15 Ways to Survive as a Freelancer

 

1)  Get up early and write first. Don't let the day get in the way of what you have to do, and by getting up early,  if someone asks you to do something later in the day, you can, because you've already done your other work -- you don't have to say you'll get to it tomorow. And if you have a day job, do your freelance work first - if your day job starts at 8 AM, start writing at 5 AM. The romantic notion of a writing lifestyle is meaningless unless you do the work.

 

2) At the start, and for a long, long time after, say “yes” to almost everything. You never know where that might lead, and if you're any good, you can learn from just about any assignment. Example: I was once asked to write one little work-for-hire book.  I sorta didn’t want to, but I said yes. Over the next decade that turned into another 38 titles. 

 

3)  Ass in chair.  Let me say this again: ASS IN CHAIR. You don’t get anything done going for coffee every hour. Most of the time, this isn’t easy or fun. The job is ass in chair, alone for hours. It’s cool to say you’re a writer when asked at the bar, but the rest of the time, it’s ass in chair. You’re not a tortured artist, you’re a day laborer, like the people waiting for assignments from Manpower.

 

4)  You never "make it." Every time you kick down one door, there is another one, and life is spitting out new writers every day. Some will work harder than you will, some are better than you are, and some will have better connections. You can only control your own effort, so make sure that’s not the problem. It’s hard to make it, and I know writers that have “made it” then got lazy and watched it fritter away. It’s hard to get back in, so don’t relax.  

 

5)  Hit deadlines. Don't ever give anyone a chance to dump you based on this, because that reputation lingers. I’ve hit tight deadlines while writing the morning of a funeral, taking care of an infant full-time, and writing with a broken finger before getting it stitched – real blood on the keyboard that day. Make a personal deadline in advance of the real one, so you don’t turn things in rushed and unfinished. Recent lesson: I was asked to write an essay, one of about a dozen writers asked to do so - 500 words – and given two weeks. I wrote a draft that day, then finished it and turned it in the next day, before anyone else did.  That allowed me to stake out my approach before another writer wrote something similar, or got the editor’s ear. My essay ended up leading the piece, and setting the theme.

 

6)  Learn to re-package, to write the same basic topic, in different ways for different markets. Easier than you think, but don’t self-plagiarize, or ever even get close to that. When I re-package, I also re-research, and then, at the end, compare with what I’ve written earlier and make sure that language and quotes are not duplicated

 

7)  Always be ready to write, and always be on the lookout for a story. I was on vacation once, running on the beach, and something strange happened. I knew it was a story before I’d finished the run.

 

8)  Don't be obnoxious, glib, or too familiar with an editor, particularly at the start. Be committed, and have an idea, but don't give them a reason to call someone else, or to conclude you’re more trouble than you're worth. And don’t blow them off, or otherwise waste their time. I’ve seen this from the other side, assigning stories and even issuing contracts only to have writers disappear, or quit on the story. I won’t ask them for work again.

 

9)  Fulfill the assignment, then do a bit more, then ask if there's anything more you can do.

 

10)  Social media may make you more popular but it won’t make you a better writer -- you only have so many words -- don’t waste them and don’t let social media suck time and energy better spent writing. Think about this: All of Shakespeare would fit on about 70,000 tweets.

 

11) Check facts, spelling, and grammar. Don't make avoidable dumbass mistarkes – er mistakes.

 

12)  If asked what you charge, ask for more money than you think you're worth. Sometimes they say yes – I once sold a poem I’d have given away for free for $350, just because someone asked me how much I wanted for it. But also be prepared to accept less than what you think you’re worth if there’s a chance it could lead to something more. Waiting for the big payday is playing the lottery and about as likely. Careers are built from the accumulation and momentum of many assignments.

 

13)  Try to work in a day a week without words, and find something you like to do that doesn’t involve looking at a screen at all.  

 

14)  Pay your quarterly taxes, and if you don’t know what these are, learn. Set aside 1/3 of all you make to account for this, and learn all about “Business Use of Home” and “Expense Deductions” on your taxes. Expect your income to vary wildly month to month, year to year. That’s a given. If you can’t live that way, don’t try this.

 

15)  Lastly, no excuses. Not the economy, not your relationship, not your day job, not your upbringing, not your education, not anything. The “free” in freelance refers to your time - you control that, something most people can’t say, and that’s extremely valuable.

 

People who don’t write have excuses. And the only real difference between people who write for a living and those wanted to write for a living but don’t, is that at some point those people lifted their ass out of the chair, walked away and quit.

Insurance

My mother used to say that when I was born I didn’t cry; I coughed.




And I am alive today only because the company my father worked for provided health insurance.



She was overstating things only a little, because when I was born the umbilical cord was knotted around my neck so tightly I was actually not breathing at all. Had she waited to go to the hospital or had me at home because she was uninsured, I might not have survived. And because she wasn’t forced prematurely from the hospital with a newborn, and they soon discovered I had an enlarged heart.



That cough that finally did come and didn’t go away a few months later? The doctor came to our house, listened to my lungs and admitted me to the hospital with pneumonia.



At nine months, when she noticed something wrong with my eye, she didn’t have to wait to bring me to the doctor. A cyst was discovered and removed before causing permanent harm. I gave her a black eye when I hit her with the splints on my arms as I recovered.



For the first two years of my life, perhaps because of an immune system already weakened by birth trauma, I contracted every basic childhood illness, one after the other and sometimes simultaneously; chicken pox, measles, mumps, whooping cough, tonsillitis, bronchitis, and God knows what else. Unknown viruses swept through my body like wildfires. I would go to bed healthy and in the middle of the night my mother would check on me and body would feel so hot she would be afraid to take my temperature. My earliest memories (plural) are all of being bundled in blankets and being carried to the car by my father and then all of us, my parents and my older brother, racing to the hospital in the middle of the night or leaving early after overnight trips to my grandmother’s and stopping not at home first, but the hospital or the doctor’s office. I spent weeks swathed in mentholated oil and breathing humidified air, was fed ice chips like most kids get oatmeal, and my mother lost track of the times doctor’s told her “If the fever doesn’t break soon …”



But because I had health insurance, because they didn’t stop often to think if they could afford it, I always got to the doctor or the emergency room on time, always received the shot of antibiotics, the prescriptions, the around-the-clock care. It didn’t help that I was reckless and accident prone – falling through glass doors, down stairs, getting caught on barbed wire, nearly cutting off my thumb with a butcher knife, driving the staff of a small Fourth of July flag through the roof of my mouth, knocking out my front teeth on the dashboard when my father’s car was rear-ended while parked. When I stepped on a nail, received a tetanus shot and seemed to fall asleep on the ride home, my father didn’t hesitate. He shook me out of habit and when I didn’t awake he turned around and carried me into the emergency room. I was in a coma due to an allergic reaction, making all subsequent encounters with sharp objects (of which there were many, including more nails) problematic. Often the entire wound would have to be excised, cored like an apple to prevent infection.



Between the coughs, the pneumonia, the unexplained fevers that kept coming, the allergy to milk that waxed and waned, the bone disease, an arm broken and healed that we only discovered when we thought I had broken the other one, the weird hives I got after being immersed in cold water, what I remember most about school is leaving; field trips cut short leaving other students seething, visits to the nurse, vomiting in the hallway, searing headaches that made me cover my head and scream. Teachers became as adept as my mother at spotting my rapidly emerging maladies, banishing me from class and sequestering me on a cot in the office before I could infect the others as my fevers formed and began to rage, friends peeking around the door at me as if I were some alien, uncertain if I was contagious. What I remember most from my report cards are the absences; 23 days, 29 days, 18.5 days, 32. In sixth grade, after bouts with both pneumonia (which I eventually had six times that I am certain of), and mononucleosis, I peaked with a high of 47 or 48, something that gave me a curious sense of pride; I wasn’t just a sick kid; I was the sickest. All told, of my twelve years in primary and secondary school, I probably missed class about 15% of the time, something that I blame to this day for certain lapses of knowledge, like how electricity works.



Yet when I was not ill I was robust, all appetite and action, which must have made my periods of illness all the more frightening. Each hospitalization was ever more exotic. I was a course in pediatrics all by myself and younger doctors were often paraded in to examine my chart and poke and probe as if I were some new species. Old drugs stopped working and I was always being given new ones.



I should have been dead a dozen times, maybe more, and even with insurance I remember some nights seeing my mother with a stack of bills and my father sitting at a table and the worry over payment, for even insurance did not pay everything. We were not wealthy by any stretch, or even close; one car, one 600 or square foot house on a half acre plot in the cornfields, and once a year vacation – maybe - to see relatives, at least one of which I recall involving a trip to the hospital.



Yet I survived, and somehow, so did our family. Without insurance I doubt that either would have. I’d have died and my parents likely would have lost the house, filed for bankruptcy and fallen apart. But by high school the rate and severity of my illnesses and accidents began to wane, and as an adult – knock on wood – persistent health has replaced chronic infirmity. The baby born coughing has gone on to write and publish several million words and many books, jog a distant equivalent to the circumference of the earth, play a wide variety of sports as both a teenager and an adult and outlive both parents. A recent physical confirms I am more robust than most people my age. Apart from a brief time in my early twenties, when I was fortunate enough to remain well, I have had insurance, either through my own work or that of my wife, and have not often needed it. My own daughter, now sixteen, has enjoyed the good health I did not. But even she, at age seven, was seriously ill with a bout of necrotic pneumonia that ended up requiring nearly two weeks of hospitalization in two facilities, an ambulance transfer during a blizzard, and several surgical procedures.



Even then, insurance paid every cent of her treatment, which included the stint in the hospital that, had I been responsible would have left me bankrupt. More important, had we not had insurance and had to factor caution and cost over concern and waited perhaps one more day for her to get care, it would certainly have killed her.



I knew then how my parents must have felt, and how some parents might feel today.

Glenn Stout is the author and editor of more than eighty books.  For more information see http://www.glennstout.net/.

How Long Has This Been Going On?

I've written tweets of ten words, blog posts of fifty to a thousand, articles between 300 and 10,000 words, and books between 20,000 words and 250,000 words. Different genres, different audiences, topics and approaches require different lengths - which isn't even length really. It is time. Write as long as you need the reader's time to tell the story. In regard to books, and in consultation with your editor and according to your contract, you write the book the length it needs to be so when you're done you feel done, with no unanswered questions. Just don't drop a surprise at the end, and dump a book way long or way short on an editor expecting the opposite.

Much the same with chapters - 2,000 words, 15,000 words - write them, as long as they need to be to feel complete and unified. NEVER write a chapter to length just because you're stuck on a number.

The only real regret I have about any book I've written is when I've compromised according to length. As the late great David Halberstam once told a friend of mine "F-'em. It's your book. Your name is on the cover."

I think of chapter breaks like big breaths, where you feel the need to pause, inhale, ponder and move on - and you have to be a reader here, as well as a writer. Be sensitive to when natural transitions occur - an event comes to a close, a conclusion is reached, a character experiences some kind of defining moment, there is a moment of quiet before action, or action before quiet, some contraction in the narrative. Much of it is just learning to listen to your own work.

It helps, when ending a chapter, to find a way to lift it off the page a bit, and cause the reader to reflect a little, just like the end of a long story or magazine piece, where the story turns back on itself a bit, or the way a piece of music echoes earlier themes. Again, if you are just breaking off for the sake of breaking off, don't. And see if a lead for the following chapter comes easily. If it does, you're breaking it at the right place. But if you neither have an end, or a lead, then you simply might not be at the end of the chapter yet, or have already rushed past it. Trust me, it gets easier the more you do it.

It sounds simplistic, but it really helps sometime to scattershoot through your library just reading leads and ends to chapters, or magazine pieces - can help to brainstorm your own. You'll also realize that some writers you may like a great deal use the same strategies over and over. Nothing wrong with that, if it works, but I must admit that ever since I did that to a writer who I had always admired and realized that nearly every story ended with a similar sensory impression, my admiration dropped just a little. So don't abandon your change up and throw fastballs every time.

And use you outline as that - an outline. Maybe I'm the outlier, but I've never worried for a second about abandoning the outline as I write, as long as I make sure I cover the same territory. For the writer the writing process is also a learning process - no matter how much I think I know beforehand, I don't make the connections until the act of writing takes place, and that can cause me to recast the rest of the book entirely. One of the most lasting things I ever wrote came about when I was in the process of telling a small story that I expected to write over quickly, but found first one question that I didn't have an answer to, then another, then another, and all of a sudden not only did I have an entire new chapter, but the info in that chapter informed the remainder of the book and provided a entire logic that wasn't there when I started writing, and that I didn't know was there in my research.

Another reason why you do this.

The Book and the Plow

When do you know it is time to write a book?

For any non-fiction writer, that question actually represents two questions. For the writer who has not written a book, the question concerns ambition. For the writer who already has, it is a question of craft. In this case, I’m considering ambition.

Whether he or she will admit it or not, most writers, in any genre, and at every level, from the writer who toils on in secret to the newspaper columnist or the magazine feature writer, wants to write a book. Having people read your work is like giving a performance, but having your work appear in book form is like making a recording. Even the best deadline based journalism can be swallowed up in the undergrowth, but books are trees.

Apart from the obvious – you write a book when you have something to say – and the practical – you write a book when you have a contract to do so - the best reason to write that first book is that it will help you grow as a writer. I believe writing a book is about the best lesson in writing any working writer can have. Writing is, in itself, essentially an act of learning and writing a book takes that to a completely new level, both in terms of what can be learned about a subject and what you learn about writing itself.

The transition for any short-form writer – by “short-form” I mean anyone who generally writes pieces under ten thousand words – into writing book length is dramatic, like going from prose to poetry. The tricks and patterns of writing you can get away with while writing in short-form can trip you up in a book.

I might be more sensitive to this than most people. As series editor of The Best American Sports Writing, I read a great deal of longer feature writing both about sports and about anything else that catches my eye. After doing this for twenty years there are many writers now whose work and style I can recognize within just a few sentences and who have produced significant and lasting work. Yet many of these writers have either not written books or done so with only tepid success. What makes their work so affecting when read in six or eight thousand word bursts four or five times a year often doesn’t work in a book. The style that captivates for eight or ten pages can become redundant and tired when spread across 200 pages, the method of transmission formulaic, and the level of observation predictable. There is a reason so few character actors successfully transition to leading roles – the shtick becomes wearisome – and why leading men and women often seem awkward in small parts. Accustomed to playing a large room, when confined they seem to shrink out of proportion.

This is what can happen to writers who suddenly go from writing eight thousand words to eighty thousand, or to one hundred and eighty thousand. When the writer has to inhabit the consciousness of a reader for days and not just a few minutes or perhaps an hour, that relationship changes. Another metaphor – it’s the difference between a one night stand and a relationship, a date and a life.

Not all writers can make that transition. I had an agent tell me once that he rarely accepted journalists as clients for just this reason.

Writing a book changes the process in ways you cannot foresee. Here’s one example: When writing in shorter forms interview with subjects are common, but an interview of more than several hours are rare. But in a book, given the demands of those many thousands of extra words, you sometime share the opportunity – and the responsibility - to go much farther. On at least three occasions while working on book projects I have ended up interviewing someone for upwards of twenty-five hours over a period of months. In each case I got their basic “story” early on in the process, in the first six or eight hours. But what I found remarkable (and surprising) was that each time, as the interviews continued far beyond the point at which a writer would normally interview a subject for a magazine story, right at the point that I felt there was nothing left to learn, each subject dropped down a line of defense that I hadn’t even known was there and gave me something absolutely essential. I’ve had the same experience while doing research. After spending a year or more accumulating material at a level far beyond what I would do for an article, the transformative information that I really needed finally begins to coalesce

So when do you decide to write the book? Most writers know long before their readers when they’ve stopped growing and are writing the same way over and over. When you begin to be bored with only going so far into a subject and feel you are only driving past it - staying a couple of nights there in a motel, as opposed to actually living there - that’s the time to challenge yourself, before the self-loathing kicks in, before you are sitting there thinking “I really should write a book someday.”

Hold It Right There

Earlier today a friend asked me a question about writing and restraint, which was inspired by a post by Chris Jones on his blog http://sonofboldventure.blogspot.com/2011/01/words-that-arent-there.html.

I’ve always thought it important to note that “In the beginning was the word…” not “In the beginning was the words…” Now I know that's not the biblical interpretation but it has always seemed to me that, as far a writing goes, that truth and wisdom are best delivered in brevity, and that sometimes, the more words we use, the farther away we move from wisdom. Thumbnail version: Know when to stop.

That’s one of the reasons I think that writers of any stripe should read poetry – it not only provides tangible lessons like economy, sound and rhythm, but it also teaches that the negative space in writing – what’s not there, and the heartbeat of recognition that takes place over the empty space at the end of a line or a phrase - is as important as what is on the page. The way we connect with a piece of writing is how our brain fills in the blanks.

It’s like backing away from a painting rather than standing too close.

How To Write Two Million Words…or so

Several months ago, in his farewell column in ESPN The Magazine, Rick Reilly noted that “My math says this column puts me over one million published words. And that doesn't count books (No. 11 coming up in May), screenplays (two), sonnets, ransom notes and quilts. This is one million too many for many citizens, but the fact remains.”

When I was younger this kind of statement that would send me into deep depression. When one wants to be a writer there is nothing more depressing than having someone quantify what you have not done. I recall being particularly dismayed when I learned that Jack Kerouac had written a million words by the age of thirty. When one has not written anything of merit - or at least published it – one million words seems like, well, one million words, a task so daunting as to be unachievable, like running around the world. One imagines that the writer of a million words must have the discipline of a monk, the typing skills of a graduate of Katie Gibbs, the supple imagination of a jazz musician, the stamina of a marathoner… and either a vow of poverty or a trust fund, because how would it ever be possible to both work and write?

I looked at myself and saw none of those qualities. I liked to have too much fun, laughing and hanging out in bars, and a small nerve problem in my hands made it impossible for me to touch type. The only thing I did every day – beyond the physical necessities - was wake up and read, probably so I would not have to confront the fact that I was not writing very much.

Despite this, in 1986 when I was in my late twenties, after writing in camera for years - mostly poetry - through some kind of dumb luck I finally started writing and publishing non-fiction. In an instant I went from “wanting to be a writer” to “being a writer” and a certain floodgate fell open.

It was not too many years later – I had just turned thirty, hence the accounting - when I sat down and discovered that, rather incredibly, almost accidentally, even I had written a million words. Now this was not a million published words, mind you – there were probably only about 100,000 of those at the time - but if I started in college and counted all the papers I had written and the notebooks I had filled up and scratched over, despite what I saw as my utter lack of discipline, a common imagination, questionable stamina, lack of a trust fund and a regular job that kept me nominally above the poverty line, even I had written a million words.

The realization was liberating beyond measure. Writers were not mysteries, and the act of writing was not some kind of secret sect to which I had no access. It did not entail following a schedule carved in stone, a muse, the ability to work until one fell asleep at the typewriter (a quaint thought…) or the proper pedigree.

No, I realized that most of writing entailed putting my ass in a chair, hitting deadlines and, most important of all, not being intimidated by the process. If I had written a million words by age thirty – and felt that I was just getting started at that – well, writing couldn’t be that hard.* This was something I could do.

I had also started running, and at about this time also realized that running around the world was also achievable as long as I did it in increments and did not let the goal overwhelm the process. For about ten years or so I probably averaged about forty miles a week, which totaled about 20,000 miles and put me on the brink of the running around the world total. And although I no longer run as far or as often, I have still kept it up for more than thirty years and at this point am probably closing in on my second global circumnavigation.

I only bring this up to underscore the point that even while writing a million words one need not stop doing everything else. In fact, I think it helps to do other things, to help turn the act of writing from something so precious that you freeze with anticipation in front of the keyboard into something as normal as brushing your teeth, a part of the daily fabric, not subject to any excuses. At the same time I continued to work full-time until 1993, helped raise my daughter from infancy (and with minimal daycare before school while my wife worked), played nearly 400 games of amateur baseball over nine seasons, learned to skate, ski, and kayak, cut my own wood, built my office, held public office, etc., etc., etc. This does not even include the vast amount of reading I have to do as part of my duties as Series Editor of The Best American Sports Writing. And I won’t even get into the amount of time I’ve spent watching baseball or sitting in bars. I still feel completely undisciplined and think I should be much more productive than I am, but now, after nearly twenty-five years as a professional writer, including the last seventeen on a full time basis, when I add up my published output since 1986, I am closing in one two and a half million words. And that doesn't even include all those poems in the bottom of a drawer somewhere.

When I write that, it does not seem possible, yet there it is. And I hope at least one young writer might find some solace in the fact that if a stiff like me could write a couple million words, well, so can you.

So sit down and get cracking. As long as you start now, there is plenty of time.

Meanwhile, I think I'll take a nap.

P.S. And I still cannot touch type. I only use my thumbs, index fingers and, occasionally, middle fingers on each hand. But I do type at the speed I think.



Word Count:

Illustrated Biographies

Ted Williams: 40,000
Joe DiMaggio: 50,000
Jackie Robinson: 40,000


Red Sox Century: 200,000
Yankees Century: 225,000
The Dodgers: 225,000
The Cubs: 225,000

Nine Months at Ground Zero: 110,000

Young Woman and the Sea: 125,000

Fenway 1912: 140,000


Matt Christopher titles (39): 720,000

Good Sports titles (2): 36,000

BASW Forewords (21): 40,000

Misc work for hire books: 100,000

Articles: 100,000

Boston Baseball Columns: 80,000

TOTAL: 2,456,000


*Understand, I am not equating quantity with quality here. Rick Reilly is not Jack Kerouac and neither am I. All we have of Sappho are a few scant fragments, a few thousand words at most, and I would gladly trade my millions for her few. Believe me, I get that. But there was a time when Sappho was probably intimidated by the act of writing as well.

Advice for a Young Writer

One of the greatest challenges a young writer will ever face is continuing to write without the forced deadline of a school assignment or a job. It is a test that will determine whether you are meant for this or something else. To start, writing for money is probably the last thing you should be thinking about - no one coming out of college is best served by waiting for a writing job to write. And if you do get one, it may be covering select board meetings and/or the paper towel industry. That is fine and well, but just a start.

Becoming a writer is a decision and a practice, not a job. Whatever work you do can feed your decision, for the practice of one task can inform another. Seek out others interested in words so there is a running conversation about writing taking place in your life. At the same time you should be thinking about stories and embarking on reading that school has not supplied - at its best, formal education prepares you to abandon formal education and start learning on your own - now is the time to start. Look at that as an assignment in itself - report, for yourself, on the paths over writers have taken. Trace those paths through reading. Read what the writers you like most have read. When you find yourself interested in any kind of topic, write it, when you think of an idea, write it, when you think of a phrase, write it, hear some dialogue, write it. Carry a notebook with you at all times. Get into the habit - write anything, notes, sketches, descriptions, etc. You need to write until you don't think about writing when you are writing. Study how stories are framed. Share work with friends. Try everything, all genres. Read everything. It all adds up, and you will never be more prepared to sink in neck deep in words than right now. If you put that off you will find it very difficult to return.

It was six years after college before I published a word. The only reason I did or could was that in the interim I kept reading and writing, steeped myself in it, and kept that - not just "a job" - the priority.

It wasn't practical, but nothing about this or any of the arts is. To paraphrase someone wiser than myself, being professional is doing what you should be doing when no one is watching.

Memory of a Writer

As close readers of The Best American Sports Writing know, the Guest Editor makes the final call each year. Unless I am asked, I stay out the selection process. That keeps the book from getting stale, but sometimes one gets away. The late Jeff Felshman of the Chicago Reader wrote a story in 1994 called Blind Alley, which was cited in “Notable Sports Writing of 1994.” I went to school with Jeff many years ago, and don't recall whether I had put 2 + 2 together at the time and realized that CR's Jeff Felshman was the same guy I had known in college, although I became aware of it later. It was an empathetic, slice of life account about a group of people who bowl, despite not being able to see.

Earlier this year Jeff Felshman contacted me through some mutual friends on Facebook, and reminded me that I had selected his story on the notable list, but what he really wanted to tell me was that some years ago he had interviewed a someone who had worked with me at the Boston Public Library, and Jeff just wanted me to know that this person had spoken highly of me, a kind gesture he did not need to make, but did, and also the kind that tells you a great deal about someone.

Two days ago Jeff Felshman passed away of a heart attack. This morning, the day after Thanksgiving, I looked up the story in the Reader archives and read it again. Now I wonder how the hell it didn’t make the book. The Best American Sports Writing 1995 was the shortest edition BASW ever published, and now I wish it had included one more story.

So what am I thankful for this season? Among many things, writers like this:

"

...There's been a steady stream to the bar, but even among those who don't drink the scores drop off as the day goes on. The third game is the worst. Diane hasn't struck once since the first. Howard hasn't yelled "Mark it!" in a while, either. Beverly dropped from 104 to 46, around Andre's average. Her partner Jim Regan, the only bowler wearing shades (besides Kai Okada, who can see), rolls at the same time as Andre, who says she can't tell which pins go down "but I can hear a gutter ball pretty well." Regan's roll was his last of the day, and he says it didn't make any difference that Andre was on the line next to him at the same time. Bowling in tandem doesn't bother the blind bowlers.

"It probably bothers the sighted bowlers," Regan points out, "but they haven't said anything."

"Well, they're probably just being polite," Beverly says, "but we should watch out for that."

"If they don't say anything, how are we going to know?" There's such a thing as being polite to a fault. Regan goes on, "It's the old thing where you're sitting in a restaurant with somebody and the waitress asks, 'And what does he want?'"

"What do you mean?"

"It's like you're not there--"

"Oh yes," Beverly laughs, "I know what you mean. My daughter has a good line for that. She says, 'She's blind, not brain dead!' I like that."

"Anyway," Beverly continues, "this game, it's just luck. I'm just waiting for these lying excuses about why things went wrong. I'll hear 'em before the end."

But the end is here. Kai collects the score sheets and reads them off to Virginia, who enters the scores into a hand-held tape recorder. The bowlers gather around the bar to wait for the results. Three couples take over a table to the right of the bar. Mike and Jodi are engaged to be married. Mike, a partial who bowls with a monocular, rolled a 242 in the midwest tournement, and with Jodi is odds-on favorites to win today. Jackie and Howard are swirling their stools, hugging and laughing. Howard's in high spirits. "I've been living with this woman for ten years, and still got no piece of paper. You know why? Because I love her, that's why! We don't need no goddamn piece of paper."

To read the rest of the story, or more of Jeff Felshman, a writer worth remembering, and reading, follow the link to the Reader archives or Jeff's own site.

http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/blind-alley/Content?oid=884958

www.jeffreyfelshman.com

BASW 2010 Guest Editor is...

I am pleased to announce that the guest editor for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt's The Best American Sports Writing 2010, the twentieth annual edition which was first published in 1991, is noted author, baseball authority and occasional guitar hero Peter Gammons. For submission guideline and other information, see www.glennstout.net or The Best American Sports Writing on Facebook.

How to Get From Here to There

After driving more than 1,500 miles over the last week - to Ohio and back - I’ve thought quite a bit about length and distance. And as the PR machine for Young Woman and the Sea, my bio of Trudy Ederle (aka Gertrude Ederle) , starts to fire up, I’ve recently done a couple of interviews about both the book and about writing which will soon appear. I’ll link to them when they do, but one of the interesting things about doing such interviews is that I occasionally get asked questions about the process of writing, which is something I usually don’t think too much about – until I do.

So I’ve been thinking about length. My experience is rather unique in that I've written poems, columns and non-fiction for both juvenile and adult audiences, and books that range from between 20,000 words and 250,000 words – from one hundred double-spaced typed pages to more than a thousand, for those who think in those terms. Different books, different audiences, topics and approaches require different lengths – but length isn’t the right term, really.

It is time. No matter the subject, I write as long as I need the reader's time to tell the story, so when I am done I feel done, with no unanswered questions or stray cats still roaming around in my brain. A book of several thousands of words needs to feel as finished and complete as a poem of only ten or fifteen words.

It is the same inside the book, with chapters. I’ve written chapters as small as 1,200 words or so and as long as 15,000 or more – whatever it takes to feel that they are complete and unified. I NEVER write a chapter to length just because I’m stuck on a number, although in most books most of my chapters fall within a range similar range.

I think of chapter breaks like big breaths, where you feel the need to pause, inhale, ponder and move on - and you have to be a reader here, as well as a writer. Be sensitive to when natural transitions occur - an event comes to a close, a conclusion is reached, a character experiences some kind of defining moment, there is a moment of quiet before action, or action before quiet, some contraction within the narrative.

Much of it is just learning to listen to your own work. I think it helps, when ending a chapter, to find a way to lift it off the page a bit, and cause the reader to reflect a little, just like the end of a long story or magazine piece, where the story turns back on itself a bit. Again, if you are just breaking off for the sake of breaking off, don't. And see if a lead for the following chapter comes easily. If it does, you're breaking it at the right place. But if you neither have an end, or a lead, then you simply might not be at the end of the chapter yet, or have already rushed past. Trust me, it gets easier the more you do it.

It sounds simplistic, but it really helps sometime to scattershot through your library just reading leads and ends to chapters, or the beginning and ends of magazine pieces, even the beginning and ends of poems. This can help you not only to brain storm your own transitions, but you’ll also realize that some writers you may like a great deal use the same strategies over and over. There is nothing wrong with that, if it works, but I must admit that ever since I did that to a writer who I had always admired and realized that nearly every story ended with a similar sensory impression, my admiration dropped just a little. So don't abandon your change up – try not to repeat yourself.

And use your outline as that - an outline - and not a dictator of length and chapter. Maybe I'm the outlier, but I've never worried for a second about abandoning the outline as I write, as long as I make sure I cover what I have promised to cover. For the writer I think the writing process is also a learning process - no matter how much I think I know beforehand, I don't make the really valuable connections until the act of writing takes place, and that can cause me to recast the rest of the book entirely.

One of the most lasting things I ever wrote came about when I was in the process of telling a small, familiar story that I expected to write quickly, but then I found one question that I didn't have an answer to, then another, then another, and I started looking for answers and all of a sudden not only did I have an entirely new chapter, but the information in that chapter informed the remainder of the book and provided a entire logic that wasn't there when I started writing, and that I didn't know was there in my research the whole time.

That's why you do this.

Getting It Across

While I generally don’t think writers and actors have that much in common, I do think we share a capacity (or at least a desire) to “inhabit” a subject, in other words to get inside a character and see/feel/think what the character feels. It's a challenge.

In Young Woman and the Sea, my book about Trudy Ederle, (aka Gertrude Ederle) the first woman to swim the English Channel, my biggest fear was that I would be unable to “inhabit” her and translate her experience as a Channel swimmer with authenticity. After all, I am not only not a nineteen year old girl, but - at best - I’m a pedestrian swimmer. What do I know about that experience?

All I could do was all I could do, steep myself in research and use my life experience to try to gain access to her experience, and by that I mean the physical discomfort and mental gymnastics I’ve experienced from a variety of activities – running regularly for more than thirty years, pouring concrete for fourteen hours a day, pitching a baseball, kayaking on Lake Champlain in a wide variety of weather conditions, and other things I’ve done that have required real discipline, focus and physical stamina (like writing a book). That being said, I was still worried I’d get something wrong, and that an experienced open water swimmer would roll his or her eyes and call me on it.

Yesterday I received an e-mail from someone who has read the book, a person who has swum the Channel several times, both in relays and alone. She wrote of the book that, “It is wonderful. You really were able to capture open water swimming and what it is all about.” And then she went on to cite specific examples, scenes from the book that resonated with her own experiences both swimming the Channel and training for it.

Writing a book is a long slog, and that e-mail made me feel like I'd just made it across an English Channel of my own. It is already my favorite review.

The Buzz

I can almost hear it.

All you can ask for from writing a book is the chance for people to hear about it and read it. The sad fact is that for most books, by the time they are published, the audience is already known, the niche has been defined and it is extraordinarily difficult to break out of that.

It might be different for "YOUNG WOMAN & THE SEA," my biography of Gertrude Ederle, aka Trudy Ederle, the first woman to swim the English Channel. A couple of really, really good pre-pub reviews have attracted some attention and given the book a bit of a profile. It was selected as a "Best Summer Read" by the Wall Street Journal, which appears to be attracting even more attention. None of this is bad with the pub date still some weeks off.

Could be it has some "buzz."

Ultimate Beach Read

And I mean it. My new book Young Woman & the Sea (see previous posts) was just selected a “Best Summer Read” by the Wall Street Journal, one of only five non-fiction books so designated. They even ran an excerpt:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203431004574194003685860522.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

Researching Trudy

Once upon a time when I was beginning to write sports and social history, the print portion of what flacks and reviewers usually call “exhaustive research" was just that. Even ten or twelve years ago, writing a two or three thousand word profile on a historical sports topic was grueling. Apart from interviews, which, depending on the time period in which one writes, are not always central to the process, you had to try to find every book on the subject – or close to the subject – and hope each had an index, and spend hours looking for useful information. Research in newspapers consisted of scrolling though mountains of microfilm, and either taking notes or taking your chances with copy systems that were rarely satisfying. Even the most basic information was almost impossible to come by. For instance, in those pre Retrosheet days even reconstructing the play by play of an inning of a baseball game was almost impossible.

Now of course the wealth of material available online is staggering. In one full day online I can often access and print (if necessary) more material than I could have physically looked up and copied in several months a decade ago. It has dramatically changed the amount of time it takes to research a contemporary topic, and write a book about it. But here’s the catch. As the wealth of online material grows, I think many researchers just stop doing the old grunt work I just described. There is a tendency to dismiss sources that are not available online through Proquest, some magazine database or Google books. Not true. The result can be a great deal of faux research that ignores as much material as it includes.

In my soon to be published book on Gertrude Ederle, "Young Woman and the Sea: How Trudy Ederle conquered the English Channel and Inspired the World," I did both kinds of research, days and months online and similar time in libraries. In 1926 Ederle became the sixth person – and first woman - to swim the English Channel, beating the men’s record by nearly two hours, a staggering achievement that proved, once and for all, that women could compete as athletes. My challenge was to animate her and her era. The result was, I think, informative. In the end I uncovered more than six thousand articles and stories about Ederle over an eighty-year period. That doesn’t include the wealth of background information on topics such as swimwear, swimming, the geology of the English Channel and other topics I dove into. In the end I collected more information on a single confined subject than I have ever used in any of my previous books. I am certain that I now have the largest collection of print material in Gertrude Ederle in existence, absolutely critical in reconstructing her life and times. And some of the best of that information was acquired at the very end of the research process, which continued even as I was writing and even revising the manuscript in galley form.

The difference between research then and now is as dramatic as the difference between writing out in long hand and using a word processor. Having done both, I prefer the way it is today, but I am reminded by the process that just as writing today generally requires using both a pen and a PC, research requires both access to online resources and the discipline to spend weeks and months squinting in a corner of the library.

Not unlike the discipline it takes to train to swim the English Channel.

It's Memorial Day...

P.O.W.

Two weeks since the war started
and I have already surrendered
thrown up the white flag
relinquished my gun, and turned myself over.
Caught between my own lines, captured.
Private, I am confined
with others of my kind; solitary,
chained to my oaths and promises
and no thought or words of home.
I keep no military secret but this:

We should not live this way.

My name, my number, my place and rank in this world
is not enough to say. I have given up
to love; to fight
is to start the battle
and the beatings I still feel
all bad training, say for me to stop.
I’ll admit to anything, yet confess
to nothing else. There is no war crime
no malice in my heart, but one true target
and I refuse to hate the one that keeps me.
We war for reason, and there is none here.
It is fear and loneliness, the feeling of our separate cells
we fight, and not each other.
I will cooperate with my captor
and join in the resistance the only way I can,
make invasion from imprisonment
trying to escape, freeing myself, through the head
the heart, and then the body
of the only true, real enemy
we have ever known.

Day Labor

One of my all-time favorite quotes is from Wilcy Moore, one of the first relief pitchers and a key member of the 1927 Yankees. "I ain't a pitcher," he once said, "I'm a day laborer."

And ain't that the truth. As someone who has been writing books almost exclusively for nearly twenty years, with about 2.5 million words between the covers,I learned more about writing from working construction than any writers' workshop. Because the sooner you integrate the process of writing into your daily life, respecting it for its occasional magic, but treating it like day labor, with all the same attendant difficulties that come with getting up way too early and working even when you don't feel like it, the better off you are, and the easier it becomes.

Many writers, I think, are too cautious about the process, and I tell people over and over and over again to stop acting so damn precious. The people who are good at this, like those who are good at virtually anything, outwork almost everyone else who is trying to do the same thing and may be more talented and privileged. I've never met the artistic genius who didn't put in the time, but many who thought they were who never bothered.

Treating writing as labor keeps me focused on the task at hand. I hardly ever think about what will happen to a book as I am writing it, or the doors it will open, or the cool stuff or the bad stuff that will happen because I wrote it (and I've had both happen - book signings with no one and times I've felt like one of the Beatles), or my expectations in terms of sales and reviews. I can control very little of that, and every second I spend thinking about that stuff takes me away from the work that I am doing. Besides, it's not like you write the book, wait for it to be published, experience that and then begin the process again. It' overlaps, like covering a beat - you have to roll out a story every day. You write the book, and by the time you are finished up and beginning the editing part, you had better have the next idea/proposal rolling out, and by the time that first book is published you should be well on your way to writing the next one and starting to think of the one after that. Some of the things I have in the works now are, literally, ideas I had and started lining up and working towards ten years ago, and I'm already trying to plot out the next ten years. I have a book coming out this summer, Young Woman & the Sea. I'm done with the research and getting ready to write the next one, and may be signing another contract soon. The process is not unlike the way it was when I worked construction, lining up each job ahead of time so you didn't get laid off between jobs and end up unemployed - especially now.

Despite what others have said, I don't think that writing a book is like running of a marathon. It's running every day to stay in shape for a marathon.

BEST Writing Advice I Ever Received

No matter what you write or in what genre, occasionally read your work into a tape recorder and then listen to it closely when you play it back. This lesson was delivered to me by Robert Kelly, who was my poetry professor at Bard College and I've used it ever since.

Hearing your own voice will give you a perspective on your own work that cannot be gained any other way. If, when listening, something doesn't make sense or sound right, neither will it make sense on the page when read silently by a reader. Similarly, if you find your attention drifting when listen to yourself, the reader's attention will also drift.

Discovering where this happens, and why, will help you edit and revise. Awkward and inappropriate phrases will stick out when read back aloud - cut them. Phrases or sentences or observations you have fallen in love with but are not organic to the work will also stick out. Whenever you stumble over a word or phrase when reading aloud, there is probably a better word or phrase to use. Over time you'll develop your own inner ear which will allow you to hear your own work without using the tape recorder. All writing is language, and language is sound, and by listening you will learn to use the sound and rhythm of the language to your advantage - that is called style and is the way you find your own "voice" as a writer.

The Reviews Are In

Young Woman and the Sea: How Trudy Ederle Conquered the English Channel and Inspired the World, the story of the first woman to swim the English Channel, comes out in July.

A few early reviews:

from PUBLISHER’S WEEKLY April 2009 (Starred review):

Young Woman and the Sea: How Trudy Ederle Conquered the English Channel and Inspired the World Glenn Stout. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $24 (352p) ISBN 978-0-618-85868-2

In 1926, 19-year-old Trudy Ederle fascinated and inspired millions around the world when she became the first woman successfully to swim the English Channel. With great storytelling, sportswriter Stout (series editor of The Best American Sports Writing) chronicles Ederle's singular accomplishment and its significance for the future of women in sports as well as the tremendous challenges for any swimmer who would dare traverse the waves of the channel. At age five, Ederle (1905–2003) suffered permanent hearing loss, which made her reticent and shy; at age 10 her father taught her to swim. The ocean opened to her like another world, and she loved the feeling of floating and swimming in its vastness. After lessons at the Women's Swimming Association, Ederle developed her gift and emerged as one of America's fastest swimmers, earning a spot in the 1924 Olympics. Disappointed by winning only a bronze medal, she quickly turned to the challenge of swimming the English Channel—difficult due to its strong tides, winds and currents—and after an initial failure, Ederle conquered the channel on August 6, 1926. Stout's moving book recovers the exhilarating story of a young girl who found her true self out in the water and paved the way for women in sports today. (July)


The next one is a paired review, reviewing my book and another about Ederle that comes out a bit later this year. I've excised comments about the other book, but highlighted the important part

from Library Journal, May issue:

Trudy Ederle, who died in 2003 at age 98, was the first woman to swim the English Channel, in 1926. For several years, her fame had been uproarious, her achievement thought earth-shattering. She enjoyed New York's biggest ticker tape parade, had her own swimsuit line, and had Americans rethinking women's athletic capabilities. After a semisuccessful vaudeville tour, her career declined; she turned to giving children swimming lessons and, later, selling dresses in a shop. Although the shy and hard-of-hearing Ederle failed to cash in on her fame, she felt satisfied with her career and resented those who deemed her ultimate anonymity a tragedy. These two biographies help readers understand the age of "ballyhoo" and "wonderful nonsense," as Stout cites sportswriter Westbrook Pegler referring to the Twenties... [Stout was] able to re-create vividly the dramatic events, largely from published reporting and interviews… Stout, who has edited The Best American Sports Writing annually, delves into the history of U.S. swimming, how geology shaped the fearsome tides and currents in the channel, and Ederle's failed first attempt…a popular social history that brings to life a woman, her era, and her remarkable feat. Both books make for very entertaining reading, with Stout's given a slight edge for more picturesque writing. Recommended for all scholarly as well as public libraries.


YOUNG WOMAN AND THE SEA by Glenn Stout
ISBN: 9780618858682
Pub date: July 28, 2009

First Pitch

Without poetry, I'm not a writer, pure and simple.

I was thirteen and had to do a school project, using magazine illustrations and photos to illustrate a collection pf poetry. At that point, apart from Casey at the Bat, my literary horizons ended at "The Baseball Life of Mickey Mantle."My older brother gave me steered me to Langston Hughes. Who knows why, but I read this poem:

Suicide's Note

The calm cool
face of the river
asked me for a kiss.

Boom. That's it, satori, I was done, finished, hooked on language and my life changed. I still get chills reading it. There should have been no way that me, a white kid in the middle of nowhere with zero literary background whose parents never read a book should ever, ever, ever have connected with the work of an urban black poet of a previous generation. But language and experience really are universal. I read more Hughes, then read about Hughes, then read who he read, and his contemporaries, then read who they read and their contemporaries, always pulling at the thread.

When I got into high school every week I took the five or six bucks I'd saved up from cleaning toilets, drove into Big City to a used bookstore and would spend the whole day there deciding what to buy. Out of high school I got a scholarship under one of the best poetry teachers in the country, and almost forty years later, although I write prose for money, without poetry I'd never bother. Back in the day I ran informal workshops, readings, and other public poetry events, like reading poetry outside Fenway Park, putting poetry before people who otherwise would never have bothered, sometimes reading to hundreds of people and sometimes reading to myself. Now part of me can't wait to get retired so I can spend more time with it.

But without that first poem...