Finding the right internship is not as tricky as it seems.

By Amelia Anderson

Although internships are like taking on a part-time job while students are finishing their education, they are actually very beneficial to future goals. Internships will not only give you experience in the field you are interested in pursuing, but they usually act as some form of school credit, can potentially open a possible permanent position within that same company in the future, and some will actually offer a small payment or stipend. All in all, internships are great ways to get you on the right career path. Even if you find that you no longer hold interest in your field, then the internship has served the purpose of showing you whether you would feel compatible with that career or not. Whether you are in high school or college, here are some tips on finding the internship that will be beneficial for you.

Ask Your Teachers

Teachers are a great source of information when it comes to your school and whatever jobs might be available in it. Chances are, at least one of your teachers will know of an internship at the school, which will make it easy for you to get to your job and classes on time. And, since your teachers have gotten to know you pretty well over the course of months or years, they are inclined to have your best interests in mind with your future plans. If you are interested in becoming an editor, ask your writing teacher if he or she knows of any internships that are related to the editing field. In my own experience, I had a teacher who referred me to taking an internship in a Writing Center because I was interested in becoming a writer.

Browse Online

There are plenty of job-listings that actually list available internships, as well. Just punch in the word “internship” into your search engine and plenty of helpful sites will pop up. Websites like http://www.craigslist.org, www.internships.com, and http://college.monster.com are great resources for finding internships for a specific field. Be sure that you are dealing with a legitimate company for your internship, though. Some internships are offered that do not provide school credit or any compensation, which is not a productive use of your time. Get another individual’s opinion, like one of your professor’s, to see whether or not the internship you have found online will benefit your career goals.

Check the School’s Career Center

Schools are meant to help people earn a better career, so college campuses provide a career center for their students as an extra step in those future plans. Career centers will not only help you find an internship that is suitable for you, but they will also help you prepare a resume and possible even provide some coaching and tips for your interviews. Yes, even an internship requires an interview. Internships not only provide experience, but they help prepare students to deal with the pressures of a regular job, which also requires an interview and resume.

Ask Friend and Family

There is no shame in asking the people who are closest to you for help in finding an internship. These days, jobs can be hard to come by, and internships are not an exception to this. It is very common for people to network, using the people they are close with as resources for inside information on job and intern openings. If you know someone who is working in a field that is related to your own future goals, then ask that friend or family member about any internship openings. If that person can recommend you to his or her boss, then you are already ahead of the game by having a personal reference within the company.

Check the Newspaper’s Classifieds

It may seem old fashioned to some people, but leafing through a newspaper can be useful in finding an internship. It not only lists available jobs, but it lists available internships, too. Although most people prefer to search for their information online, sometimes when the cyber world of searching lets people down, it is helpful to use a different resource and open up the black and white pages of the classified section of the newspaper. If you ever feel stumped with your searches, try a different source. There is always more than one.

by Julia H. Jackson

Dave Barry is a Pulitzer-award winning humor writer with more than 25 years of professional writing under his belt.  He got his start writing humor columns for The Miami Herald, where he later became a nationally syndicated columnist. This is the man who brought us such classics as Dave Barry’s Guide to Marriage And/Or Sex and Dave Barry Hits Below the Beltway: A Vicious and Unprovoked Attack on our Most Cherished Political Institutions, newspaper column collections such as Boogers Are My Beat: More Lies and Some Actual Journalism! and Dave Barry is NOT Making This Up, and novels like Big Trouble and Dave Barry’s Complete Guide to Guys that later translated to the big screen. Most recently, Dave has partnered with Ridley Pearson to write the Disney Edition Starcatcher series for kids, with titles such as Peter and the Sword of Mercy and Science Fair. Dave agreed to share some Writing Careers tips with us, just as soon as he’d polished his annual “Year in Review” column, which readers can read at The Miami Herald on December 26.

Photo by Daniel Portnoy

JHJ: How did you get your start as a writer?

DB: I always liked to write humor. I wrote humor columns (at least I thought they were funny) for my high school and college newspapers. When I got out of college I went to work for a small newspaper, and when I could I wrote humor columns there. Eventually I got some larger newspapers to publish my work, and I just kept building on that until humor-writing was my only job.

DB: I don’t really think about the medium; I think about the audience, and what would likely entertain them. My main goal is not to be boring.

DB: It’s anything that’s intended to make people laugh and actually succeeds.

DB: More than anything, deep down inside, it’s a need to be liked, and a fear of failing at that. This is not a very noble motive, I admit, but I think it’s true of most of us in the humor business.

DB: If you want to be funny, be funny quickly — get the joke out there, end with a punchline, and don’t dwell on it. Move right on to the next joke. And give your audience credit for being at least as smart as you are.

“I see no intrinsic reason why a doubly talented artist might not arise and create a comic strip novel masterpiece.” – John Updike, 1969

A young Iranian girl is sent to boarding school in Switzerland in an effort to escape the Iranian revolution. One night, after her boyfriend breaks up with her and she is left alone in an isolated European metropolis, she gets on the subway and rides it in loops all night long. She is an outspoken artist, a teenager living in exile whose strongest bonds are to the God she is just beginning to doubt and her uncle Anoosh, who is a political prisoner.

Who is this girl? And how do we know her?

We see her in thick black and white lines, her story outlined in rectangular blocks, words penciled in panels like a photograph’s negative. She is Marjane Satrapi, cartoonist, writer, and author of Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, and its sequel, Persepolis 2: The Story of Return. Satrapi, who grew up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution and was educated in Iran, Switzerland, and France, transformed her story into an animated film in 2007. Satrapi’s story is family, exile, religion, art, politics, and personal growth, and it transcends both cartoons and memoir. Her work is best categorized as graphic novel, a genre that we will explore in today’s Write Like You Mean It: Graphic Storytelling.

Reflect for a moment on your second-grade writing class. Remember the worksheets that were half-lined, half-space for illustration? In a way, this is a form of graphic storytelling. Children’s books are often presented in this format, with colorful illustrations that relate back to the story. Newspaper comics use space and images in a specific way to tell stories by using panels to show differences in time, character perspective, or location. Where do graphic novels fit in the scheme of things? What is their purpose? And just how does one write a graphic novel?

The history of graphic novels is long and varied. In a literary world, even the very terms “graphic novel” is highly contested. Art Spiegelman, creator of Maus, two books that chronicle his father’s survival of the Holocaust, is considered as the patriarch of graphic novels for many, and yet he prefers the word “comics.” As he told The Economist, “’Graphic novel’ sounds more respectable, but I prefer ‘comics’ because it credits the medium. [‘Comics’] is a dumb word, but that’s what they are.”

Be that as it may, the fact is that Spiegelman’s work pushes the boundaries of a standard comics format. His depictions of Jews as mice and Nazis as cats in Maus set a tone that was hardly funny, nor was it restricted to a gut reaction. Rather, the juxtaposition of almost cartoonish characters against the serious backdrop of concentration camps, mortality, and emerging American identity give the book weight. His is a story that can’t be restricted by the definitions of “memoir,” “cartoon,” “comic,” or even “novel.”

In more recent years, the graphic novel has emerged as a permutation of popular entertainment. The Watchmen, by writer Alan Moore, illustrator Dave Gibbons, and colorist John Higgins, follows D.C. Comics superheroes in an alternate history where the United States win the Vietnam War, thanks to heroes who have been transformed into vigilantes. The novel mimics the D.C. Comics style with its vibrant, melodramatic colors and particular vocabulary, and yet by proposing a different kind of cold war, it serves as a darker political commentary than the original superhero comics.

Not all graphic novels are about war. Craig Thompson won critical acclaim for his 2003 autobiographical novel Blankets, which follows him as a young man who discovers love just as he is breaking free from his Evangelical Christian background. The novel is an impressive 600 pages long, and yet the meat of the story is expressed in the brief exchanges between characters, the shared looks that we as readers get to actually see. The snowy backdrop becomes a character of its own as Thompson chronicles the saga of two young lovers who meet at Bible camp.

How is it that these stories impact readers? Graphic novelists are like the triple-threat performers of Broadway musicals; they can draw, write, and package these stories as if they were onstage singing, dancing and acting. Of course, not all graphic novels are illustrated and written by the same people; the partnerships between writers and artists often create a special alchemy that adds personality to the story. Notable author-illustrator duos include writer Harvey Pekar, creator of American Splendor comics, and cartoonist R. Crumb, whose work has run the gamut with publications like Zap Comix and Arcade Comics Revue. And although Crumb’s illustration lend a certain cartoon style and surreal characterization to Pekar’s stories, the main idea behind American Splendor is to document the daily intricacies of a seemingly simple life.

So now the question is: How do writers and artists know which parts of the story need illustrations? If you think back to your second-grade creative writing prompts, your illustrations were most likely linked back to the text on a given page. But what happens when a character feels a whole range of emotions in one sentence? Or when another character is suddenly caught up in a quick series of actions, such as in a car accident? Is it more important to draw a person’s entire body, and give a full picture of what he or she looks like, than it is to zero in on a single, peculiar characteristic?  Here are some tips to writing a graphic novel of your own:

1) Storyboard. Animators and illustrators alike plot out the actions of their characters, scene by scene. Although it is important to put story first, you might have a better idea of how the events will unfold if you have a visual aid.

2) Develop a consistent style. One of the great things about graphic art is that you don’t have to subscribe to a specific aesthetic; that is to say, your characters don’t have to look like Art Spiegelman’s or R. Crumb’s. Stick characters can be just as compelling as fully-animated ones, as long as they have distinct personalities and are easily recognized.

3) Design your own setting. Create a rough sketch of your characters’ world, whether it is twenty-first century New York or twenty-third century Mars. Even if you don’t include this outline in your final story, it will give you a clearer idea of how your characters can move within their world. By knowing where they are and how they got there, you can then intuit their challenges and desires. In Persepolis, the protagonist’s life changes dramatically when she moves from country to country. Superheroes transcend Earth’s atmosphere in The Watchmen, and every time they do, the characters grow.

Graphic novels are a way to transport readers using both words and visual art. The journey of a young Iranian women might have appeared very differently if it were told as an epic poem or a young adult novel. In the end, the use of multiple media gave the story a power that transformed it beyond the page.

What’s your favorite graphic novel? Let us know!

By: Julia H. Jackson

Leanne Milway Chabalko is a copywriter in San Francisco whose career achievements and professional background echo the trajectory of the online journalism and advertising boom. Now an established copywriter at Oglivy West, she has developed campaigns for clients such as Yahoo!, Cisco, Wells Fargo, and the San Francisco Department of the Environment. She got her start at USA Today.com, where she first learned how to write for the web, a skill that can be applied to marketing, advertising, development, and business. Forget Mad Men – Leanne and her compatriots go beyond the print world to find creativity in advertising. She agreed to share some ideas with us here at Eduify for our next installment in Writing Careers: Real Tips from Real Writers.

How would you define what you do?

My professional title is “copywriter,” a term used by advertising agencies for a person who works with an art director to solve creative problems and come up with a “big idea” that will make an audience take notice. Copywriting often entails writing emails, banner ads, and print ads as a way to sell a company’s product or service. Many advertisements want to say the same thing: “This will make you feel better” or “This will save you money,” and so it’s our job to find new ways to make these ideas sound appealing.

How did you become a copywriter?

I was a journalism major in college—I loved reading and writing, and never considered a career that didn’t include those things. My first job was with USA Today.com, updating their website. When I first started web writing, it was not as obvious a career choice as it is now. My job was to repackage the news stories for the web—which means writing attractive enough headlines to get readers to click on the links and read the full stories. I worked at USA Today during the Clinton / Lewinsky scandal of the late 1990s, and quickly saw how online news is the place to be when big news stories are happening. There’s a lot of energy and effort placed into getting the news online as quickly as possible. When you write for the web, you also have to keep in mind the production aspects, such as formatting the story and pictures. In the end, web writing was a good fit for me because, the truth is, it’s a lot of fun. I love the web.

What was your transition from web writing to advertising?

I moved to San Francisco during the dot com boom, where I wrote content for a failed dotcom start-up before working at Microsoft. I also worked as a freelance writer, and developed skills in marketing. Because I could write, and had enough experience writing for the web, I was eventually placed at an ad agency, where I later got hired as a copywriter. I had to develop a lot of skills on the job, and was lucky to find a firm that helped me do that. I’ve been working in advertising for about six years.

“I believe in putting the horror in the mind of the audience and not necessarily on the screen.” – Alfred Hitchcock, in an interview with BBC reporter Huw Wheldon, May 5, 1965.

In 1954, notable director Alfred Hitchcock and screenwriter John Michael Hayes sat down to adapt the Cornell Woolrich short story “It Had to Be Murder” into Rear Window, what later became one of the most renowned films in American history. The original story featured only three characters: injured journalist L.B. “Jeff” Jeffries, his girlfriend Stella, and Lars Thorwald, Jeff’s neighbor, who he suspects has murdered his wife. Hitchcock and Hayes expanded Woolrich’s world to include a star-studded cast (featuring Jimmy Stewart and Grace Kelly), a complete Greenwich-style apartment complex, and a minimal score by Franz Waxman. Somehow, Hitchcock and his team created a  suspense-driven universe that played on themes of isolation, voyeurism, and romance. Just how did they do it? In today’s Write Like You Mean It, we’ll share some of Hitchcock’s own personal philosophies for creating a Window of your own.

First, one of the first trailers for Hitchcock’s “masterpiece thriller:”

Hitchcock was known for his signature cinematography—the montages, wide panning shots, close-ups on characters, and dramatic angles for effect. Rear Window works as the perfect example for Hitchcock’s use of character, perspective, and setting to create suspense.

CHARACTER

Jeff, the film’s main character, is defined by his inability to move. The audience learns a lot about Jeff in the first introductory shots of his apartment; he camera slinks along Jeff’s bookshelf, where there are photos of an auto accident, and then focuses on his broken leg. He zooms in on a broken camera, copies of Jeff’s magazine, and draws in very close to a picture of Stella. Already, viewers can sense an innate conflict, and the possibility of romance.

Because Jeff can’t walk, he avoids his feelings of inadequacy by instead focusing on other people’s lives. The entirety of Rear Window is shot from a spectator’s perspective, which gives the film its nosey, dangerous feel, as if Hitchcock is letting the audience in on a secret. Perhaps he is suggesting a reality that most people wouldn’t care to admit: that in times of trouble, it is always easier to focus on other people’s problems.

PERSPECTIVE

Hitchcock got his start in silent films, a medium that required a strong visual sensibility to create narrative. He understood that the people can demonstrate a lot about themselves in the way they observe and react to their surroundings. Rear Window epitomizes this first-person perspective because the viewers are simultaneously observing Jeff’s neighbors while they see Jeff’s reaction to his outside world. When his neighbors discover that their dog has been killed, the camera jumps from an image of the dog being raised to the couple’s balcony in a basket to a shot of Jeff’s face. Jeff doesn’t say anything; instead, Hitchcock focused on the juxtaposition of Jeff’s physical reaction to the dog’s death.

One of Hitchcock’s methods for establishing drama is when he breaks from Jeff’s perspective. Because the majority of the film is seen through his eyes, the few moments when the camera turns and focuses its lens on Jeff itself are often the most thrilling.  One could interpret this as sudden personal scrutiny: in watching a film, we too have become voyeurs, and when the camera turns,  we are forced to recognize ourselves. In one scene, Jeff has fallen asleep in front of his open window. The camera turns outside, where viewers can witness the drama going on across the courtyard. Hitchcock is revealing a part of the story to the viewers that his own protagonist can’t see. He referred to this as revealing “information.” In his 1964 interview with BBC reporter Huw Wheldon, he says:

“One’s challenged by the audience. They’re saying to me ‘show us’ and ‘I know what’s coming next’… and I say, ‘do you?’ And therefore, that’s the avoidance of the cliché automatically.”

SETTING

Rear Window is set in an apartment complex in Greenwich Village with buildings that face each other across a courtyard. The entire set was constructed in Paramount Studios, where the apartments were carefully designed so the lights and sound would reflect back to Jeff’s view. Hitchcock had decided against a huge Hollywood music score, and although Waxman’s score was important, he supplemented it with background sounds that were heard across the courtyard. Miss Torso’s dance routines and the pianist’s daily practicing become important dramatic elements.

The script had originally included a scene with Jeff and his boss in his office, but Hitchcock later scrapped it because the drama was so defined by the apartment complex setting. The story is cemented in place, much like Jeff, which furthers the film’s sense of isolation.

TIPS, A LA HITCHCOCK

Few writers or directors have influenced visual storytelling as much as Alfred Hitchcock. Are you a budding cinematographer? Aspiring screenwriter? Here are some tips to get you started:

1)    Onscreen, storytelling is visual. It is important to have strong dialogue, but remember to let your characters speak without words. Take a note from Jimmy Stewart and let the characters pause, react, and think before acting.

2)    Trust your audience. Invite them in to the life of the story, even (or especially) if the protagonist doesn’t know.

3)    Humor is key. Many writers maintain that there is an important relationship between humor and suspense—both trigger physical, emotional responses.

What is your favorite Hitchcock Film?

Matthew Clark Davison is, among other things, a fiction writer, lecturer at San Francisco State University, an Artist Mentor with the San Francisco Performing Arts Workshop, a private writing coach, and teacher of a non-academic writing workshop called The Douglass Street Lab. He also is the Faculty Advisor for the SFSU graduate literary magazine Fourteen Hills. His novel manuscript ROADMAP won the Clark/Gross Novel-in-Progress Contest and was granted a Stonewall Alumni Association Award for excellence. His current novel manuscript, Letters to the Dead, was awarded a Cultural Equities Grant from The City of San Francisco. His short stories have been published in The Atlantic Monthly’s Unbound, 580 Split, and Lodestar Quarterly. These days he teaches eight classes a week, and yet nearly every night he still makes time to write. He agreed to offer some tips for young writers for this second installment of our series on Writing Careers—Real Tips From Real Writers.

What’s your background?

MCD: I discovered writing as a powerful art form in the basement of Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco—in a workshop similar to the kind I teach now for Performing Arts Workshop. At the time, I was a gay teenage runaway; a high school dropout. It was San Francisco during the middle of the AIDS pandemic. The women teaching that workshop saw that I had stories to tell, and encouraged me to pursue my education. I earned both my B.A. and M.F.A. in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University, where I have been teaching for over ten years. I also have been teaching a private writing workshop called The Lab for the past three years. I am an Artist Mentor with the Performing Arts Workshop, where I teach creative writing and also give feedback to artists about how to improve their pedagogy. I’ve also been a cold-caller, a ESL teacher in Italy, a waiter, and a book-keeper (even though I am severely dyslexic when it comes to numbers.)

You define yourself as a fiction writer, educator and mentor. Who or what inspires you?

MCD: I’m really fascinated by questions that can’t be answered—the unanswerable questions. I’m inspired by everything—by every book I read, by the visual arts, dance, music, nature, exercise, observing people. I’m really interested in fiction that explores self-destruction. I’m endlessly intrigued by the contradictions inherent in the human experience. How passion defies logic. How people destroy themselves when they’ve been given information how not to—and how people sustain themselves when their circumstances seem to have set them up for the opposite. I’m also an amateur photographer. In between big projects, when I have to force myself to write at night, like now, I use the Macbook tool Text Edit, and challenge myself to write until I fill that little four in by four inch space with words. It’s not unlike taking a quick snapshot.

What has the novel process been like for you?

MCD: My recently-completed novel, Letters to the Dead, started as a short story. I called this story my “No, But—” story, because every time I submitted it, the editors would say, “No, we won’t accept this, but do you have anything else?” and then they’d publish the second story I sent. Sometimes the themes need more space to spread out.  Short stories are impossibly difficult to do well. It’s like decorating a tiny space. Novels have more square footage. It took me five years to write my first novel, and three years to write my second novel. I loved the process of it—I started to really think as my character, Janis, as a friend, or an extension of myself. I wrote extensive journals from her point of view. Sometimes I’d be at a party and I’d sneak into a bathroom to write. One time, my cousin asked me my opinion on a restaurant, and I said, “Oh my god, Janis loves that place!”

You’ve taught classes such as the Craft of Fiction for many years. What has teaching taught you about writing?

MCD: Everything. I learned to speak Italian while teaching English; by listening to Italian people make mistakes in their English because they are translating word for word. Teaching is the same thing. In the Craft of Fiction, we do experiments, and with 35 students in the class, patterns emerge in their writing that I can see in my own work. Although it’s the same class every semester, I always assign new stories; I’m always looking for new work. With the Lab, we use art forms outside of creative writing, such as essays and video excerpts and music written by visual artists or architects or musicians or dance choreographers. In this session of The Lab, we used architecture concepts to talk about how plot is formed in fiction and memoir.

What tips can you offer for young writers?

MCD: I would remind them that revision is their friend, not their enemy. That the subject matter has to be interesting to you, and if it’s not, then you need to risk more. I can’t stay interested in any subject long enough to go through the revision process if there’s not some part of the subject that scares me. I’d also say imitate the writers you think are brave. That said, it’s better to be the best you than a bad imitation of someone you admire. Imitating is good as long as your goal is to find your own voice in the process, rather than appropriate someone else’s. Find what you love. Take care of yourself so you can sustain a writing practice. Practice all the time. Read your work out loud. Be open to feedback, but try not to become dependent on it. What you write is up to you.

Meet Larry Smith

Meet Larry Smith: writer-editor extraordinaire. His writing has appeared in publications such as The New York Times, Men’s Journal, Popular Science, Slate, and Salon. He was also the senior editor at ESPN The Magazine, executive editor at Yahoo! Internet Life, articles editor at Men’s Journal, founding editor of P.O.V., editor-in-chief of Egg, and an editor of Dave Eggers’ Might magazine. His online magazine, SMITH Mag, provides a host of resources for everyday writers, and also features the Six-Word Memoir project, which has produced enough memorable memoirs to publish a series of Six Word anthologies. He enthusiastically agreed to answer some questions for us for our third installment of Writing Careers: Real Tips from Real Writers.

JHJ: What would you define as “good” writing?

LS: Honest and authentic work in whatever form of writing it takes—full-length book, blog, tweet, haiku, six-word memoir, comic, whatever—that comes from a place of passion.

JHJ: What has been your favorite project? How did you achieve your objective?

LS: After years of working at traditional, editor-driven, top-down magazines, I started SMITH as a more user-driven, bottom-up kind of magazine, one where professionals and aspiring writers could all tell and share stories (with some curation by editors). I wanted the site to be focused on personal stories because the stories that resonated most deeply with me—ones I wrote myself, ones I loved reading—always seemed to have a personal through line.

So “personal storytelling” has always been the concept behind my overall favorite professional project, SMITH Mag. And while it has changed in terms of look and the reader/writer experience on it, the mission remains the same as it was when I ran around the publishing world in early 2003 trying to get funding or find a publishing partner: a user-driven, editor-curated online magazine.

We launched in January 2006 and since then we’ve been trying different projects, some of which have worked really well, some not as well (one of my own six-word memoirs is, “Threw spaghetti at wall; some stuck”). My two favorite projects are at the two extremes of what we do. A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge is a nonfiction webcomic that tells the very big story of Hurricane Katrina through the very specific prism of seven people who survived it. It was an intense, complicated editor-driven endeavor that involved a lot of shoe-leather reporting and coordination (and went from 17-part webcomic on SMITH to expanded book  from Pantheon). In A.D.’s case, we tell the story the way we always try to on SMITH: one person at a time.

The Six Word Memoir Project

Then there’s the Six-Word Memoir project, which is much more “bottom up” — anyone can submit a six-word memoir, and hundreds of thousands of people across the world have. Rachel Fershleiser (who co-edits the project and book series with me) and I read each and every six-word memoir, and work hard to curate ) them for the community (via daily editors’ favorites, sending out one six-worder a day on Twitter, and then putting some in books). But the thing is, if you submit a six-word memoir it’s automatically posted to the site. And—poof—you’re a published author. That’s a very powerful feeling for people.

What’s more, we get email after email from people who have been inspired to start, or restart writing, after just getting those six words down. We hear from teachers from kindergarten to grad school who have used the form in their classes; people running after-school programs, post-traumatic stress disorder facilities, battered women’s shelters, and preachers and rabbis alike have all told us how this simple form of storytelling has proved to be quite powerful for their own work. Above all, I love the Six-Word Memoir project because anyone can do it, from bestselling writers like Elizabeth Gilbert and Junot Diaz, celebrities such as Stephen Colbert and Sarah Silverman, and thousands of Joe the Plumbers and Jane the Teachers across the world. I launched SMITH Magazine as a place for passionate, populist, participatory, and addictive storytelling—you get all that with the Six-Word Memoir project.

JHJ: Who or what inspires you?

LS: Lately, I seem to be most inspired by the very young and the very old. By that I mean that when I see members of SMITH Teens (SMITH Mag’s site for 13-19 year olds) writing 500, 1000, 2000 six-word memoirs I am touched, tickled, occasionally shocked, and often blown away. The teens aren’t afraid to put themselves out there, they’re totally addicted to self-expression, they know the story of their lives can change every day. Then the very old, or perhaps a more correct term is “very experienced.” I’m thinking of storytellers who have done what they love doing, unfailingly, for years and years—people like the late Studs Terkel, Harvey Pekar, Alison Bechdel, Ira Glass, David Isay from StoryCorps, Sandy Close from the Pacific News Service. And in terms of old as in “age,” who isn’t inspired by an octagenarian blogger or new YouTube star? I love it!

JHJ: What tips can you offer young writers?

LS: My philosophy of writing is “write drunk, edit sober.” That doesn’t mean be Charles Bukowski. It means: just get the words down. Spill them out onto the page. Don’t hold back a thing and don’t be afraid of making a big old mess. Just write. Then go back to those words—the next hour or next day—and start to clean it up.

JHJ: What is one piece of advice you wish someone had given you?

LS: Don’t panic about having a set, defined, overly programmed career path. Jumping off the path you think you’re supposed to be on won’t slow you down, but in fact open you up to new experiences, new places, new people, and new ways of seeing. And that—so obvious to me now, but maybe it wasn’t when I was getting started—makes you a better writer.

By Julia Jackson

When I was a senior in high school, a real live writer came to my English class. She was a successful novelist, a middle-aged woman who later went on to win a series of literary awards. After she spoke about her latest novel, my teacher opened the class up to questions. I raised my hand and asked, “What advice do you have for young people who want to support themselves as writers?”

The author, who has since gone on to become a renowned writer and somewhat of a local hero in my hometown, smiled grimly and said: “Marry rich.” I put my hand down and before I could respond, someone else asked a question. Class resumed and it seemed that no one else was bristling as much as I was. How could this be true? This was the twenty-first century! Surely there were better ways of being a professional writer and a healthy individual in the world. The author both crashed my confidence and instilled a lifelong desire to prove her wrong, all in one fell swoop.

Just how do you become a professional writer? And how do writers combine their technical skills with careers that support themselves? Well, there are a lot of ways to do it. Welcome to Writing Careers: Real Tips from Real Writers. Over the next few weeks, we will be profiling professional writers who work in various media.

Our first featured writer is April Halprin Wayland a farmer turned author. Her newest book, New Year at the Pier—a Rosh Hashanah Story, received a starred review in Publisher’s Weekly. Her novel in poems, Girl Coming in For a Landing, won Pennsylvania State University’s Lee Bennett Hopkins award for Poetry and the Myra Cohn Livingston Award for Poetry. She has written three other books for children: To Rabbittown, The Night Horse, and It’s Not My Turn to Look for Grandma. She’s the co-founder of Authors and Illustrators for Children and of the Children’s Authors Network, has taught in over 400 schools in the United States and abroad, and has been an instructor at UCLA Extension’s Writer’s Program for over a decade. She took time out of her busy schedule to sit down with Eduify and answer some questions about her life as a writer.

What would you define as “good” writing?

AHW: Good writing is writing that tells the author’s deep truth—it’s the author-in-the-raw. I love Anne Lamott’s writing—it’s as if she is standing at the top of a mountain and rips off her shirt, shouting “Look, here are my scars!” As I read about hers, I reach up and touch my own.

It seems that the more embarrassed I am to share something (however disguised as it is in fiction or poetry), the more it strikes a nerve in my readers. My mentor, renowned children’s book author Myra Cohn Livingston, with whom I studied for twelve years, said “Tell me something new. Or tell me something familiar in a new way. Make it fresh.”  When poet Deborah Chandra wrote about a “storm / caught on a paper cone,” I could never look at cotton candy again.

What has been your favorite project? How did you achieve your objective?

AHW: My favorite is always the one I’m working on or the one I just sent off. I just sent off a novel in poems to my agent. My objective was to write something that touches young adults who are struggling with issues of fat, food, faith, friends or family. A pretty broad constituency! I hope I achieved my objective. How? By being honest, honest as I possible could be. Period.

Who or what inspires you?

AHW: I am inspired by great anything—by the layers of greens and grays on the trail I hiked last week, by great writing and funny writing and children’s authors and poets, and also by political cartoons because they are visual haiku; so condensed. I am inspired by the young adult novel When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead. I also just finished reading the adult novel The Help by Kathryn Stockett, a rich, satisfying read and her first novel.

Really wonderful mosaics, my mother’s command of classical piano music, original, playful landscaping, songwriters whose words move me, whimsical art, banjo players, business people who think completely outside the box and make me think “Wowee—what a great way to look at that!”

I heard former President Clinton speak recently; he showed me how to think about world problems from a completely different framework.

All of this inspires me.

What tips can you offer young writers?

AHW: 

1) Take a deep breath.

2) Dive down to a place where you’re most embarrassed to go.

3) Bring onto the page what you find there.

4) Turn things on their heads—find a new way of looking at them.

5) Hold nothing back. Be very, very generous to your audience, your teachers, and your  fellow writers.

Know that you’re not alone—we’re all scared. Who do I think I am? Why would anyone listen to what my insane brain is thinking? I’m a fraud and they’re going to pull all the covers off me. Believe me, we all think those same thoughts.

When I had writer’s block one year, someone said to me, “Aspire to be what you’re most afraid to be. I realized I was really afraid of writing something ordinary. So I put a sign on my door that read “Aspire to mediocrity.” And anyone can write mediocre stuff, right? It got me to write again. I do a lot of what I call circling-the-chair—working on everything but my current project—but eventually I settle down. BIC—Bottom-in-chair—is the only way I get work done.

What piece of advice do you wish someone had given you?

AHW: After my first book, To Rabbittown, was published, I discovered that children’s book authors make money by publishing…but also by doing school visits. I love doing school visits—teaching, traveling, and, let’s face it, getting treated like a movie star by teachers and students. So I did a LOT of traveling, speaking, teaching and PR stuff early on.

I wish someone had taken me by the shoulders and said, “Stay in your writing garden, plant more books, don’t jump into the speaking waters so quickly.”

Or, BIC for short.

There you have it—the best way to succeed is to keep your bottom in your chair! April has an excellent wealth of resources for young writers on her website at www.aprilwayland.com. While you’re there, check out her previous publications, as well as her links to literary and political organizations.

Credits:

Illustration: Upside Down: See the World in a New Way drawing by April Halprin Wayland

Photo Credit (top) for picture of April Halprin Wayland. Taken by: Webb Burns

Stay tuned for our next Real Live Writer!