Written by Brendan O’Meara
I received my latest issue of Outside Magazine in the mail a few days ago. The quality of this magazine has been in decline for some time. It’s edging into Men’s Health territory, which is never a good sign if you’re into good writing.
One story struck my interest and I sat down to read it, carving out the 30 minutes or so I figured it would take. What I read was the worst opening paragraph I’ve ever read.
I’m supposed to go flying over New Zealand’s South Island with the director of the world’s largest guidebook company, but I’m feeling haggard. Last night, Daniel Houghton and I made a little tour of Queenstown’s bars: Winnies, the Buffalo Club, Zephyr, a few other places …”
It carries on a bit more in this style. Instead of taking two pushpins and jabbing them into the dead of my pupils, I closed the magazine and went back to proofreading a feature I wrote.
I was eager to read this profile because it’s about this 25-year-old billionaire who took over Lonely Planet. I wanted to read to learn what percentage of one’s soul does one need to sell in order to be a billionaire at 25. My guess was somewhere between 50 and 65 percent. But the author of the piece, Charles Bethea, popped that balloon.
Part of being a good writer is being a great reader. With that comes reading shit. I almost want to read the rest of the piece as a cautionary tale. But, then again, I’d rather rant in a blog post than finish that piece.
My frustration with this drivel is that I want to have a sustainable freelance career and much of that comes from cracking into the slicks, the magazines that afford you time to write a great feature and pay you several thousand dollars. A man’s gotta eat … and keep his wife from hanging herself as she watches her husband fail again while she works at a job that has sucked every ounce of vitality from her once vibrant persona.
Maybe it’s not possible.
Bryan Cranston, the brilliant—truly brilliant—actor, best known for his role as Walter White on Breaking Bad, says an artist needs four things: Patience, perseverance, talent, and luck. It is so, so true.
Patience: How long do you wait for your break?
Perseverance: How much of a beating are you willing to take and for how long?
Talent: Do you even have the ability that people find worth waiting for? Have you overvalued your own talent, thus wasting everyone’s time?
Luck: Who the hell knows?
Luck. Luck is really what it comes down to, luck and talent. It’s true, some people have to make their own luck. Luck comes at the intersection of preparation and opportunity. Some people have all the luck, little talent, and still manage to float. Some people have all the talent, but are never granted to opportunity to let that talent bloom.
It’s a tough and brutal industry and reading opening paragraphs like that make me angry and, most of all, deflated.
I have to believe in a paradigm of abundance, that there’s room for all our work and that we can be paid accordingly. It’s unfair to knock Bethea’s horrible paragraph. It probably has more to do with jealousy on my part, but even if I were in place where I was writing for slicks, I’d still find that paragraph about as appetizing as cod oil.
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