Getting Out of the Office

I was a guest speaker at a class at UMass yesterday. Old pal BJ Roche, who I have known for decades, invited me to speak to her feature writing class. The students were mostly interested in writing for magazines, none said they wanted to be travel writers. I showed them examples of well written queries, (one sentence will do to summarize the story you want to pitch, and a second is all you need to describe your experience) and talked about John McPhee. I told them about the fourteen years he spent trying to get published in the New Yorker, and that after so many rejections, he finally found the sweet spot when he wrote about Bill Bradley, Princeton’s first great basketball star. They hired him as a staff writer, and now just his name on an issue sells thousands of additional newsstand copies. Perseverance, I said, you get rewarded for that.

I also talked about blogging, and podcasts, and RSS feeds, and how the web is the final peak of all of the other media. I drew a “W” on the blackboard showing how TV, radio, print are all pointing up toward that convergence. They clapped after I was done, and that felt good.