Magazine Writer

As an English Major it can sometimes seem depressing to wonder what the future will hold. Perhaps you have been called idealistic, or a Borders-employee-in-the-making. No fun. Not to fret, it appears that there are some options which don’t involve starvation, readily available for you. Yours for the taking! Have you ever thought about magazine writing? If you are looking for freelance jobs to cold call, according to another person’s blog, I’ll pass along the grapevine four very good starting point websites to visit: Mediabistro, MastHeads, Wooden Horse, and Ed2010.

If you are a Portlander like me, there are a lot of local organizations based in Portland which might be good first choices as well. It is known that living in proximity of the center of a field is most likely to get you the job than being best qualified. Get into the heart of the action, and this isn’t hard for a Portlander because although our city is small, we do have plenty of local organizations available to send internship requests for. The more well known magazines based in Portland are: Wend, NW Palate Magazine, Bitch Magazine, Flossin Magazine, and Spot Magazine.

Lots of Pennies for Your Thoughts

If you’re anything like me, you enjoy passing judgment. You love the passion you hear in your own voice as you critique a novel or film. You get a high from labeling things as “cliché” or “self-indulgent.” You’re not a bad person, you just know that you could make the wordy world infinitely better if someone would only listen. You know you could make everyone sound less dweeby if someone just gave you a chance. And maybe pay you for your insights?

Let’s assume that, along with dishing out blunt yet thoughtful critiques, you like to write. But maybe you don’t have any original ideas. Maybe you haven’t the attention span to stick with anything bigger than a haiku. Maybe you’re detail oriented—at your best when adding flourishes and accents to an existing text. If so, perhaps you’d like to be a developmental editor.

Comics: Write Your Own World

Comics are awesome. Hopefully that’s about the mindset you’ve got if you’re looking to be a comic book writer. If so, this is your time to shine. While mass hysteria may be rampant regarding plummeting sales within media such as newspapers and magazines, the comic industry, as well as their heftier brethren, the graphic novel, have surprised many with their vivid success over the past ten years.

Comics boast original stories, unique characters and savvy prose, as well as a wealth of stunning art styles and genres; in a world where the movie remake is becoming its own genre, originality goes a long way when entertaining the hungry masses. Comics have exploded out of their 2D paper world onto the scene in film and literary investigation, painting a colorful swath of movies such as: Spider-Man, X-Men, Ghost World, Sin City, A Scanner Darkly, Fantastic Four, V For Vendetta, Blade, Hellboy, Watchmen, Iron Man, Kick Ass, and Academy Award winner Road to Perdition. And there are even more upcoming features slotted for 2011.

The Short Story Writer: Outside the Ivory Tower

The first thing you need to do in starting a career as a short story writer is write. This is the advice given to you in every how to write book ever known to man: write and write every day.

A body of work is the most important thing for a short story writer because you must produce and produce often. Once you have short stories that you believe, or the peers of your writer’s workshop believe, or your creative writing teacher believes, that are good, you must sumbit them to magazines, anthologies, anywhere that publishes short stories in your genre.

Editing Careers in the Publishing Industry

A couple Google searches about the trade publishing industry reveal that this career track consistently calls for an undergraduate degree in English. Other degrees may apply, and certainly a publishing house has a need for such varied credentials as legal, art and economics degrees. My particular interest lies in editing. Apparently editors play many roles at a publishing house, with various titles and responsibilities. Publishing houses employ editors to work with authors and develop texts, to check for grammatical, spelling and factual errors and for consistency, to commission manuscripts and review unsolicited submissions, and to manage the process of bringing a text to fruition, including planning and budget. Editorial departments have to work closely with the design, marketing, production and sales departments.

Publishing is an apprenticeship industry, where most of the experience that earns you a career comes from an entry-level assistant position rather than an advanced degree. Workplace experience trumps educational experience in this industry. Although a higher degree might not be a necessary asset when entering the publishing industry, unpaid experience like internships and time writing at a school newspaper is valuable. Personal and business connections made during internships and assistant positions provide resources that formal education can’t match. One common entry-level position for a college graduate is as editorial assistant.

Screenwriting

So, you want to be a screenwriter? Get in line. There are on average 35,000-50,000 screenplays registered with the Writers Guild of America each year and of those, roughly 600 of those screenplays become a Hollywood movie. Want to take an independent approach? According to IMDB there were over 18,000 total movies made in 2009, the bulk of them being independent films. Furthermore, the Sundance Film Festival, the Mecca of independent film only screened 145 feature length movies in 2009. The point is screenwriting isn’t a viable career. Go do something else.

Still with me? Good, you don’t give up easily. That’s the first trait a screenwriter will need: the will and desire to succeed in the midst of seemingly insurmountable odds. As a profession, screenwriting has far more downs than ups. Developing thick skin and a tenacious attitude is essential to being successful and achieving long term success. So, we ask, how do we break into the tight nit, hierarchal system of Hollywood? How do we get our screenplays made into films? There are two schools of thought: go to film school or take the independent approach.

Become a Literary Agent

If you are one of those English majors who while standing in line at the grocery store handle the paperbacks that pack the display rack, turning them over to see how much they cost while wondering if people really buy that stuff, you are well on your way to a career as a literary agent. Yes, people really buy that stuff, and literary agents are there in the thick of it, making it happen.

As most commercial publishers will not consider work that is not represented by an agent, agents are indispensable cogs in the ever churning mill of the book business. Publishers and their editors rely on agents to supply them with manuscripts which are primed and marketable, creating a steady stream of potential bestsellers. An experienced agent knows the market and can sell to those publishers, convincing them of the profit in packing the display racks with their clients' work.

But becoming a literary agent is no easy road. You must really want it and not fakingly kinda want it because you will need to work long and hard for years. And the first thing you will need to do is move to a city where most successful book publishers are located, which is New York City. After landing but before taking off your shoes, you will want to take your expensive four year degree and hunt down an entry level job with one of those publishers. English majors can usually find work as low level editors. This may seem like a waste of time, steering you away from your true calling, but there is purpose in this step as you will be learning the publishing business from the inside while establishing contacts.

Novel Writing

“Writing is easy. All you do is sit staring at the blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead.” —red smith

Even if it were as easily done as it is imagined by the many who “want to write a book someday,” the actual writing of a novel is just the beginning. A novelist is typically someone who has published several successful works of fiction, non-fiction, or memoir. Getting your novel onto the shelves is an increasingly long and difficult endeavor. You must be self-motivated, able to work alone, and willing to risk failure (success being defined here as profit).

If you are a first time author, begin with a finished, polished manuscript and a query letter describing your novel. Although it is possible to proceed independently, chances of getting published will greatly increase if you hire an agent—someone who knows the industry, has connections to editors, and can help make your manuscript more marketable.

Theatrical Alzheimer's or: When the Theater Almost Forgot to Appeal to the Under 60 Crowd- by Amber Beren

Theater is not dead, far from it. Theater is merely an ageing spinster on the track to rejuvenating herself. Go to any one of the three major cities of Chicago, Los Angeles, or New York City and it may even shock or awe you to find that the stage actually plays a fairly central role in the lives of the people in these aforementioned communities. It is simply that the theater and playwriting in particular are like any other industry in the US today: a compartmentalized, metamorphosed business.

The notion of striking it big with an award winning Broadway play is certainly about as realistic as obtaining a recording contract with a major music label—it happens, but you have to solidify the right connections, go to a lot of parties, oh yeah, and be a genius writer of course. That is not to say that there is no career to be had in the field of playwriting however. Burgeoning theater troupes and playhouses are sprouting up across the entire US and gaining national attention.

Writing in Video Games

In 2008 the Entertainment Software Association stated that in 2008 the video game industry brought in $11.7 billion dollars.

I could probably best describe writing for a video game as a mix between writing for a film and writing a Choose Your Own Adventure type book. The film aspects you must consider because video games are typically a visual medium.

With the increased ability to fit more data on discs, voice actors are being hired to replace text. And with actors comes dialog that must sound believable. The Choose Your Own Adventure influence comes with the myriad of choices the user can make in a game. For example, a character could be standing in a room for various objects. What happens when they examen a book? What happens when they turn on the TV? The radio? Is someone speaking on the TV/radio? If so, more dialog is needed. Flowcharts are often used in design documents to help organize all the information that goes in to making a game. A good example of a game design document is the Grim Fandango Design Document. Grim Fandango is a PC adventure game released in 1998 by LucasArts. If you were to look at the document you can see that the cut scenes are written very similar to a novel while including rough sketches of storyboards. Also written out and explained are the puzzles and their solutions.

Is This Thing On?

If you have ever listened to the public radio program This American Life, you have likely realized the power of a good story. I have spent many a Sunday morning, kneeling on the floor of my living room in front of a pair of oversized secondhand stereo speakers, laughing out loud or with tears streaming silently down my cheeks, fully engrossed in the tales that were being told to me via radio broadcast.

A story that will hold the interest of and entertain those who are reading (or listening) must contain certain key elements such as a plot, characters, and a conflict. It is also helpful if there is some sort of universal theme or message within the piece. In addition to these aspects, the story must be well worded and explained in a clear and captivating manner. As important as the writing is to a good story, often the yarn takes on a much stronger emotional or comic quality when conveyed orally, especially when spun by a great storyteller.

One Word Two Words Three Words More--by N Otis Richerson

Just after high school but before college, I laid in bed with the sheets pulled up to the crook of my arms. I hunched over large books as poor bedside light washed over thin pages. I labored over Dostoevsky and Hesse. I bit my nails over Nabokov and Tolstoy. I took small morning coffee sips over Hemingway and Salinger. I took lunch with Kafka. I read the greats. I read only the greats. I said to myself, “ I’m getting smarter-greater by their words.” I wouldn’t own a television. I believed in the image.



Ten years later, with two drawers full of term papers and a small country’s debt, I ask myself, “What are the books that really changed your life?” I’m not irrecoverably changed because of Hemingway, Tolstoy, or Joyce. It was the book Hey, Dummy, that really effed my shit—if you’ll excuse the cliché—that rocked my reading world.