All Posts in Category: Professional Writer Mindset
Business Planning Doesn’t Work for Creatives (or Anyone Really). Here’s What to Do Instead
How do you usually approach planning for your business—either the big picture or the more short-term goals?
Can We Help Your Business and Your Life Flourish Every Week?
Flourishing – n. a condition denoting good mental and physical health: the state of being free from illness and distress but, more important, of being filled with vitality and functioning well in one’s personal and social life.
– APA Dictionary of Psychology
Languishing – n. the condition of absence of mental health, characterized by ennui, apathy, listlessness, and loss of interest in life.
Redefining (Walter) Mittyesque – Let’s See Your New Resume
The Ben Stiller-directed “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” came out in 2013. Instagram hit the scene in late 2010.
Watching the film today, the cinematography oozes shots that we now think of as Instagram tropes: packing flat-lays, travelers in profile walking in front of brilliantly painted walls, a lone traveler in a long shot on an otherwise empty road. Just cue the overlaid text of the Robert Frost poem.
One Sunday night, however, we knew that “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” was just what we needed.
We had an intensive Saturday of soul-searching and Sunday of planning our first Detox + Reset retreat and Walter Mitty came up as a frequent touchpoint throughout the weekend. On the one hand, for the gorgeous visuals (we didn’t see the Instagram-style until re-watching it now!), but, more importantly for the character and journey of Walter Mitty.
The film itself is a remake of another film from the ’40s, which is itself based on a short story. Its impact is so far-reaching that it has spawned additions to many dictionaries for the term “Mittyesque,” as in: a character given to grand and elaborate fantasies; a daydreamer.
But homo sapiens have daydreamed long before Walter Mitty.
What the character truly brought to the table was a vision of someone who could be so lost in a romantic, adventurous, triumphant version of oneself in one’s own mind, and then bring those visions to one’s actual reality.
Walter Mitty begins–in the modern version–as a photo editor of a magazine. He spends his days confined in a dark, sub-level office with little human interaction aside from the letters and images he receives from his photographers, who naturally ply their trade doing uncommon things in far-off places.
In the film’s earlier beats, a running gag emerges that the protagonist lapses so deeply into his daydreams that you can flick him or throw something at him with no reaction. Another running gag revolves around his difficulty setting up an online dating profile, because he has never done anything interesting with his life and has left all the profile questions blank.
A twist of fate (as films always find) requires him to hop an airplane to Greenland in search of a missing negative for the film’s final cover.
Getting on that first flight was not the hard part. The image from the film that sticks with me is that of Walter Mitty’s face when, after being thoroughly immersed in one of his famous daydreams, he jumps into a helicopter as it is taking off.
He’s crossed the threshold now–doing something from one of his daydreams–and he’s astonished, delighted, transformed, and in one piece.
Very soon, he finds himself, however, literally swimming with sharks while moments from hypothermia. (There is more than one way out of a helicopter!)
In the case of the character in this film and the original story, the plot required him to keep moving forward.
It’s not interesting for readers if he jumps onto the helicopter and then:
- refuses to jump in the North Sea,
- get away from the sharks,
- narrowly avoid a volcano, and
- all of the other ridiculous hoops he jumps through in order to complete his goal.
Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on your tolerance for adventure, I suppose!) our lives are not fiction. There is nothing making us keep taking chances after that first one.
Especially in those moments when that first chance leads you, literally or figuratively, into deeper, darker, colder, and more treacherous waters!
I can’t be there, as Kristen Wiig is in the Ben Stiller film, to sing you a beautifully arranged version of a song that is simultaneously nostalgic, motivating, and triumphant to help you jump on those helicopters. Or at least the scary-magazine-pitching versions of them.
But I can remind you of Walter Mitty–perhaps now every time you see certain images in Instagram?–and, at least now, invite you to take that leap towards a flourishing life and business.
Send that pitch to that magazine you really want to build a relationship with.
Most importantly though, follow up. And then send another. Become a writer suffering from success.
Don’t send single-use plastic pitches. Create the infrastructure that lets your travel-writing daydreams become your travel-writing reality. Find ways to regularly challenge yourself to cross your thresholds and grow a thriving freelance business.
Second to Ben Stiller’s face when his character jumps into the moving helicopter, my second favorite part of the film is when Walter Mitty is making his resume at the end. It reads:
- Life Magazine – Negative Asset Manager, 16 years. Reference: Sean O’Connell (address upon request)
- One of 3 known non-Navy Seals to helicopter “free release” into gale-force waters (North Sea)
- In a single day: Biked, ran and long-boarded over 17 kilometers to Eyjafjallajokull volcanic eruption
- Scaled highest peak of Noshaq Mountain (northwestern Afghanistan face)
- On Icelandic fishing trawler, earned keep as a boar swain (unpaid deckhand) for one day
I can’t wait to see your Mitty-esque resume.
Discover More Inspiration:
- The Real Reason Why We Travel Even When It’s Hard – And How to Bring that into the Rest of Your Freelance Work
- The Single, Biggest Thing That Holds You Back From Travel Writing Success
- How to Rain the Right Things on Your Business, Elizabeth Gilbert and Hamilton-Style
Want to Expand Your Expertise on This Topic?
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An Important Public Service Announcement About Following Up on Your Freelance Pitches
This week, I wanted to take a minute for an important travel-writing public service announcement on following up with editors after a pitch!
But this topic is not only near and dear to my heart because it is a such a big deal for writers, but as it seems like we are reaching a certain tipping point here that doesn’t have a good solution.
When Was the Last Time You Met a Travel Magazine Editor?
I’ve previously attended the Book Passage Travel Writers and Photographers Conference and I’m always delighted to see the seats full of writers, who already have a flourishing business with travel writing as their full-time occupation or are on their way there.
But even more than hearing their stories of taking the leap, quitting their previous professions, and making travel writing work for them, I loved seeing them interact with editors.
It is so easy to have an “us vs. them” mentality about editors as a freelance writer.
Don’t Let the Haters Sell You on These 3 Mega Myths About Freelance Travel Writing
It’s a breath of fresh air to see more and more websites talking about six-figure freelance writing. Particularly six-figure freelance travel writing, as a reality rather than a pipe dream, but I am still shocked by the various ways people who are not successful freelance writers deride the profession.
Why Do We Need Travel Writers? Why Do You Need to Be One?
Don George, editor of Lonely Planet’s annual travel anthologies and author of the seminal travel writing handbook Travel Writing: Expert Advice from the World’s Leading Travel Publisher, sat down with close friend, Jeff Greenwald, author of six books on his travel adventures and founder of EthicalTraveler.org, to talk about what it means to be a travel writer with a flourishing business.
Editors Have Needs. Please Fill Them.
Let’s turn your usual visions of editors around. Rather than envisioning an editor:
- seeing an email come in from someone they don’t know and either ignoring or deleting it;
- finding something fundamentally wrong with your subject line and deleting your email without reading it;
- opening your email, checking if you have any clips from national magazines and deleting it when they find none;
- reading your email, liking the idea, and then sending it off to one of his or her writers to work on