On Sunday, I spoke on a panel about freelance writing at a journalism conference with my friends and fellow freelancers, Chris Kenneally and Hannah Wallace. Chris’s new book, The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language, is coming out later this week and during the panel, she mentioned that she is using a private blog (a blog she doesn’t publish) as an organizational tool for her next book. Now that I’ve discovered how easy and useful blogs can be for keeping track of writing thoughts, online links and other stuff you don’t want to lose, I loved this idea.
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I recently got a two-part question from a second year law student in Florida. Taking a page from Jeremy Blachman, one of may favorite bloggers, who likes to post his answers to such questions on his blog, I’m going to start to do the same whenever it makes sense. I’ve started to get a lot of questions from readers, and I’m guessing that if one person has a question, might have a similar one. Plus, it will share more of my back-story, something I want to do in this blog. And it should give readers an idea of how I feel about the questions I get.
The question was: What prompted you to leave the law after 10 years? I inquire because I am a 2L and would appreciate some candid insight into what I can expect from a career in law. Thank you in advance for your response.
Here’s what I wrote:
What you can expect from a career in the law is an awfully big question and the answer is completely different if you end up working for the A.C.L.U., a small law firm in Iowa, a big firm in L.A., or the federal trade commission in DC. That question is a bit like asking what you can expect from a career in business.
If you tell me a bit more about what you want to do in the law or the kinds of opportunities you’re choosing between, I might be able to shed more light.
As to why I left the law, that’s also not a short answer kind of question. But here are a few reasons.
1. I ended up doing very specialized work that I wasn’t passionate about and after some searching around didn’t feel like there was another practice area that jazzed me enough to try to figure out how to move in that direction.
2. At the same time, I was becoming increasingly drawn to writing. I was reading a lot, taking classes, and the urge to get published was really nagging at me.
When you combine #1 and #2 it was a bit like feeling like your marriage is starting to fracture and then noticing that rather conveniently you were starting to find yourself attracted to an available and willing partner.
When I first started writing, I had an inordinate number of mentors. One of them, Tamara Loomis, was about a year ahead of me on the law-to-journalist train and I thought I would never catch up. Tamara treated me as a peer from the start, made time for all my silly questions, and inspired me by the way she quickly became a professional, and then by the ways she continued to reinvent herself — first as a legal reporter for The New York Law Journal, then as a freelancer/new mom. But now I think she’s found her calling, as a snarky, smarty pants daily columnist/blogger for Cookie Magazine, the hippest of the parenting pubs. Even if you’re not a mom, you’ll agree that First Feeding is good stuff.
So, in honor of Mother’s Day, I give you Tamara!
BOOK PUBLICITY TELESMINAR with Stephanie Gunning (5/10)
Stephanie Gunning is offering a FREE teleseminar on the secrets of successful book promotion. She’ll be interviewing Brian Feinblum, of publicity firm Planned Television Arts, and they promise to spill the beans on:
* Pitches that impress radio & tv producers
* Elements of kick-ass electronic press kits
* The ooh-la-la factor in press releases
* The ins and outs (and merits) of local tours
* Easy approaches to in-print journalists
Date: Thursday, May 10
Time: 8 PM (ET), 5 PM (PT)
Cost: $0
How to register: Follow instructions at http://www.stephaniegunning.com/teleseminar
Any questions, contact Stephanie Gunning – abundantworlds@aol.com
EXTREME SUCCESS SEMINAR with Karen Salmansohn (5/21)
May 21st/Soho House.
According to Salmansohn, “You don’t need to work longer hours — just ballsier hours.” In this seminar, Salmansohn will give pointers on “how to become your balliest, most successful self” — from her empowering book, BALLSY: WAYS TO SCORE EXTREME SUCCESS.
How to register: Sign up at paypal at Salmansohn’s site — www.notsalmon.com
Location: Soho House @ 9th Avenue, between 13th/14th St.
Time: 7-8:30pm
Cost: $35 PER PERSON
Any questions contact Karen Salmansohn — info@notsalmon.com
New freelance writers always worry whether someone will steal their ideas.
Whenever the question of how to protect against idea theft comes up in a class or a workshop, I always say some variation of this:
So what if someone steals your idea. If you couldn’t execute it better than anyone else, someone else should write it. And if you are really the best person to write it, you’ll still be able to write it. That’s why I loved this description (from The New York Times, Tuesday, April 3) of surgeon/author Atul Gawande’s sharing a bunch of his ideas for future writings with a reporter:
Pulling out his Blackberry, he said, “It seems like there’s a story in every nook and cranny of medicine,” and scrolling down a list of 106 ideas he’d saved, he picked a few. “Itching,” he said. “Nobody really understands what it is. Chernobyl. Twenty years on, what really happened there? Why weren’t there as many cancer case as once predicted? And here’s a good one: why, if we have so many health-policy experts in this country, do we have such bad health policy?”
Btw, I tried to interview Gawande for my book. He politely declined, saying that his slashes were just keeping him too busy.
