Dennis Cass Wants You To Be More Awesome

A reader writes:

I’ve started exploring a possible story on SUPER SECRET STORY IDEA and I’m successful getting email replies to my original query from some significant clinicians and players in research. So, the question I’m often asked is: “What magazine are you writing for?” Of course I wish I had an assignment from a magazine. Our buddy Dan Baum, even lacking the assignment, would say he’s writing (in his example) for “Wired” because in a sense he contends that he is–doing all this leg-work free for an article he’s going to pitch at “Wired”. But I can’t get away with this can I?–”I’m writing for Psychology Today.” When the question has come up in the past I’ve said that I’m writing on spec and hope no one asks where I’ve been published. “Well, a couple literary quarterlies.” So how do I handle ingratiating myself to key sources so that they don’t blow me off and have enough confidence in me to spill the beans?

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with being honest. Tell them that you’re a freelance writer and that your plan is to take the story to Psychology Today.

If the source asks where you’ve been published then mention the name of the journals. Or tell them that you’re just starting out.

Whatever you do don’t apologize. There’s no shame in being new.

If they won’t talk to you, then ask them if they know anyone who will. If they offer another source then pursue that lead.

If they say they don’t know anyone (or if the person they recommend doesn’t pan out) then press them again to help you. Appeal to their vanity. You know from your research that they’re the single most important source for this story, a story that will completely change how we think about INTERESTING SUBJECT MATTER.

Or try luring them into a conversation. Tell them you just want to verify one fact or confirm one theory (then shut up and watch while they talk for half an hour).

If they still won’t talk to you then move down the list and pick the next source.

Wait . . . you don’t have a list of sources categorized by information need and then ranked in order of importance?

If you don’t have such a list, then get one. Every story has its dream scene, its dream quote, its dream fact. With some pieces it’s obvious, like getting the tobacco executive to admit that they’ve known for decades that cigarettes are harmful. With other stories it might be more subtle: a tough guy in a moment of vulnerability or a public saint betraying a hint of avarice. In the right context a boring statistic can be undeniably powerful.

If you can identify these ideal outcomes then you’re more likely either to get them outright or to recognize variations of them that fall into your lap.

Final thought:

Knowing what you want also helps your credibility. In my experience I’ve always gotten more out of interview subjects when I’m a mission. I don’t know how they can tell, but sources know the difference between hunting and fishing.

Thanks to one of our readers for the heads-up on this story about Dan Baum, a writer who detailed his hiring and firing by The New Yorker on Twitter. I’ve always said that if you’re going to burn a bridge, burn it trendy!

Of more interest is Dan Baum’s website, where he generously offers .pdfs of proposals he’s written for various national magazines.

Here are the proposals that worked

Here are the proposals that failed

Two things I hope you take away from reading Baum’s proposals:

1. You write the piece in order to get permission to write the piece.

Notice how many facts Baum already has at his command in these proposals. So if you’re pitching a story about Twitter, you can’t just say, “Twitter is really hot right now so it would make a good story.” Better to put a number on the hotness (there are X million people on Twitter). Even better to make some calls and find the fact that won’t immediately show up in a Google search (people are joining Twitter at a rate of X people a minute). Better still to contextualize that more pointed fact (at a rate of X people a minute, Twitter achieved in three weeks the user base it took AOL three years to build).

2. The difference between a proposal that sells and one that doesn’t is that the proposal that sells sells and the one that doesn’t doesn’t.

If I mixed up all these proposals and asked you to pick the ones that turned into paid stories and the ones that didn’t, you probably wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. Even if you’re an excellent writer like Dan, you only control part of your destiny. There are countless other factors—editorial mandates, competitive works, the Coriolis effect—that determine the outcome. Do your best—and by all means learn and grown and all that—but most of all get yourself out there and pitch. Quality matters, but it’s also a bit of a number game. Act accordingly.

Later this month, the latest How Much Information? research project will reveal its findings. The last time HMI presented its data was in 2003, when Berkeley researchers determined that print, film, magnetic and optical storage media produced five (5) exabytes of new information in 2002.

If digitized with full formatting, the seventeen million books in the Library of Congress contain about 136 terabytes of information; five exabytes of information is equivalent in size to the information contained in 37,000 new libraries the size of the Library of Congress book collections.

This is how HMI attempted to contextualize the five (5) exabytes. You could argue that you would then need another context in order to understand the 17,000,000 books in the LoC, but you get the idea. Here’s a fire hose of data: take a sip.

Whenever I present this tidbit to people, the reaction falls into one of the following general categories:

1. Information overload isn’t new. The (loosely defined) information that life throws your way has, throughout history, been difficult to take in and understand.
2. There is no such thing as too much information. All of this data is a boon for curious, engaged people everywhere—go Internet!
3. My head hurts. Won’t you please make it stop.

Personally, I vacillate between #2 and #3, although I can see the point of #1. Nature, after all, is filled with signs, signals, and cues. I’m sure that there were Cro-Magnon who bummed on the number of animal sounds they needed to recognize.

But I would also argue that what we’re going through now is different because the 37,000 Libraries of Congress are on top of the general complexity of life. And even if you don’t engage with the new LoCs that are created every year, you know they are out there. All that info creates indirect pressure on you, especially if your job is requires mastery of knowledge, insight, making connections, etc.

In my talk I said it was important for every writer and artist to take a personal stance toward all this new information. My bet is when the next HMI comes out it will say that at least seven (7) exabytes of new information are created each year. Unless the upcoming solar storm season brings down the Web, we’re going to have to reckon with the LoCs.

So I’m going to try a little experiment this month. I’m going to ignore it all. I will still search for information, and use information, but I’m not going to worry it. Perhaps one of you fine readers out there will take it upon yourselves to do the opposite. Then we can compare notes, yes?

As a writer and journalist, I couldn’t be happier with all the research options at my digital fingertips. There are days when the Great Almighty Screen provides all the information I could possibly want, information that used to require that I get off my ass, leave the house and talk to people.

But for my latest project I’ve started to get physical. One of the books I’m working on is set in 1954, and I’ve started to collect artifacts (mostly magazines) from that time. There is something about the Gestalt of an old issue of Cosmopolitan that is even more illuminating than the article about a man who put his wife in a mental hospital because for some reason she didn’t like being a suburban housewife (this happened a lot more than you think).

I’m talking about how the paper feels, and the art direction of the advertisements, and the strange causes of outrage in the letters to the editor, and the sensation of holding something that someone else held a long time ago and picking up the echo of their heart and of their mind.

Take, for example, this Wired photo essay of classic instruction manuals. Even though the subject matter isn’t dear to my heart, I got a thrill at seeing the binder for the first civilian nuclear energy plant in the US, as well as the Project Gemini “familiarization manual” (image left). The people who used these booklets didn’t give them a second thought, and yet from where we stand they witnessed a partial core meltdown and a trip to space.

Ideally you’ll put your mitts on the real thing, but in a pinch a picture or a snippet of video will do. I now make a Google images search and a YouTube search a mandatory part of everything I’m working on. Doing a Google blogs search is another way to pick up thoughts, images and impressions. You never know what you’ll find.