Archives: February 2005

mb Toolbox won’t be publishing Monday, February 28.

Create a social media strategy, launch your campaign, and track the results in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. The online event and workshop will feature speakers including The Onion's Baratunde Thurston (left), Facebook's Morin Oluwole, and bitly's Tim Devane. Register now.

Tax day is fast approaching. Have you got all your W-2′s and whosits and whatsits? Good. Now before you sit down to figure it all out, you might want a little refresher on what you can and cannot deduct from your taxes, because you might be paying for things you can write off, or, you might be omitting items you think are business expenses but are not in the eyes of Uncle Sam. Warning: I am not the IRS and this is not a complete list. If in doubt, as a professional.
You can deduct:
Educational expenses. If you took a course that “maintains or improves skills required in your present job”, you may write tuition off, along with transportation and book fees. If you are filing as a self-employed individual, you can include educational expenses on Schedule C Form 1040, Schedule C–EZ, Form 1040 or Schedule F of Form 1040. If you are filing as an employee, speak with HR.
Office supplies, furniture and equipment. The gubment has more details on their site.
The phone. Keep your phone bill and circle the business-related calls and add them up at the end of the year to deduct 100%. If you use your home phone for your business calls, the regular fees will not be deducted but you can write off everything if you have a separate line just for business.

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Oh my god, there is NO way I’m going to be able to turn this story into 500 words. Maybe at most I can squeeze out 50 words. God. Groan. Okay, done. Word count. How much more do I have to fluff this out? What? I wrote 900 words? I have to cut this thing down, now?
Some easy ways to cut it down:
Start by trying to remove a solid graf of copy rather than sentence by sentence (especially if you’re over by more than 100 words.) It’ll be hard to take out a large chunk but it’s easier than combing through. However, hold onto your old trimmings because it might be valuable if your editor wants to dump something else.
Check for unnecessary detail that doesn’t move the piece along. It might be pretty but chuck it.
Read it aloud. You’ll hear better what sounds too unwieldy and what can be cut down.
Check your transitions. Can you say “On Thursday” instead of “A few days later”?
It depends on what the definition of ‘is’ is, right? No. Insead of
“appears to be”, “seems to be” or something or that ilk, use “is.”
And finally: Adverbs? “Very”? “really”? Goodbye.
If you’re still having trouble, hand it to another writer friend who owes you a favor. Your babies won’t be his babies, so he won’t have any trouble cutting out the details that you think are so essential that he just finds wordy.

Today I speak with Benoit Denizet-Lewis, contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine. His writing, which focuses on society, sports, gay culture, and youth culture has also appeared in Boston Magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle, ESPN the Magazine, Spin, Out, Salon, and JANE.
1. You teach magazine and nonfiction writing at schools like Tufts. What seems to be the hardest lesson for students to learn?
That writing great nonfiction isn’t like writing a great college sociology paper. Many students have learned as undergrads that if you use a lot of big words and creatively repeat yourself for five pages, you’re pretty much guaranteed an A (or at least a B plus). The most difficult lesson for many young writers and journalists to learn is how to write – and the value of writing – a clear, precise sentence. They want to dazzle me with their “style,” but often they haven’t mastered the art of writing a sentence that makes sense. So that’s the first step. The second is getting young writers to understand that clichés are very, very, very bad.

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You may find the following links even more useful and entertaining than child labor!
The American Native Press Archives, collecting American Indian and Alaska Native newspapers, periodicals and more.
Who was on the cover of Life when? (Since Life was not publishing weekly when I was born, I looked it up for 10 year earlier. I got Mae West.)
If you’re covering the fine arts (and no, “Celebrities Without Makeup” does not count), try the Artcyclopedia search engine.
Ah, remember 1999? Before you get all excited about these ‘blogs’ and the cautious resurgence of e-commerce, perhaps we can learn a lesson from the past at Ebituaries.
Speaking of blogs, apparently it’s really easy to get rich running them and nobody knew about it.

Q:I’m breaking into freelancing and am pitching a piece that involves doing my first phone interview. I’m painfully shy and hate the phone in addition to being inexperienced. I’m also concerned with notetaking, as I don’t have much practice and I don’t have any recording gear. Any advice?
A: Congratulations! I hate phone interviewing too but you have to start sometime. My advice is to write down your questions ahead of time, taking care to write any follow-up and backups that you can think of because you might be too nervous to come up with these on the spot. Practice asking these questions out loud.
While you definitely want to be friendly and conversational, don’t worry about mindless chitchat: the interviewee knows he’s being interviewed so you can get down to business without too much ado.
I think you’ll find notetaking easier than you think. It will naturally to you which is most important to write down and which little filler words you can omit. Your source isn’t going to look at the piece and say, “Hey, I said ‘which,’ not ‘that.’” Plus you can always ask them to slow down or repeat. And practice, if you like. Call up your wife or dad or best friend and practice asking them questions and writing down their responses. If you prefer to type your notes as you write, that’s fine too but close down all your programs but your word processing ones because you could miss something while you’re glancing at CNN.com.
If anybody else has any feedback for our shy first-timer, please let me know. Good luck!

This is something that I am as guilty of as anybody else but it never ceases to amaze me how phonophobic our field can be sometimes. We writers often dread actually speaking with our editors, mostly like because we worry that we’re going to be intruding or get yelled at (note: the Zulkey definition of “yell at” involves anything from mild critique to actual yelling) for some shortcoming we just figured the editor was too busy to tell us about via email.
Yet as I look at the boards here and on other sites, a common question is “I haven’t heard from the editor/he won’t return my emails/I keep bugging him.”
Pick up the phone! Getting your editor on the horn demands immediate attention, plus an actual voice to the name is a lot more personal than words on the screen. The editor indeed might be too busy to deal with you but actually hearing from you intead of sending an email that gets lost in the shuffle is more effective. So don’t be afraid. Let your fingers do the walking, er, dialing.

Life is so confusing!
The multi-culti fashion publication Suede is soon to be no more. The April issue shall be its last, due to not enough customers putting down cash to pay for the flamboyant pub.
OK! is okay, okay? First OK! was coming to the States. Then it wasn’t. Now it is. Boy, think about how easy the Revolutionary War would have been if all British invasions were like this.
Rich snobs now can read about rich snobs in rich snobby new magazines. (from MediaLife.)
And general media news:
The WSJ: great on paper, flimsy online (via Wired.)
When Martha busts out, will we see a rise or a fall? Or neither? (BusinessWeek.)
Now I’m not one to endorse illegal drugs, but apparently methamphetamine gives you the energy to do this.

You think you’ve got it. The perfect story idea that’s going to get the picture made and you the screenplay Oscar. Fabulous. Now before you get all “Hollywood” on us, how exactly do you write a screenplay? I mean, you know what to write, you just don’t know what it’s supposed to look like. Fortunately, that’s the easy part.
There are about nine billion references out there to guide you to your first screenplay but it’s hard to know which is actually helpful and which, not so much.
The first easy, free thing you can do is hie yourself to the library or online and check out some examples of screenplays. That’s the most basic place to start, to see in front of you how they look. You’ll notice the spacing, margins and font are different than everyday prose writing. Learn it, live it. Often you can simply set your formatting preferences on your word processing program to remember layout rules like such as the ones suggested in sites like these.

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If you’re a music writer looking to take your clips to a higher plane, Blender might be a good option for you. Rebecca Onion chats with EIC Craig Marks about what they look for. The music review section is a great place to break into. If you consider yourself a music enthusiast but maybe not so much a hardcore music nerd, there are recurring sections that combine music with profiling like “Weird Band Alert” and “Life After Rock” that can be up your alley.
If you’ve never written for them, though, forget about pitching a feature. You have to get in on the ground floor with reviews first.
By the by, more info on music writing will be forthcoming, once I can get some people to talk to me. If you’re an experienced music writer and have some tips and how-tos, please, by all means, write me.