Welcome to day one of my five-part series where I walk you through how I got some of my biggest, most profitable, and most prestigious assignments.
Let’s talk about TIME
Time was my first big credit. As in big prestigious credit that people didn’t look at and go, “Oh, women’s magazine.”
I’d written tons for women’s and general-interest magazines at this point in my career (Elle, Ms., Glamour, Marie Claire, etc), but the big international political magazines and newspapers that would publish my hard news and analytical pieces were still somewhat of a challenge for me. Unfortunately, I’d decided that this was exactly what I wanted to do with my life—write long, well-reported international stories that changed the world—and the editors of Cosmo just weren’t going for it. (Shocking, I know.)
Around this time, I got into my head that Time was going to hire me to write stories for them come hell or high water and I didn’t care what I had to do to get these assignments, I was going to do it.
It may have had to do with the fact that my ex-boyfriend had recently stolen two story ideas I was working on and sold them to The New York Times and had never, for the life of him, been able to crack Time. So I was going to do it. Just to spite him. Because at 25 years old I wasn’t the most mature person on the planet. Go figure.
It was August. My birthday was in December. I decided I was going to get an assignment from Time by the time my birthday rolled around. Totally logical.
But it didn’t go quite to plan.
The pitching begins
It’s important to back up a little bit here and remind you that in 2007, Time was not the creature it is today. Back in the day (man, how old did I sound there?)… anyway, so back in the day, Time was an extremely difficult publication to crack. The editor names, let alone their email addresses, were cumbersome to track down, and when you did email them, they often didn’t respond. Contributors to Time were few and far between and it wasn’t every day that they hired a 25-year-old like me in India to report for them.
Back then, a clip in Time was an extremely rare and precious thing. I wasn’t stupid—I knew this. But I’d been recently cheated out of two New York Times bylines and I was a 25-year-old on a mission. I wasn’t giving up without a fight.
I eventually tracked down an editor on the magazine’s masthead and sent him a pitch. He loved the idea. Unfortunately, he was in London (having recently moved there) and was no longer taking India-related pitches, but he loved my writing style so much, he was happy to forward my email to a colleague in India with a personal note.
So far, I was winning.
Until I wasn’t. The second editor didn’t go for the idea. But he encouraged me to pitch again.
And so I did.
The pitching continues
I pitched. And pitched. And pitched.
That is, I’d send him a query in the morning, he’d get back to me with a rejection by the evening. The next morning, I’d send him another query letter.
I sent, I sent, I sent. He rejected, and rejected, and rejected.
It was now December. My birthday was 17 days away.
I was no longer winning.
I decided to be brave
Let me tell you something about myself: I’m extremely motivated when there’s a clear goal ahead of me, a clear reason for wanting it, and a true desire in my heart to get it. My birthday was not going to be the day I failed. Not again. This much I had decided.
I was getting nowhere. So I needed to be brave.
“Look,” I emailed my editor. “I’m not getting anywhere with you and I’m wondering if it’s because I’m just not getting what you need. Would you mind if I called you or dropped by your office and discussed how we can make this work?”
He said, “Sure.”
That’s right, people. IT WAS THAT SIMPLE. I said, can I come meet you? He said, sure.
So I arrived at his office, waited outside for ten minutes because he was on the phone, and soon he came out, took my hands in his, apologized profusely for having kept me waiting, and proceeded to school me on the world of Time.
I went back home, wrote another pitch, and emailed it to him.
He turned it down.
My birthday arrives
One day before my birthday, with a heavy heart, I sat down to send another pitch. I had to do it, even though I didn’t want to. It was going to be my one last try. I had failed. Clearly. And by this time, even persistent old me was beginning to feel bruised and battered. I sent out a story I wasn’t even sure of mostly because I had to send something and working on new ideas was just taking everything out of me by this point.
I received my first assignment from Time on my 26th birthday.
Cue the fireworks.
But the story doesn’t end there.
Because Benazir Bhutto got assassinated ten days later and my story was killed. Then my editor told me that he was leaving the India bureau and moving to London. (Why does everyone keep moving to London, I thought then. A few years later, I moved to London.)
Anyway, so I said screw it and sent him another idea anyway.
He loved it. He wanted it. And not only for online, he thought the story would be perfect for print. He emailed the arts editor in Hong Kong and an assignment was born.
Until it was killed again.
By now, it was February 2008. I’d had two stories assigned and killed by Time. I was beginning to get really frustrated. I had also, by this time, decided to leave India and explore Africa.
So I sent a one-line email to the arts editor, who also handled travel. “Hey, I’m headed to Accra, Ghana,” I wrote. “American President Bush will be visiting while I’m there. Would you like me to do a Three Days in Accra story for you?”
“We’ll pay $1 a word,” he wrote back. “Is that okay with you?”
I left India in mid-February. And while in Africa, I finally got published in TIME (all its international editions).
I had finally won.
So then what happened?
I moved to the US and wrote a “Three Days in San Francisco” story for the magazine. And followed that with one about Kolkata. Easy simple stuff. Not political analysis, but Time clips nonetheless. There was hope for me yet.
Nine months later, I returned to India, where there was a new bureau chief who had never heard of me, and frankly, didn’t want to.
I emailed her anyway. And she wrote back. She said, “I don’t usually work with freelancers, but [editor in Hong Kong] has spoken very highly of you, so I guess we should meet.”
We met. We got on. I made jokes, she didn’t laugh. But she thought I was amusing anyway. She invited my husband and me to a dinner at her place, where I wound up meeting people that I will tell you about over the next few days. I wrote for her for a few years, covering everything from latest political scandals to environmental issues to anniversaries of horrific events to women’s issues to random cool stuff.
It took a while, but I was now a regular contributor to Time.
Lessons learned
1) Pitch, pitch, pitch. It’s not stalking if you’re not actually standing outside their office window.
2) Be at your best, always. And that means write and send the best queries you possibly can. The only reason I wrote for Time for as long as I did was because everyone I interacted with at the publication had only good things to say about me to their colleagues. This was invaluable. And it all started with that first query to the editor in London who forwarded it to his colleague.
3) Make an impression. I did, clearly. Because when I wrote those emails and when I went for that meeting I didn’t pretend to be someone I wasn’t. I wore jeans. I swore (a lot). I ordered wine and got a bit tipsy and giggled. Be real, be you. Editors don’t want to work with “professional freelance writers,” they want to work with cool people they like and trust.
4) Set yourself goals, the motivations behind them not withstanding. I had a clear goal, a clear date, and a clear intention. I was going to keep trying until the very last moment.
5) Be persistent. Be brave. The only way you’re ever going to be defeated is if you give up trying.
Stay tuned. Tomorrow you’re going to learn about the story that earned me thousands of dollars and won me two awards.
In the meantime, download this totally free, totally badass book that I put together in which I share some of the pitches that landed me in these top publications.
(Missed part of the series? Here’s Part 1. And Part 2. Part 3 lives here. Click here for Part 4. And the final one, Part 5.)