Do You Write About That Often? No? Perfect
Why it’s good to go off beat
Editor’s Note
The idea for OFF BEAT might seem simple, but it’s been a dream of mine for some time: What if a writer could write about — and publish! — anything that moved them? The assumption is that this is what we writers always do, but the reality is often something different. Writers are often pigeonholed by editors and magazines, and sometimes even by themselves, to write about one specific topic — infrequently given the chance to deviate from that beat. When writers are characterized by a marginal identifier of some sort, the pigeonhole becomes a kind of glue trap.
This issue is quite personal for me, because for years I have been called on to write about just a few topics: Iran, Middle Eastern identity, Muslim America, refugee life, etc. Never mind that before I wrote about those things, I covered hip-hop, did celebrity interviews, had a bar column, and wrote investigative features — all of which had not a thing to do with Iran. Just a few weeks ago, another investigative feature I’d worked on for many, many years for a prominent magazine — about a treasure hunt in the Southwest — got killed for not being “timely” enough. I can’t help but think that if it had an Iran peg — especially as the United States is once more licking its chops for war with Iran — it…
