceptions. Then be willing later in your career to bend all those rules to fit whichever publication/media you work for. Also vital is a strong sense of the publishing process, this will help in knowing where exactly your type of editing fits in.

Thoughts on this job for writers...
The upshot for writers is that you get to really dig into, become one with words and to see how others use them. You’re given the chance to read things that you may never have picked up (i.e, at AMS, I work mostly on the Journal of Physical Oceanography, and for freelance, I’ve read over thirty-five college textbooks). The downside is, as said earlier, it’s easy to keep doing editing work to avoid doing writing work. And it’s a little more difficult to write “shitty first drafts.” The Editor in you is squirming, while the Writer screams obscenities at her. The act of researching, as mentioned above, is a fantastic skill for writers; it translates well into magazine or newspaper writing, where you need to conduct research/interviews for any number of assigned topics.

Jocelyn Humelsine is a FT copy editor, PT freelance editor, and FT mom. Her latest copy edited books for 2008 include The Forgiving Air (AMS) and The Well-Crafted Sentence (Bedford/St. Martin’s Press). She is also on a Paulo Coelho binge.