2014: The Year I Learned How to Be a Writer

At the beginning of 2014 I had published a grand total of four pieces for actual pay and two of those were high school writing contests. Three years out of my B.A. in Journalism I was calling myself a writer while making 99.9% of my income by waiting tables in New York City. (It’s not just for actors, you guys.)

Then the chain reaction started. After one editor decided to take a chance on me, I was suddenly doing it — actually getting paid to write. When I stumbled onto a YouTube video showing tractors square dancing, I realized it wasn’t just an anomaly of the Internet but an actual article.

I got better at pitching. I missed the boat and was told that articles had already been assigned. (Oh are those hard to see in your newsfeeds.)

I got better at finding stories. I wrote about a group of nursing homes in England that allow senior residents to keep chickens as companion animals.

And I discovered that just because you’re writing (semi-)serious journalism doesn’t mean you can’t use puns — lots of puns. My favorite line of 2014 was “One solution is the ‘manure share’. Think of it as the Craigslist of crap.” That quote was just one of many pun-pain-inducing things I got to write for this Modern Farmer article.

I talked to Eric Goldstein, essentially the head of NYC’s school food programs, and learned that feeding a million students a day is a seemingly impossible yet possible task.

I became a little bit fed up with the partisanship of the food movement and found myself wishing that more people were part of the discussion about what we eat and how we grow it.

The way we talk about food might not be perfect, but I still celebrated how far the conversation has come during my lifetime. I was excited to write about the 25th anniversary of Slow Food and a meeting between Carlo Petrini and Alice Waters at Roberta’s pizza in Brooklyn.

I got to interview Chris Soules — Iowan, farmer, and soon-to-be The Bachelor. In the process I learned that perseverance can actually get you past the gates of PR-people. And that being able to find hard-to-find email addresses is definitely in the Top 3 most important skills for any journalist.

I became obsessed with behavioral psychology and was tickled to find non-culinary ways to improve your cooking. Or at least make people think the food and drinks are better than they actually are.

Throughout it all, I reminded myself why writing is so much fun to do. Though freelancing is often stressful and always hard work, there’s payoff every time I can link to a new article and say, “I wrote that!”

I hope that the feeling only increases throughout 2015 because, boy, did I send out a lot of pitches this month.