How to write about music (or anything else) on the internet
Get your foot in the door by being an industrious opportunist and a creative thinker
Contents
- Introduction
- Getting started: EMAIL
- Networking: a stupid buzzword, but it’s important
- Your resume and web presence
- Be an expert on your topic, know how to think
- Conclusion and resources
Introduction
My name is Derrick Rossignol, I am 25 years old, and I am a freelance writer, writing words for a few websites about various topics, primarily music, entertainment, and technology.
Right off the bat, I haven’t put myself in a position to be considered an authority that should be giving advice to young writers, considering that I am one who is very much still learning his trade and isn’t nearly as good at it as he’d like to be. That said, I’ve been largely self-taught in my work, and I think I have some useful insights (you can check out what I’ve done so far at my website). This won’t tell you how to be a Rembert Browne or Robert Christgau or Josie Geller, because I for sure don’t know how to do that myself, but read this and you might learn a thing or two about getting started in the online writing world if you feel a bit lost trying to find a way in.
College textbooks can’t be written fast enough to keep up with how drastically the Internet has changed the function of journalism and writing, and many professors, as esteemed and experienced as they might be, have not worked in the modern writing environment, so there are just some lessons they are not equipped to teach because they haven’t lived them.
They can totally run us through the basics of journalism and writing, but that still leaves it up to us young people to figure out for ourselves how that applies to the online workplace. If you don’t have a helping hand or two early on (which I thankfully did), it can be easy to get discouraged and feel lost.
I spend too much time thinking about this stuff, and I have a thing or two to say that I think could be helpful to young writers in a position similar to mine: Not wanting to get a job at a local newspaper (which your school’s journalism department is probably actively encouraging you to pursue), but try to find their way online. Newspapers are great for writers who are into that sort of thing, but for plenty of others, that kind of work doesn’t afford them the opportunity to cover topics about which they are passionate.
I hope anything in here helps somebody and answers some questions, but if it doesn’t and you want to talk, you can find my email at my website. Mmkay, let’s get going.
Getting started: EMAIL
That is some gorgeous stock photography, right? It has all the cheese, but it also illustrates my first point: To get started, you should be reaching out to so many people and sending so many emails that translucent envelope graphics start hovering over your keyboard.
Ultimately, nobody is going to give you a job unprompted, and there’s not really a centralized job listings board where you can see which websites are hiring (not that I know of, anyway). The only opportunities that will be available to you as a writer with little-to-no professional experience are the ones that you create yourself.
You need to be sending so many emails, to pretty much every editor whose email address you can find. Ideally, you want to introduce yourself, state your intent and/or have a concise pitch for a story you could write for them, briefly state your qualifications or previous experience, and say you look forward to hearing back. If you’re a bit shaky on how to write a pitch, this page and this page have good information.
- Quick aside about previous experience: If you don’t really have any and are still in school, I recommend writing for your college’s student newspaper. It’s a great way to learn how to produce content quickly and often (two essentials in online writing), and you’ll have some writing samples for your resume (more about your resume later). Otherwise, start a blog and put some effort into it. Regardless of what you do, have multiple written products towards which you can direct an editor.
I have stable, paid work now, but back when I didn’t (which wasn’t all that long ago), I was ideally sending emails to at least five different editors every day. Most of those emails didn’t result in jobs, but thanks to the few that did… well, I have jobs.
For example, I currently write multiple stories on a daily basis for Nerdist, and I’ve been doing so since late August 2015. I emailed a few of their editors in March 2015 and only heard back from one of them in August. That was five months later, but I was offered the opportunity to write a consistent stream of paid content, and writing for Nerdist is now one of my primary sources of income.
Even if it seems futile or like the opportunity is too far over your head, send an email anyway. Another example: I emailed an editor at The Guardian sometime in 2014, and in my email, I mentioned that I was from Maine. That editor happened to be interested in a feature story about Maine music, so I secured an opportunity that I thought was above my level and got a nice clip (writing sample) for my resume. I got my foot in the door, and I’ve since written a couple other stories for the publication.
If you email an editor, one of a few things will probably happen:
- They will ignore your email. If that’s the case, wait a week or so, and follow up. If you still don’t hear back, do that again. If they ignore three emails, you’re probably not what they’re looking for at the moment, or their staff is all set as is.
- They will respond to you and say they’re not looking for writers at the moment, or they don’t accept freelance submissions, or you’re not what they’re looking for, or some other form of rejection.
- What happened to me with Nerdist: You don’t hear back from them, but your name is in their records, so when they do have a need for fresh blood in their staff, your name is on their list of prospects.
And that’s it. Nothing too demoralizing. There aren’t many negative consequences to trying, so give it a go and see what happens.
Early on, a lot of your writing opportunities will likely be unpaid, but the important thing about unpaid writing is realizing that if you put in effort, it will eventually lead to paid writing. Like writing for your college newspaper, it gives you content for your resume, and it shows editors that other editors trust you and your work. The more publications you can get a byline at, the easier it will be to find other opportunities, because again, it shows that editors trust you.
To find a contact email address for publications, check their website or social media profiles. To find email addresses for specific editors (which is usually a more productive point of contact than a general website email), check their social media, or try the methods outlined here. Once you get an address, here are tips on writing a good email (aside from what I already outlined above).
Networking: a stupid buzzword, but it’s important
Stock photo lesson #2: Tap as many human icons as you can get your finger on.
When I first started trying to work online, I didn’t really know what I was doing. Over the first year that I tried freelance writing, I had only a few published stories, and most of them were unpaid. That wasn’t a red flag for me at the time because I was still busy with school and working plenty for my student newspaper, but I was going to be on my way out there soon and knew I needed to figure out how the online workplace functions.
I needed some guidance, so I thought about who I should reach out to and I got in touch with Zach Dionne. He is currently an editor at Fuse, and has also written for Rolling Stone, Grantland, GQ and pretty much every other publication college students have wet dreams about working for. He also happens to be from Maine and also happens to have worked for the same student newspaper that I did (not at the same time, but he was my editor’s editor before I got there).
I used that connection as a point of entry, and I sent him an email, picking his brain about how he got to where he is, and what I should do in order to do what he does. He was happy to help a fellow Maine writer, and he’s given me a bunch of high quality advice that I have genuinely taken to heart and incorporated into my mindset. We still keep in touch today. Most of the advice in this long-winded thing probably stems from something that Zach told me. He should be writing this, actually. He pretty much is.
Even if you don’t have a pseudo-connection with an established writer like I did, reach out to somebody who seems approachable anyway. When your friends ask you for advice, that makes you feel kind of important, right? Writers are the same way, except we love feeling important a lot more, so if you’re polite and ask somebody a quick question or two, they’ll probably be glad to give you some tips if they have a couple minutes to spare.
This piece of networking advice is one I haven’t followed yet (the cost of living in Maine is soooo low), but it’s probably a good idea to move to New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, or some area where the media is concentrated. Networking online is useful, but I would imagine that if you meet an editor in person, he or she will probably think of you before some faceless email in his inbox when he needs a writer to give him some words. Beyond that, you’ll probably meet other people who are trying to do the same thing as you, and having friends and contacts in your industry can help you hear about work opportunities and things like that earlier and more frequently.
While you’re at it, you may as well make a LinkedIn profile. I like to call LinkedIn “notworking” (bad play off “networking,” sorry), but you never know. Plenty of people in the biz are on there, and maybe you’ll find a fruitful connection on there. At the very least, it can be a good place to organize all of your achievements and skills into a de facto resume.
Speaking of…
Your resume and web presence
Note that this isn’t Mark Zuckerberg’s actual resume, because as if he needs a resume (or curriculum vitae, or CV). You need one, though, so make it a good.
Writers are supposed to be creative people, so have a creative resume. LinkedIn might be good to link to from your resume, but don’t use it as your primary resume. This applies to any career field: Make your resume stand out. If a lot of people are vying for the job you want, make your resume pop when compared to the monotonous, Times New Roman, size-12-font stack of papers (or folder of PDF files or however employers organize resumes).
Create your resume in a graphic design program like InDesign, not Microsoft Word. If you don’t know how to use InDesign (or a comparable piece of software)… learn. It’s an increasingly valuable skill that you can totally add to your resume. Have as many multimedia skills as possible, really.
If you don’t know what you want your resume to look like, look for inspiration. A Google Images search for “creative resume” is a good start. My resume (found here) is essentially an amalgamation of elements from two or three nice resumes that I found online, but I made them my own and now I have a resume that I think stands out. I’ve been complimented on it by multiple editors, so that’s something. Again: find a way to stand out.
When looking for jobs, having a nice website can be as or more important than having a good resume, because a functional and aesthetically pleasing website is basically a more interactive and in depth version of your resume. It’s also a lot easier to link to your website in an email than it is to attach a resume and hope the editor feels like opening a PDF file.
Here’s my website, where you can view and download my resume, as well as find direct links to writing samples and other kinds of work and projects I have done. A useful bonus of having a strong website is that it shows that your know your way around the interwebs.
My first personal website was created based on a tumblr theme because I didn’t feel like paying for one, but I eventually caved and now I pay a couple bucks a year for my Wix website, and it allows me to control the message I get across about myself and it’s easy enough to use. That isn’t an ad for Wix, by the way, so use whatever service you want; People seem to like Squarespace too.
Also, spring for your own custom domain name. You can get a .com address from GoDaddy for a few bucks a year, a low cost to pay to look more professional. What do you think looks better to an editor, yourname.wordpress.com, or yourname.com? Plus, if you meet an editor or whoever in person, you can easily tell them what your website is or have it look nicer on your business card or whatever.
Oh yeah, and get business cards, too. Vistaprint usually has them for pretty cheap. Establish a visual unity between your website, resume and business card for bonus branding points.
I think that’s everything I wanted to cover in terms of the logistics of getting started in writing online. Now for information on writing and working.
Know how to think, be an expert on your topic
One you figure out how to find work and be a presence online, it’s time to make sure the spheres and rings of light in your head are always glowing.
Vampire Weekend singer Ezra Koenig nailed it when he said (in an interview with Hipster Runoff’s Carles that you should totally read), “Content is the commodified form of thoughts/information.” As a writer, your goal is to commodify your thoughts, to convert your opinions, ideas and theories into a form that is digestible to a reader. That’s the hardest part of writing, I find.
The way I see it, writing is 20 percent knowing how to use words, and 80 percent knowing how to think. If you don’t know how to think — or rather, how to commodify your thoughts — then what the hell are you going to write?
It’s a two-step process: having thoughts, then turning them into a product. To have the thoughts, it’s helpful to be an expert on your topic. The good news is that if you’ve read this far into this piece, you probably really care about music or technology or food or whatever it is you want to cover, and caring is a great start to having thoughts.
To have thoughts that your readers can both relate to and take something away from, you need to have a greater context than your readers do. You should know more than your readers, so follow your topic as closely as you can. Like all of the good pages about your topic on Facebook, follow all of the relevant Twitter accounts, and use an RSS reader like Feedly to stay on top of what websites on your topic are talking about.
Do your best to hear about everything that happens within your topic. Not only can that lead to more (commodifiable) thoughts, but it can give a news peg to thoughts you already have. For example, if you’re a health writer and you’ve had a hot take on E.coli but haven’t had a good reason to write about it, then being one of the first people to hear about Chipotle’s run-in with the food-tainting bacteria can allow you to have a different perspective on the hot-button issue early on, to be one of the first writers to add an alternate angle to the conversation.
A previously-undiscussed or under-discussed perspective is your best friend. It’s what sets you apart and gives you your voice. If you’re already able to see things in ways that others aren’t, that’s fantastic and you’re lucky, because that’s not easy.
The subhed for this section promised to teach you how to think, but the truth is that I can’t do that, because we don’t think like each other. We are different, as people and as writers. What I can do is tell you a few things that I do to try to understand the methods of people who are better at writing than I am, or have a different perspective than I do.
When I find a piece of writing that I enjoy, I try to reverse-engineer it and figure out how they got from having no words to having a well-structured and well-written story, starting from the end product and working backwards.
I’m also big on looking outside of writing for inspirational thinkers: Like I said, thinking is a bigger part of writing than writing is, and not all great thinkers write. Be open to inspiration from all areas of life and you will become a better thinker, and therefore a better writer.
Conclusion and resources
I’ll wrap up with listing a few links I’ve collected over the past few years, because they were useful to me and they might be to you as well, or at least encourage you to seek off-kilter sources of inspiration.
- Four Tet In The Studio With Future Music — Four Tet is an experimental electronic musician, and this video is a 40-minute look at his composition process and how he works in the studio. He approaches music and sound in a way I’ve never seen anybody else do it, and that encourages me to consider thought and writing in novel ways as well.
- Marc Maron shares his interview skills with Shad : q Live at the Gould — This is an interview with Marc Maron (from the WTF podcast and the self-titled IFC show) in which he discusses his interview methods, which is fascinating to hear about because he approaches the interview not from a journalistic or writerly perspective, but from the point of view of a comedian interested in personal conversations. Comedians in general are worth considering, as their careers hinge on being able to see alternate perspectives of aspects of everyday life we usually overlook. This video of Louis C.K. honoring George Carlin is valuable as well.
- Siskel & Ebert on Film Criticism — Simple: two of the greatest critics of all time discussing basic but important aspects of reviewing an artistic work.
- Bill Simmons Is A Shitty Writer — I strongly do not think that Bill Simmons is a shitty writer. In fact, he’s a writer I look up to a lot (mainly because I admire how strong his written voice is, and how well it matches his human personality, as seen on TV and as heard on his podcast). But as I read this, I realized a lot of this article is definitely true, and that Simmons is not as flawless as I thought he was. What I learned: form opinions, but be open to adapting them as you learn new information or have new thoughts.
- Minecraft is for Everyone — Toon Grumps — This video is actually an April Fool’s joke from YouTube video game channel GameGrumps, but Arin and Ross do actually sit down for an hour and talk about wanting to become animators when they were younger. Both of them are successful in animation and other endeavors now, despite being told that it wasn’t a great idea or facing other obstacles. But they created their own careers on YouTube and live comfortably from that, so their insight on finding a way to make a living by doing what you do is worth a listen.
- Here Are the Shitty Interview Questions You Should Never Ask Bands — Self-explanatory, and important information if you’re not experienced with talking to musicians, since most of the questions here are go-to’s for a lot of interviewers. Important quote: “Can this question be asked of literally any band ever? If so, it is a bad question. Do not ask it.”
- Every Frame a Painting — This YouTube channel has a lot of strong insights about the nature, structure, production and execution of film that has helped me to think about movies and television in new ways, and therefore, I am able to write about those topics more confidently and thoughtfully. It could be the case that these videos are insightful to me because I don’t know that much about film, but they’re fun to watch either way, I’m sure.
I appreciate you reading this, I hope it’s been helpful in some way, I hope you’ve enjoyed the terrible clip art and stock photos, and here’s to getting that Internet writing money!
I also spoke about a lot of this stuff as a guest on a recent episode of the Missaligned podcast, so feel free to listen to that here.
