Money
Making money
Interview with Martin Gurdon, author of Write On!
You may want to write for pleasure or profit, but how do you know if what you are writing is interesting, or even if it reads well?
Author and freelance journalist, Martin Gurdon, has recently published a guide to professional writing called Write On!, an invaluable book for keen scribes wanting to learn trade secrets and handy hints. Here he speaks to Jo Tillin:
Car enthusiast and chicken-keeper Martin penned Write On! after meeting many budding scribes at Women's Institutes, where he had been giving talks about keeping chickens.
"I kept encountering people who wanted to write either creatively or functionally," says Martin, "they might have a yen to write a book, or they might have had to write a newsletter. There was a great breadth of stuff that they wanted to write about, and feel confident in it.
"I thought there was a gap in the market for something that didn't assume you necessarily wanted to be the next great novelist - but that you wanted to improve what you did at one level, and if you did want to write more creatively, the book would help you to do that, too. I thought that if you could produce a book which gives you the tools to get started so you're not thinking about some of the dynamics of writing, then that helps.
"There are also other more esoteric things, like personal organisation - so that you're not spending a lot of time flapping around, trying to organise practical things which stops you from getting on with the writing - you can think less about the other stuff, and concentrate on the words themselves."
Martin explains that he has been one of the lucky few who gets to write about one of his passions - cars, in his case.
"I am a car bore. My dad had lots of funny old cars - we had an old Bristol, an old Jowitt…and these things interested me. I've always liked writing and I thought that combining two interests was something I wanted to do.
"Eventually I did become a motoring journalist, but in fact I've discovered that what I am is a journalist who writes about motoring. The older I've got, the more interested I've become in the words I'm writing, and the more I've wanted to do other things with it as well."
"I have been a staff writer, and was a reporter on a fortnightly news-led trade magazine - I learnt a tremendous amount from doing that, as the people I worked with were very good at what they did.
"I like the freelance life because it is so flexible. I think a lot of people who write professionally have gravitated towards freelance because their career progression just isn't there otherwise. I've freelanced for about 16 years now, and I feel comfortable with it."
"If you are going to go freelance, you must have lots of contacts. You must be personally organised and self-disciplined so you can churn stuff out every week. You have to really understand what it is that people want, too. I worked as a commissioning editor for a newspaper's motoring supplement and there were some journalists who didn't really know their subject but they understood what the supplement was about, gave me what I wanted and at the same time met their own standards.
"There were other people though who I had to stop using - they kept giving me what they thought that I should have, not what I had asked for. The people who were good, could get satisfaction from what they were writing whilst providing the editor with what they wanted."
Martin likens freelancers to sharks,"If you stop, you will die. They have to keep moving, and you should be continuously busy. Even if there isn't any work around, you should be looking for work or pitching ideas.
"It is difficult. Many times I've submitted an idea that has met a wall of indifference but you have to persevere. There have been one or two things which I have done that have taken ten years for someone to pick up on! I went through a period of writing about nothing but cheap cars - I had an article published in The Guardian, and for the two years after that I found that that story kept popping up in different forms.
"Like a lot of freelance journalists, I am essentially a 'hack writer' and go from job to job - my role is to fill space for people. I might be writing about cars one week or engineering, local government or anything. There are certain generic skills that you apply to different forms of writing. You can't be too precious - you are just there to do a job."
Keen to turn his hand to something different, Martin is now writing books for children.
"It is very difficult and is much like nailing custard to a wall, if you don't have a track record in a particular area. I have collaborated with an illustrator with one idea, and with a freelance photographer whom I have done some work with.
"I think there are some absolutely brilliant children's books about but having looked at some which belonged to friends' children, I didn't think many were very good. As a reader, I felt if I would have been rather bored with this if I was a child.
"I thought it would be an interesting exercise to write some children's literature, and to see if I could produce something that was credible. Whether I've succeeded or not I don't know - I guess it's a case of wait and see. There are no chickens in these books - although we do have an idea for a book involving a chicken and an egg, so very highbrow stuff..."
