Freelance writer Louise Sloan has also worked an editor at several magazines and recently published a nonfiction book about single women choosing to become mothers. Here she talks about freelance writing and her new book called Knock Yourself Up.
Urban Muse: Your website has a wide variety of samples. Do you consider yourself a specialist or a generalist?
Louise: I’m definitely a generalist! But that’s a hard thing to market, both as a writer and as an editor, so I guess I don’t recommend it. I’ve probably lost out on a lot of jobs as a result of not being the go-to girl for X topic area. People really want to put you in a box, because it’s just easier to assign that way, I guess. In fact, I wrote one workplace issues piece for Glamour, and suddenly editors from other magazines were calling me with workplace issues assignments, which I thought was kind of hilarious, considering at that point I’d pretty much never worked in a conventional office and really didn’t know (or care!) much about corporate America. (My Glamour piece had been on lesbians coming out at work, and it was the gay-rights aspect of it that had interested me.)
On the other hand, while it may have cost me some career points, I have found it much more interesting NOT to specialize. I have gotten to work on so many different things, from silly fashion copy to serious health reporting. I have loved that, and my ability to do it was why I got jobs in custom publishing, which requires versatility. Also, as an editor, I have sometimes specifically avoided hiring a specialist--for example, to explain really complex HIV science issues to a mass-market readership--because I felt like a smart generalist would do a better job of figuring out how to explain it to the true layman, because she is one herself.
UM: The topic for Knock Yourself Up is pretty personal. Was there a line between what you were willing to share with your readers and what you kept personal or did you want to spill everything so that other potential single mothers would know what to expect?L: I pretty much spilled everything that seemed relevant and didn’t hurt anyone else. I felt like I was asking the women I interviewed to tell all, and so it would be morally bankrupt for me not to do the same (despite not being able to hide behind a pseudonym!). Also, just from a literary point of view, I felt like I had to be open and vulnerable and truthful otherwise it just wouldn’t be as good a piece of writing and so people wouldn’t want to read it. At the same time, I often wondered whether I was telling interesting personal stories or droning on about “then I woke up, then I poured my coffee, then I ate breakfast, then I brushed my teeth…” I was pretty nervous about it for a long time, but then some positive feedback from early readers made me feel a little better.
You’ve gotten some strong reactions from a lot of readers. How do you handle criticism?L: Oh, yeah! The reactions to my salon.com Q&A were surprisingly mean, and just today I saw a thread on a right-wing website that was even meaner! They actually posted a picture of me when I was pregnant (taken from my book website)--I think it was meant to illustrate that I’m so ugly that of COURSE I had to knock myself up. When I was writing the book, I was totally freaked out by the prospect of criticism. I woke up many mornings with a stomachache at 5 am, feeling uncomfortable about the vulnerability I was exposing in my writing, and afraid of the right-wing bashing I knew I was gonna get and (worse) fearful of snarky, bad reviews and personal attacks from mainstream media. It was pretty awful inside my mind those early mornings, actually. But I thought, you know, I set out to write this and if I focus on protecting myself, the book won’t be as good. So I just have to ignore my many fears and insecurities and just try to write this as well as I can.
Now, I’m actually able to mostly laugh at the criticism and let it roll off me. I think it’s partly because I got so much worrying done earlier, but it’s also because before it went to press I gave the manuscript to many people, both friends and strangers, and their feedback was quite positive and supportive. So that gave me confidence and also a sense that whatever the bashers say, I have friends and family behind me, and I know that the women who want this sort of imformation have enjoyed my book and found it to be helpful.
Actually, if a review came out saying it was a badly written book about the life of an alternately dull and unlikable woman--that would get to me. (Hasn’t happened… yet.) But the folks (who haven’t read the book, mind you) who say that I’m a selfish, ugly narcissist who can’t maintain a human relationship and who’s raising a future angry, sad criminal, and that I gave birth to him simply to piss off my conservative family because I’m a typical immature liberal? Whatever!
What’s your next project?
I’d really like to finish and publish the book I was writing when I stumbled into the Knock Yourself Up book deal. It’s a memoir about my 1996 brain injury from snowboarding, titled Losing My Mind. It’s a very different book--more of a literary memoir, or at least that’s what I hope it is--and one that I’m more invested in. And I’d also like to write a book about single fathers and what they can teach us about parenting and gender. But I start a full-time job at Ladies’ Home Journal in January. I’ll be the senior articles editor in charge of their “Inner Life” (psychology/self-improvement/spirituality) section. I also get to edit the inspiring pet stories! So I don’t think I’ll actually have any time to write books. That makes me sad, but it’s a great job and I’m excited about it!
UM: Any tips for emerging freelance writers?L: Well, I got both my first major magazine assignment (back in 1993) and the book deal last year because I made a personal connection to an editor and followed up on the opportunities that created for me. So I’d have to say, network, network, network! Get out there and meet people in the field, and then keep up with them. It doesn’t come naturally or easily to me, but the older I get the more I understand how essential it is. As an editor, I have hired people in part because they were the person who kept calling back when I told them, repeatedly, “Too busy now, call me in a couple weeks,” or who kept sending me little, “hey, just to let you know what I’m up to now” emails years after we’d worked together. They were good at their jobs, sure, but were they the absolute best candidate, or just the one who sprang most easily to my mind? I suspect it may be the latter! I may have been their employer, but they were my mentors. I totally took notes from them.
My first magazine article came out of meeting an editor at a barbecue in D.C. and asking her for an informational interview. She gave me the name of a colleague of hers at Glamour, and I called her and set up another informational interview. The Glamour editor then thought of me when she wanted to run a short, first-person piece on “coming out” at work. I told her that my workplace experience (I’d been the Gay Issues columnist and a copy editor for the San Francisco Bay Guardian, an alternative newsweekly) was so far from the corporate norm that I didn’t think it would make a good story for her readers, but I pitched the idea of doing a reported feature on the topic. It turned into an assignment that got lots of reader attention and won a National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association award!
My book deal came because I took a full-day intensive Mediabistro “publish your memoir” class with the phenomenal Sue Shapiro, an author and teacher who is very well-connected in the New York publishing world. She had invited a book editor to be a guest speaker in her class, and the first page of my brain-injury memoir happened to be read aloud in the 20 minutes he was there. He emailed me the next day wanting to see more, and I started an occasional correspondence with him. Months later I somewhat randomly sent him a funny essay about trying to get pregnant that the NY Times Lives column had rejected--really just hoping he’d enjoy it and maybe know some editor at a magazine or newspaper who might publish it--and, long story short, I got a book deal. My friend Jake got many assignments for the NY Times because he took a course taught by a Times editor. So that’s one very doable piece of networking advice--take classes that are taught by well-connected writers and editors!
That is great advice, Louise. Thanks for sharing, and good luck on all your new projects!