Joann Lublin: “You Have to Have a Room of Your Own”

You have to have space where you can think — if there’s a door, more power to you

Wake Up and Write is an advice column from Moms Don’t Have Time to Write. Today, we have Joann Lublin — a reporter and editor at The Wall Street Journal from 1971 to 2018, as well as the author of two books, including Power Moms: How Executive Mothers Navigate Work and Life— who shared writing advice for aspiring authors and journalists on the podcast Moms Don’t Have Time to Read Books, hosted by Zibby Owens.

“I would have different advice for aspiring journalists than I would for aspiring book authors.”

“For aspiring book authors, it’s especially important, as Virginia Woolf once said, to have a room of your own. You have to have space where you can think. You have to have space where you can have quiet. You have to have space where you can work. For some people, it’s the closet. You just throw out all your clothes and put your little desk in there. It can be the laundry room. I’ve done Zooms with people having their laptops on top of the dryer. If there’s a door, more power to you.

You really have to be able to think big and think hard and think differently, especially if you’ve spent your entire career as a journalist. That, frankly, was the hardest transition. To put it as my first book’s editor put it: you have to think writerly and write writerly, which means you have to have longer than one-sentence paragraphs.

In terms of advice to somebody who wants to be a journalist, I think you ought to be looking at some of these nonprofit social media outlets like Publica that are doing really great social good as well as achieving some great journalistic breakthroughs. I’ve been predicting for thirty years that print journalism is the dodo.

So far, I’ve been proven wrong, but I think it’s a matter of when not if. The Wall Street Journal is a great example of this. There are many, many more subscribers now to the online journal than the print journal, but they can’t fold up the print journal tent because there’s still a very large core of loyal readers who only read the print journal.”