So many of my Facebook friends are unfamiliar with Quora (frankly, so many people in general are unfamiliar with Quora), a site that began as a way for people with some expertise in specific fields to answer questions from people who wanted to know more about those topics.
In the four or so years I’ve been a Quora writer (and a Top Writer in 2017 and 2018), with just short of one-million answer views (my son, Carter, a legendary Quoran, has more than 12.6-million answer views and 7,000 followers), I’ve seen the site turn into a strange souk (would that be a bizarre bazaar?) of trolling questions, questions that could easily be found on other search sites, questions about love, classroom behavior, help-me-with-my-homework, off-the-wall hypotheticals about science, wars, foods…the weirdness of the questions has increased exponentially. And yet, there are always some questions that either deserve a sincere reply, or are so silly they beg a snappy retort.
For this But What If I’m Write? column, I’d like to share a few of my replies to Quora questions related to writing and journalism. It will become abundantly clear that many of the questions come from writers new to the craft (or who want to get started), and some questioners whose native language is not English. Given that Quorans represent many languages and cultures, it’s common to see errors in translation. Usually we get the gist of what the questioner is going for.
Anyway, here is a list of the questions; you can just scroll on down through the text.
Table of Contents
If I want to make a comment within a text, should I use parentheses or dash?
How differently do various generations treat email? Should I write much differently if I know the person hiring me or doing me a favor is old or young?
In what way are you influenced by the ambience and atmosphere in whatever environment you are in?
Why have I received so many rejection letters as a budding author? My writing is worthy.
Why should one take courses that require you to be present in a class, while he/she can learn the materials by reading books?
How do you write a sound within a sentence? Do I capitalize like "Crack!" or leave it lowercase? Do all sounds require punctuation after, regardless of place in the sentence?
Is this sentence correct, ‘you are finished with the test’?
What is the greatest monologue from any book or movie?
How can I grow my writing career?
How do I avoid using “I” a lot at the start of my sentences when writing a novel?
How do I avoid starting over 15 times when starting a novel?
What ways has journalism been challenged by culture?
Time Magazine has named “the guardians,” journalists - many of whom have lost their lives - as the Person of the Year. What do you think about that?
How did you become a published freelance writer? What suggestions and/or advice do you have for someone who wants to be successful in this field?
Answers:
If I want to make a comment within a text, should I use parentheses or dash?
You actually have four options: parentheses, dash, i.e., and e.g. Putting the last two aside for a moment, whether you use a parenthesis or a dash depends on the context of the sentence and/or the level of clarity you need to apply to the sentence.
Here’s an example of both in one sentence: “When I first stepped into the cockpit of the P-38 (ducking my head to avoid the lower edge of the upward-opening window), the first thing I noticed was the control wheel—the Lightning was the only American fighter in World War II to use a control wheel instead of a controls stick—and the well-worn steel seat where my father once sat.”
A parenthesis (like this one) can be useful as an aside or a point of clarity when you want something more than a comma, or when a comma might not set the explanatory phrase apart enough.
Using a dash—what we call an em-dash because it’s the width of the letter m as opposed to an en-dash, which, duh, is the width of the letter n—is one of the most flexible pieces of punctuation. If applied sparingly, the dash can take the place of a comma, a semi-colon, a parenthesis, or even a full-stop period. You can get a whole lot of explanation in between two dashes and still not hurt the overall meaning of the main sentence.
I mention e.g., and i.e., only because, technically, they are reserved for comments that show either a specific example (e.g.), or a general similarity that would be a “such as” statement (i.e.).
How differently do various generations treat email? Should I write much differently if I know the person hiring me or doing me a favor is old or young?
Choose One (but note the italics):
I’m young. The time I have left is unlimited (in my mind). Every moment I spend reading your email is a moment taken away from all the fun I’m going to have. Please keep your emails to the point, clear in meaning, brief in length.
Or:
I’m middle aged. The time I have available to read your email is restricted by children needing my attention, a house that needs maintenance, a partner I want to spend time with, recipes I want to try, and a job that pushes every one of my buttons and makes me want to hole up in a box canyon with a good book or great music. Please keep your emails to the point, clear in meaning, brief in length.
Or:
I’m old. The time I have left is relatively short. Every moment I spend reading your email is a moment closer to the grave. Is this how you want me to occupy what might be my last few minutes? Please keep your emails to the point, clear in meaning, brief in length.
In what way are you influenced by the ambiance and atmosphere in whatever environment you are in?
If one subscribes to the categorizations of the Myers-Briggs form, I am an INTJ, summarized as:
INTJs, as introverts, are quiet, reserved, and comfortable being alone. They are usually self-sufficient and would rather work alone than in a group. Socializing drains an introvert’s energy, causing them to need to recharge. INTJs are interested in ideas and theories. When observing the world they are always questioning why things happen the way they do. They excel at developing plans and strategies, and don’t like uncertainty.
Oddly enough, despite Myers-Briggs, this is an apt description of my general outlook and operational motif, and has been for at least 50 of my 70 years. The ambiance and environment of any situation I approach will cause me to pause, examine, analyze, and then, if necessary, act in a long-term way. I don’t do short-term strategies very well, much preferring the much longer, or higher (30,000′) point of view.
Why have I received so many rejection letters as a budding author? My writing is worthy.
Please don’t take this the wrong way—no insult intended—but it’s quite likely that your belief that your writing is “worthy” may be getting in the way of your success. I’ve been a professional writer for more than five decades. I’ve written books, thousands of speeches for high-level U.S. government officials and Fortune 500 CEOs, hundreds, if not thousands of editorial columns and blogs, and I count among my professional colleagues men and women with far greater output than mine.
All of those colleagues, and I, never described our work as “worthy” before we had any publishing experience. At best, most of us would have used words like “struggling,” “difficult,” “frustrating,” “not-yet-good-enough,” “barely there,” “horrible,” “terrible,” and even, “crap,” as we worked our way toward some measure of publishing success. We worked hard on everything we wrote, tossed a lot of it in the trash bin, ripped up hundreds of drafts, edited, edited, and edited some more—and then still thought we were a long way from becoming successful writers.
Even today I would never describe my work—or myself—as “worthy.” That is a puffed up word that means nothing in literary circles or in the editorial world; its only purpose as a word in your context is to elicit sympathy, and it fools you into thinking something about yourself is true when, in fact, it is not. Again, I am not insulting you; I am offering a hard lesson, learned over years of hard experience.
There is not enough room here to list all the great writers who received dozens, if not hundreds (I’m think of John Steinbeck) rejection letters and poor reviews of their early manuscripts. How did they overcome what you are facing? They kept writing, editing, writing some more, editing some more.
Some hired or at least turned to trusted editors; some went back to school to learn more about the craft; some went through incredibly difficult personal and financial times on their way to their first book or article acceptance. I had mentors who helped guide me along my writing path; they were editors, other writers, publishers, and well-read friends and teachers who believed in telling me the hard truth about my work without pushing me off my path—in fact, by being tough on me, they forced me to keep to my chosen road. If you want to use the word “worthy,” then those men and women who guided me and encouraged me and stuck with me are worthy of my everlasting praise.
You describe yourself as a budding author. Fine. If you are to fully blossom from the budding stage, then reach out to experts, teachers, mentors, editors, honest critics who can help you past this difficult time. Accept the fact that no matter how much help you get, though, you will still receive rejection notices; they are, to strain your metaphor, part of the fertilizer that all budding authors need.
Why should one take courses that require you to be present in a class, while he/she can learn the materials by reading books?
It is one thing to “read” a book to gain knowledge about a given topic. It is another thing to participate in a class discussion, or listen to an expert (a professor), to understand the context of the book’s contents.
Reading is all well and good, and it serves to support rote learning—seeing something over and over until it sinks in—but many books underpinning a classic and formal education are meant to be analyzed with the help of a teacher familiar with the book’s background, author, and place in history or technical field.
If I were your English Literature professor, I could assign you, say, “The Grapes of Wrath” (to choose a favorite), and let you just read it at home and quiz you on it when you were done. Or, I could assign “The Grapes of Wrath” and, over the course of a couple of lectures, discuss and debate the society and politics of the early 20th century during the Dust Bowl, and wrap in all sorts of connective socio-political conditions that inspired John Steinbeck to write the book in the first place.
Now, you tell me: do you really believe you could glean more salient information about the foundation for “The Grapes of Wrath” (no Googling allowed, by the way) by reading it alone at home or in the dorm, than you could if you had the benefit of a robust discussion in class? Not a chance.
Let’s look at a slightly more modern and incredibly popular book, “To Kill A Mockingbird.” You could read it at home and probably really enjoy it as freestanding book—the language is beautiful, the scene is carefully set, the characters quite real, the society of the time portrayed perfectly. And you would enjoy it.
But, if you were in my class, with “Mockingbird” as the centerpiece of a lecture open to discussion and debate, you would learn more about the conditions in the South at the time, about the meanings behind Atticus’s decisions, about the unfairness and inevitability of the outcome. You might better understand the thoughts that run through a child’s head and how adult examples can shape his or her worldviews for years.
I could go on and on here, but my point is, when it comes to education—not just reading for fun—having a professor or teacher who can help you drill down into the deeper meanings of a book—any book, be it science, history, literature, business—can make all the difference in what you take away from that experience. Education—the kind I think you are referring to—is rarely a solo journey; you can learn a lot alone, but you learn so much more, and put yourself in the experience, when you are in class.
How do you write a sound within a sentence? Do I capitalize like "Crack!" or leave it lowercase? Do all sounds require punctuation after, regardless of place in the sentence?
Let’s begin with one of the most famous uses of non-capitalized sound in all of writing, this first stanza of Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Bells”:
“Hear the sledges with the bells—
Silver bells!
What a world of merriment their melody foretells!
How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,
In the icy air of night!
While the stars that oversprinkle
All the heavens, seem to twinkle
With a crystalline delight;
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells
From the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells—
From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.”
It’s pretty hard to beat the onomatopoeic “tintinnabulation” as a written sound. But then, you asked about a sound like “crack” or “Crack,” not something quite so mellifluous as the jingling and tinkling of bells. For the most part, context will inform the use of upper or lower case and additional punctuation. It’s a common sense thing, really.
You can put a sound anywhere in a sentence and treat it as you would either a noun, verb, or a quote (the crack of thunder was heard deep in the bunker; the thunder cracked across the valley; The thunder filled the room with a mighty “Crack!”). You can see by the last example that when you choose to use the sound as a primary quote (after all, a quote is a noise) you capitalize it. If the word “crack” was used as part of a quote, it would normally be lower-cased (“I tell you, I heard that thunder crack right on top of the house…I mean, it was a loud crack! that shook the painting right off the wall!” The exclamation mark after the second crack is just a device to show how excited the speaker was about the thunder’s sound. The writer could have capitalized it, too, but that might have been a little too much drama in the sentence.
Here are a few more off the top of my head examples:
“I was looking out the window, through the driving rain, when the sky lit up in electric blue-white, accompanied a nano-second later by a tremendous “Crack!” followed in a few jazzed heartbeats by echoing thuds, rumbles, and reverberating, distant, booms.”
Or: “I’d barely had time to take in the brilliant blue-white blaze of the lightning when the crack of thunder jarred the house and shook the painting from the wall.”
There are dramatic uses of punctuation and capitalization, and there are times when just the name of the sound is sufficient:
“He pulled the howitzer’s lanyard, and, with a deafening wham, the round was sent on its way to the distant target.”
Which could also be written, “He pulled the howitzer’s lanyard. With a deafening “Wham!” the round was sent on its way to the distant target.”
Or, it could be written like this: “The deafening wham of the round leaving the barrel of the howitzer got the soldier’s full attention.”
Maybe even thus: “The soldier pulled the lanyard. Wham. The round left the howitzer and arced to the target two miles away. At the same time, the other four cannon sounded off: Wham, wham, wham, wham.”
Now, there are totally made-up sounds like hmmmmmmm, and bzzzzzzzz and glump that you can use any way you want. For instance:
“He walked into the galactic bar and heard the monotonous hmmmmmmmmmm of the Quintellian trio. ‘Now there’s a catchy tune’, he thought.” The cute (if three eyes and a tail define cute) hostess led him to a corner table, and he selected a drink from the duplo-menu. With a soft bzzzzzzz, a nice dry Martini slid out from the wall. He’d not gotten the glass to his lips when Decladeathman dropped down next to him with a heavy glump.”
Or, if more Earthbound stories with sounds are to your liking, you can try something like this:
“The two ’56 Chevys, lined up for the last race of the day, were being totally tached up by their teen drivers. The yellow handkerchief dropped. As the RPMs jumped past their redlines, the cars leapt off the line, tires screaming, tailpipes crackling, the crowd roaring! At the halfway mark, the townie’s Chevy passed the onlookers in a blur, a Dopplered whine of crimson and white. But the farmer’s blue Bel-Air was right there with him, and with a tremendous dynamite-jolted “wham” of acceleration, the country boy took the lead at the three-quarter mark.
Up ahead, waiting at the finish line, a county sheriff’s black and white cruiser waited, the clicks and hiss of the lawman’s radio the only sound until the Chevy drivers hit their brakes, and then the squeal of tires, the grinding of downshifting gears and the agonizing hemorrhaging of popping pistons, tearing rings, and clattering valve lifters filled the night air.”
As the two cars slid to a halt just feet from the deputy, the spitting and clicking of overheated engines died away. The deputy made a gun with his fingers and pointed at the boys. “Bang,” he mouthed. The handcuffs made a very satisfying snick-snick as they closed over the wrists of the racers.”
Is this sentence correct, ‘you are finished with the test’?
It could be, if in this context:
I put my pencil down and closed the composition book. There was still time on the clock, but I’d done all I could and saw no point in dragging it out with needless writing. The proctor, who had been watching me, came over to my desk. He stared at the closed comp book, and then, in a whisper, spoke to me. “You are finished with the test?”
“Yes,” I replied. “May I go now?” I handed him the composition book and walked out of the classroom.
What is the greatest monologue from any book or movie?
My favorite monologue is drawn from the dialogue between Tom Joad and his mother (Ma) in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath:
Tom: I been thinking about us, too, about our people living like pigs and good rich land layin’ fallow. Or maybe one guy with a million acres and a hundred thousand farmers starvin’. And I been wonderin’ if all our folks got together and yelled…
Ma: Oh, Tommy, they’d drag you out and cut you down just like they done to Casey.
Tom: They’d drag me anyways. Sooner or later they’d get me for one thing if not for another. Until then…
Ma: Tommy, you’re not aimin’ to kill nobody.
Tom: No, Ma, not that. That ain’t it. It’s just, well as long as I’m an outlaw anyways… maybe I can do somethin’… maybe I can just find out somethin’, just scrounge around and maybe find out what it is that’s wrong and see if they ain’t somethin’ that can be done about it. I ain’t thought it out all clear, Ma. I can’t. I don’t know enough.
Ma: How am I gonna know about ya, Tommy? Why they could kill ya and I’d never know. They could hurt ya. How am I gonna know?
Tom: Well, maybe it’s like Casy says. A fellow ain’t got a soul of his own, just little piece of a big soul, the one big soul that belongs to everybody, then…
Ma: Then what, Tom?
Tom: Then it don’t matter. I’ll be all around in the dark – I’ll be everywhere. Wherever you can look – wherever there’s a fight, so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever there’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there. I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad. I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry and they know supper’s ready, and when the people are eatin’ the stuff they raise and livin’ in the houses they build – I’ll be there, too.
Ma: I don’t understand it, Tom.
Tom: Me, neither, Ma, but – just somethin’ I been thinkin’ about.
How can I grow my writing career?
I’m sorry to have to tell you this, and it’s not with humor I reply, but in order to grow your writing career, you must write…every day. That’s it. Writing, if done right, is hard work, requiring what some of us refer to as “butt glue,” which is really just commitment in a funny phrase.
There are many days—the bright, sunny ones, filled with outdoor laughter that filters into my writing room—that call to me to get up from my chair and go have fun. Were I not a serious writer—or, at least were I not serious about my writing—I would get up conscience-free and answer the beckoning calls of friends and pets and cameras and consume, gladly, the whole of nature dancing past my house.
But that is not how the hard work of writing for a living, or writing to build a writing career proceeds. There is a very straightforward formula for becoming a writer whose career is writing (as opposed to the vast bulk of writers who strive either lamely, modestly, or mightily to break the bonds of other careers to become a writer whose career is writing). That formula, simply stated, is: writing x words daily = the possibility of life as a writer. The greater the x, the greater the possibility. My x = 5,000 words. And that’s a minimum.
If you want to hedge your bet, and add to the potential of becoming a writer with a writing career, you should (not must, but if I had my way the word would be “must”) read as many different genres and eras and authors as you can. Read, read, read. You will learn so much from the great works of the past 2,000 years, and you will, at the same time, expand your world view, and, thereby, your willingness to consider so many possible plots, characters, scenes, loves, victories, heartbreaks, defeats, and the movements of humanity across the face of the Earth. That’s what reading does.
If you apply butt glue, and then couple the writing formula with a hefty dose of reading, you may stand a good chance of growing your writing career. Good luck.
How do I avoid using “I” a lot at the start of my sentences when writing a novel?
Write in the third person. Use “I” and “he/she said” for direct quotes. Or, you can just be more imaginative in your first-person approach, and begin sentences with constructions like:
On the fifteenth of February, I met a man in the subway station. He was a pushy sort, wanting to know all about me right from the get-go. Not being inclined to encourage him, I decided to be blunt. “Sir,” I said, “you are bothering me, and if you don’t leave right now, I will call the police.” He gave me a look, and I stood my ground. “You can leave now, sir, or I will make good on my word to have you arrested.” He ambled off into the depths of the station, and I breathed a sigh of relief.
How do I avoid starting over 15 times when starting a novel?
Start over again; that way you will have started over 16 times.
What ways has journalism been challenged by culture?
There probably is a very long answer to this—I’d even think about crafting one after a lot of research—but there is also a relatively short reply that seems intuitive to me:
America’s cultural landscape, or fabric, is in constant flux, with new arrivals bringing new languages, habits, norms, mores, expectations, educational outcomes, and sense-of-community all serving as key elements for any journalist to consider when reporting on, or offering opinions about, the state of the nation at any moment in time.
Although the U.S. has been a melting pot of cultures throughout its history, newspapers and other journals were, until the post-Depression, pre-World War II era, generally written for a specific audience, and that audience was predominantly white, male, generally Christian or Jewish, more-or-less educated (at least literate), urban or urban-connected, and usually income-comfortable or at least income-earning. Some very fine reporters of the late 19th and early 20 century did cover a broader front than that, and several were responsible for exposing the financial excesses and illegal corporate dealings of the king-makers and robber barons. But that kind of coverage was not so much cultural in the large social/immigrant sense as it was cultural in the economic divide and inequality sense. Government scandals (think Teapot Dome) were also fodder for many journalists, not just in yellow journalism, but in the mainstream media of the time.
It was sufficient for the major daily papers and the wide array of local dailies and small-town and rural weeklies to publish stories about and for that audience. Reporters worked on stories that directly affected that demographic—offering coverage of sports, finance, government, world news, farm and industrial markets, and entertainment. Ethnic populations—Irish, Italian, German, Polish, etc.—were reported on as well, but not as robustly as the newsstand and subscriber base of white, Anglo-Saxon readership. Regional reporting—more specifically papers representing the Southern tier of states and states associated with Jim Crow attitudes—presented white-leaning stories while rarely, except in cases of crimes committed by blacks against whites, reporting on black Americans. That approach would undergo major shift during the black migration from the south into the North, Midwest, and West throughout the first half of the 20th century, and well into the 60s.
In my time as a journalist—beginning in the late 1960s—the influx of newcomers from central Europe, Mexico, and Southeast Asia caused communities across the nation to revamp their once-granitic social, economic, educational, and law enforcement models. Journalists who had covered Europe and the Pacific Rim during World War II, now saw those same nations’ populations taking up residence in large- and small-town America. Younger journalists, like I was at the time, had to adjust to covering town halls and school boards that now represented dozens of ethnic tributaries, each with their own languages and perceptions about the media. We had to understand the cultural sensitivities of these new populations—often non-English speaking parents and/or grandparents, with first-generation children attending local schools.
Here in Northern Virginia, the influx of Vietnamese and Korean families, along with a slowly rising population of Central American and Middle East families, presented reporters and news organizations with the challenges of fairly reporting the activities and cultural adjustments of these new arrivals. By the 1980s, when my children were in pre-school and elementary school, more than 100 languages and/or their derivatives, were in place in schools and communities across Northern Virginia. In just a few short decades, the old paradigm had shifted from covering a world of white and black English-speaking citizens, to reporting on news flowing from and about dozens of cultural enclaves and demographic resets.
In addition, the global nature of news, enhanced by the Internet, focused by wars, and demanded by competition, forced news organizations to expand their reporting resources to the far corners of the world, where cultural and political norms rarely mirrored any of the American models.
News organizations that hire and feature a culturally-representative cross-section of reporters, editors, columnists, and on-air personalities are more sensitive to the information needs of those cultures, and their biggest challenge is to maintain a deep pool of culturally-astute resources necessary to enrich the news gathering and dissemination model of the 21st century.
Time Magazine has named “the guardians,” journalists - many of whom have lost their lives - as the Person of the Year. What do you think about that?
As a journalist who has many friends in the business who have lost colleagues in war and in oppressive countries where journalists are targets of hate and harm, I think Time’s decision is one of the best “Person of the Year” calls in a long time.
The Washington Post’s motto, printed right on the front page banner, is “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” Without a free, unrestricted media, comprising men and women who are dedicated to reporting facts—no matter how inconvenient for some subjects—no society will ever be properly informed about the workings of government, the operations of industry, the financial systems of economic centers, etc.
Whether you believe media leans left or leans right, whether you believe reporters are unfair to your side or to the other side, whether you hold fast to your own biases and set of “truths,” one thing is certain: without a healthy, inquisitive, analytical, and unafraid community of professional journalists, you would be walking through life ignorant of the world around you, with no means of understanding the who, what, why, where, when, and how of dark-motive people who would be happy to shape your ignorant life in their own image.
Most important—and related directly to Time’s selection of The Guardians—without a press willing to report on the terrors of war, the horrors of genocide, and the deceitfulness and dangers of rogue leaders, despots, and tyrants, the world would, in my opinion, descend quickly into a Second Dark Ages from which there would be little hope of a follow-on Renaissance.
How did you become a published freelance writer? What suggestions and/or advice do you have for someone who wants to be successful in this field?
First, let’s define “published.” When I was starting out fifty years ago, published really meant appearing with a by-line in a print medium—newspaper, magazine, journal, etc. Over time, published included electronic media versions of print media. With the full-blown onset of social media, “published” took on a whole new meaning. Now, almost anything of substance that makes it onto a social media platform—opinions, articles, travel logs, quasi-journalistic coverage of local, national, or world events—can be considered published.
Second, it’s important not to conflate the more traditional concept of published—hard news, articles, opinion pieces, op-ed, etc.—that still constitute working journalism from freelance writers, with part-time blogging, occasional travel stories, long opinion posts that technically meet the definition of published. The Internet is awash in millions of pseudo or wannabe journalists who spend inordinate amount of time pushing out opinions and rephrasing viral stories to suit their followers. That is not journalism, even though it may be, quite loosely, publishing.
If you are looking to be a freelance writer in the former category, that is, if you want to sell your writing as a dedicated journalist covering news, producing long-form articles on important topics, working up well-researched opinion pieces, etc., then you probably should first set yourself apart from the vast social media key-pounders, and create a blog and/or website that is professional-looking and filled with quality work.
Third, while you are working at setting up a suitable site for your work, you must read, read, read as much of the mainstream news, features, profiles, and opinions as you can get your hands (or eyes) on. Monitor local, state, national, and world events; explore the feature possibilities in your hometown; seek out interesting people who will agree to be interviewed and write stories about them—aging veterans, working moms, the local priest, the food-truck operator, a favorite teacher, a first responder…it’s a long list of possible subjects.
Although you’ve probably heard it many times before, write what you know, and then begin writing what you learn that you didn’t know before. Also…and keep this posted on your front door, on the fridge, on your laptop: Know Your Market!. Before you even think of submitting your work to a publication, you should have read a year’s worth of issues to see if they have ever run something like your idea. And be sure that the publication you want to write for reflects your voice, your editorial bent, your way of looking at life. Again, Know Your Market.
Try a new life experience and write about it—bungee jump, learn to sail, try your hand at pottery or painting, walk a nature trail that challenges you, drive 200 miles from home and explore old country roads and falling down barns, eat at a restaurant featuring food you’ve never had before…if you can, attend a few sessions of your state legislature, or go to town-hall meetings, and traffic court, and similar public government events. Just do stuff and then write about it and put it on your blog and let people know it’s there using all the social media tools at your disposal. I suggest strongly that you keep your camera or iPhone/Droid close by and include images with your text, and learn to incorporate photos with your stories.
Over time (I didn’t say this would happen quickly, did I?), you will amass a reasonable portfolio of work that reflects your interests, your style, and your perspective on life. When you think you have collected a nice variety of pieces—maybe 20–30 hard-news kind of stories, a few dozen feature stories about people, places, and events, and written perhaps a dozen or so serious, well-thought out opinion pieces, you can begin reaching out to the legitimate publishers of work that most closely reflects your own writing.
Fourth, reach out to the professionals. I make it a habit to reach out to my favorite local and national news and feature writers with supportive emails and snail mail—nothing fancy, but a “well-done” note to a local reporter or editorial writer does mean a lot and establishes a link between you and that other person on the end of the journalism chain. Do the same with editors of newspapers, magazines, blogs, and other online publications. Don’t make a pest of yourself, but do try to connect. When you do have a story idea, you will at least have the fringes of a contact to work with.
Fifth (and maybe most important, because it is the hardest part), learn to edit yourself. Every good writer, and I mean every good writer, must submit him- or herself to the hard work of editing their words and allowing professional editors to cut their work to the essential bone. Nothing will spoil your effort to become a working freelancer than work samples loaded with errors. Your ideas may be fabulous, your adventures breathtaking, your opinions revolutionary, but if your writing content is discontented, if your typing is tattered with typos and ungrounded grammatically, you will wander in the wilderness of the unwanted and unread.
Be patient, work hard, and good luck.
