Tyler Brûlé’s name will forever be linked with Wallpaper*, the jet-setting lifestyle magazine he founded in the mid-90s while still only in his late twenties. He was hailed for capturing the era’s zeitgeist before he had even published a dozen issues, by which time he had sold the magazine to Time Inc., the company’s first overseas acquisition. He’d conceived of the magazine while lying in a hospital bed, recuperating from wounds sustained as a freelance journalist operating inside Afghanistan on behalf of the BBC. What once seemed like a deeply ironic contradiction — that he had dreamt of luxury living after his brush with geopolitics — have since merged into his latest project, Monocle. Best described as “The Economist meets Wallpaper*” Monocle is the magazine Brûlé has been dreaming of since his bitter departure from his first love in 2002. Published by Winkreative, the brand consultancy he has run full-time since then, Monocle marries the achingly tasteful and internationalist mindset for which he’s known with a news slant that relentless looks for opportunities and curios abroad rather than threats. The result is a manual-sized magazine that sells subscriptions for $150 a year and has a readership that’s also so well-curated that luxury advertisers are beating down his door. Brûlé replied to mediabistro.com’s questions from (we think) an overnight train at midnight last week as he raced to the next appointment in his jam-packed datebook.

Name: Tyler Brûlé
Position: Editor-in-chief & chairman, Monocle; chairman & creative director, Winkreative
Resume: Foreign correspondent, BBC; founded and served as editor-in-chief of Wallpaper*; created and anchored the news program “The Desk” for BBC 4; launched Monocle
Hometown: Winnipeg, Canada
Education: Attended Ryerson University in Toronto

When did you first have the idea to create Monocle, and how & when did you finally decide to launch the magazine? What made you think that a fusion of international reportage with a jet-setting luxury lifestyle component would be an editorial and commercially viable magazine?

Jet-setting luxury lifestyle component? Are you reading the same magazine that we’re editing? I don’t see any of that in what we’re doing. The magazine’s international but hardly jet-set. In many ways Monocle‘s the magazine I’ve always wanted to do. In fact, the basic concept pre-dates Wallpaper* by a good six years. We started work on rough layouts, structure and costs in the spring of 2005 and started raising finance in early 2006. I was convinced that the concept would work because I’ve spent many years watching consumers’ magazine purchasing habits at airports and it was frequently Wallpaper* and The Economist. I decided to merge elements of the two but refine the package.

Who reads Monocle? What do you think is the maximum readership of the magazine worldwide. I understand that the eventual circulation target is 150,000 readers, which is more than Wallpaper* has now (and about the same as during your tenure as editor). Is the readership of Monocle the same as the readership of Wallpaper* during your era? And considering their geographic dispersion, is it truly possible to speak to them as a coherent community?

We invited all of our London subscribers to a shopping evening at our offices earlier this week so I can tell you that our readers are predominantly male (70 percent) and work in finance, public policy, assorted academic fields, media, and assorted travel sectors. They’re over 30, are probably leaving in a different country from where they were born, and are on the hunt for opportunities. They’re also looking for smart media.

I think some day we can take this up to a circulation of over 200,000 globally. That’s a dream, not our business plan. There’s definitely a constituency of readers who left Wallpaper* who’ve picked up with us and a whole new group of readers who’ve never even heard of Wallpaper*. I think Monocle‘s readership is more interested in bigger ideas and doesn’t see a wall between politics and culture.

As for geography, I feel it creates an opportunity. While many media brands go more local we can talk to a group of readers who want to feel connected to the world’s major cities.

Considering how wired (and wireless) your readers are, why is Monocle a magazine and not an electronic publication? What opportunities does print afford you that digital publishing does not? And please discuss your business strategy in light of your extremely high cover price ($10 US is what I’m paying every month) and even higher subscription price, which I don’t think exists anywhere else in the media landscape. What does that mean for your business model in terms of the contributions of circulation revenue, ad revenue, and digital revenue? I imagine it doesn’t look like any other magazine out there.

It’s both. As of today, Monocle‘s ranked as the number three news/politics brand on iTunes. I feel that’s quite an accomplishment having only been present on the newsstand for 10 months and on iTunes for ten weeks. Print still sets the agenda but it needs a digital wing to give it a different, more varied metabolism.

Who said subscriptions should be cheaper than getting a title on newsstand? I think it’s a business model that simply doesn’t work when you’re shipping magazines to 79 countries. At the same time, when you offer up every single story archived there’s a value to that — hence the 50 percent increase on subscriptions. Today there is a consumer out there who will pay for quality journalism and recognizes that it can’t only be the advertiser that pays the bills. As for the business model, we’ve only assumed newsstand sales and ad revenues. We left the digital component and subs blank because we knew we were doing something different. 5,000-plus subscriptions at $150 has had a lovely year end effect on our plan.

How were you able to recruit a global network of contributors reporting on location from Rwanda, the former Soviet Union, Japan, etc. in an age where most magazines, television networks, and newspapers are cutting back on their international staff and coverage? I see that some of your staff, like Fiona Wilson, have been with you since the Wallpaper days, but how did you go about recruiting new correspondents in out-of-the-way places? How do you manage them? Are they essentially stringers pitching stories? Or are you assigning them?

Cut-backs elsewhere have created our network. There’s no shortage of good talent as a result of bureau closures and shrinking international news sections. While we started out by commissioning writers we’ve known for some time, we now have journalists all over the world contacting us with ideas and thrilled that there’s a new platform for international reportage. That said, 90 percent of the stories start at our hub in London.

How would you describe your editorial point-of-view with regards to news? American magazines’ tend to cover international news through the lens of the “War on Terror,” the Iraq War, and the damage to America’s self-image. This view is, of course, noticeably absent from Monocle. How would you describe the political and socio-economic stance embodied in the magazine?

Our view has a distinctly eastern side of the north Atlantic flavor. This means we sit in London but are influenced by the currents that have made this city more European and increasingly one that looks to Asia. Commercially, this viewpoint is proving to be a hit in America as readers are tired of seeing the world through the prism you mention.

How would you describe your point-of-view with regards to the design, fashion, and lifestyle coverage within Monocle? Your incarnation of Wallpaper* is justly famous for being so out-of-step with other fashion and shelter magazines and so locked-into its own vision of the world that it became an iconic, Zeitgeist magazine. Where and how did you develop this sensibility, and why — a decade after Wallpaper* burst onto the scene — are you still somewhat on the fringe?

Mmmmm, fashion. For starters, we hired a Japanese fashion editor to ensure we had pages with wearable, fresh brands and not spreads devoted to building the careers of photographers and stylists. I have a very clear view of who’s reading this magazine and as a result we want to shoot garments that are relevant and also have a story. Slowear’s a good example of a Monocle brand — it focuses on being best in class and is not consumed with being the brand of the season. I think Japanese fashion editors are more like buyers — they want clothes to sell and not linger in fashion cupboards. On a related note, our Porter bags have now sold over 1000 units (mostly to men) and we keep hearing that people like our vision because we introduce brands that are new, forgotten or rarely seen. There’s a political message here as well, you’ll note that brand provenance and legitimacy counts for a lot with us.

Greg Lindsay is a frequent contributor to mediabistro.com. He’s currently working on his first book.

Not every journalist covering the Summer Olympic Games in Beijing this month is busy broadcasting an eye-glazing 3,600 hours of coverage (2,200 of which concern Michael Phelps) or sporting a “J”-is-for-journalist visa in their passports. But finding coverage of these Games that hasn’t been pre-packaged along the jingoistic story lines of the country of your choice has so far been hard to come by. One of the few highly visible outsider attempts at coverage is the sports blog Deadspin’s “Beijing Bureau,” a trio of recent New York University graduates who have already spent more than a year in China living, working, and gearing up to cover the Games. Like any enterprising young stringer, they approached then-Deadspin editor Will Leitch about filing regular dispatches covering the broader issues surrounding the Games, written in a voice that’s neither pompous nor overly sensitive of offending the host nation with inconvenient truths.

They are just sensitive enough, however, to request anonymity. Not willing to be the ones responsible for their arrest or deportation (all three are carrying tourist visas which do not allow them to practice journalism), they are presented here as the Deadspin Beijing Bureau Chief, and Correspondents #1 and #2. The interview was conducted via email, with past and present Deadspin editors Will Leitch and A.J. Daulerio confirming their identities and backgrounds.

Name: “Deadspin Beijing Bureau Chief”
Hometown: Poconos, Pennsylvania
Education: BA, philosophy, New York University (2007)
Marital status: Single
First section of the Sunday Times: Sports
Favorite television show: Deadwood
Last book read: Collected Short Stories of Jack London ($2.50 USD at the foreign bookstore!)
Guilty pleasure: Reading the Times‘ Sports section

Name: “Deadspin Beijing Bureau Correspondent #1”
Hometown: New York City
Education: BA, metropolitan studies, New York University (2007)
Marital status: Single
First section of the Sunday Times: The City
Favorite television show: The Wire
Last book read: After Dark by Haruki Murakami
Guilty pleasure: Cheese

Name: “Deadspin Beijing Bureau Correspondent #2”
Hometown: Des Moines, Iowa
Education: BA, journalism, New York University (2007)
Marital status: Single
First section of the Sunday Times: “Movies, because I’m nerdy when it comes to Martin Scorsese, Spike Lee, Paul Thomas Anderson, so on.”
Favorite television show: Chapelle’s Show
Last book read: “Trying to finish Ghost Wars. It’s dense but awesome.”
Guilty pleasure: Vice magazine’s Dos and Don’ts

What was the genesis of your project? How did you meet, what are your backgrounds? What drew you all of you to China in the first place, and what’s your take on China and the Games?
“Deadspin Beijing Bureau Chief”: The three of us got to know each other during a semester abroad in Shanghai. Neither [Correspondent #1] nor I really knew any Chinese before we arrived, though [Correspondent #2] had studied Chinese since high school. I was a philosophy & linguistics major, and when one gets [to] one’s third year or so in the program, he or she starts to think about post-graduate, professional plans. I thought learning Chinese might be a good career move. I’d always been interested in the Far East and planned to spend the summer in Beijing. But when NYU announced the opening of their Shanghai program during the spring of my junior year, I decided to jump on it. I put off my Beijing summer plans and took a job in New York for the summer (working with AJ Daulerio, incidentally).

I spent the fall of 2006 in Shanghai and it was really a life-changing experience. The three of us had a journalism class in Shanghai. Our professor had been a war correspondent in Africa and now ran a film production company in town. He had dropped out of Missouri journalism school to move to Africa when he was 23 to sort of strike out on his own as a journalist. I think his story was pretty inspiring for us, and it was definitely was proof that one could be successful going out on one’s own in a foreign country.

Once we returned to New York, almost immediately we started to brainstorm about how we could come back after graduation. [Correspondent #2] had the idea to move to China in the fall, establish ourselves there, then look for freelance work during the Olympics. The idea developed and we began to reach out to Web sites and publications we enjoyed reading to see if there were possibilities for collaboration. I had been a reader of Deadspin since about the first post, and I reached out to Will to talk about Beijing. I think AJ lied to him about my qualifications.

“Deadspin Beijing Bureau Correspondent #1”: The three of us first met at a restaurant in Chinatown at an orientation dinner for our study abroad program in Shanghai. Pretty soon after arriving, we began talking about coming back to China to do creative projects and study Mandarin. We all really fell in love with the place and didn’t particularly want to enter the NYC job market, so we teamed up and moved out here to produce media content — video, photography, writing — and learn some Chinese along the way. We also wanted to explore more of the country and fortunately traveling within China is cheap and easy.

I graduated in December 2007 from NYU having studied film and urban studies, so moving to the biggest city in China and doing film was almost a no-brainer. I grew up in New York City, and I’ve found few other cities that match the energy and vibrant street life I’m accustomed to like Shanghai. Our day job — at a local film production company — takes us back and forth between Beijing and Shanghai among other Chinese cities, though we are based in Shanghai.

I’m pretty sure none of us want to be sportswriters. We all followed Deadspin for a while and loved the community of smartasses that Will created. We thought it made perfect sense for Deadspin to have some sort of China/Olympic coverage, so we pitched it to Will and he seemed to like the idea. My interest lies more in the way China is handling the attention than any sporting event or medal count. Though Chinese people seem very pleased to have an influx of foreign guests walking their streets, sometimes it seems that the government would be a lot happier if everyone stayed home and watched it on TV. The hospitality industry might not be too fond of that, but the Public Security Bureau sure would. There is a palpable nervousness in the air here and an understandable desire for everything to go absolutely perfectly. Seriously, if you’re in Beijing, try having a staring contest with a soldier (there’s one posted like every 15 feet throughout Beijing). You will win. You can’t do that in most places.

“Deadspin Beijing Bureau Correspondent #2”: I studied journalism and Chinese in college. Actually, I studied Chinese in high school, too, but took a break from it and restarted in college. I didn’t realize until I went to China in 2006 that Chinese was a language I wanted to fully understand. When the three of us got to know each other in Shanghai, I think things definitely clicked. We shared a similar sense of humor, we wanted to test the creative waters after college (meaning I don’t think any of us wanted get pulled into office jobs) and we were hooked on China.

Former Deadspin editor Will Leitch described your original meeting in New York this way: “They originally contacted me about a year and a half ago, wanting to do Black Table-like coverage of the Games. We met at Art Bar in the West Village, and they had a whole PowerPoint presentation set up. It was rather impressive, actually.” What exactly did you show him? And why did you approach Deadspin in the first place?
“Bureau Chief”: What’s PowerPoint? We showed Will some video projects of ours, namely a short film about streetball in China that I had worked on during an internship in Shanghai. I discovered the Black Table from reading Deadspin… and loved it. As the meeting progressed, I think we realized that Will and the three of us were very much on the same page about how we wanted to cover the Olympics. At the time, Will was really the only one writing posts on the site, and he seemed really excited to expense some drinks. I don’t know how successful we’ve been in providing “Black Table”-like coverage of Beijing, whatever that means, but it is certainly a source that influenced us.

“Correspondent #1”: One thing we showed him was a short video of us participating in a snake dinner in South China. We chose Deadspin because it fit with our intention of guerilla style journalism (no press passes, no official accreditation, etc.). Will saw it as an opportunity to expand Deadspin. He told us not to worry about focusing on sports, to introduce China to the readers to build a context against which the Olympics could later be presented. In trying to present China to his audience, we’ve also learned a lot along the way reading other China blogs and staying abreast of offbeat, less mainstream news.

What’s your approach to covering the Games? And did you even bother applying for credentials?
“Bureau Chief”: We looked into applying for official credentials for the Games, but found out that the deadline to apply was in September of 2006 — the week we arrived in China for the first time. So that was never a real possibility. Our thinking was that the actual sports of the Olympics would be pretty well-covered by people more qualified than the three of us. We thought we could make a more relevant contribution by writing about the social aspects of the Games and the particular, novel things you learn about China by living here.

“Correspondent #2”: Access is certainly not something that Deadspin worries about, and it’s certainly not something we worry about. We would like to be able to go to every event we want to, but a journalist’s access in China comes with a lot of headaches. Also, we like the idea of being under the radar and producing stories that won’t have us getting into trouble later on. Our anonymity grants us this, to be sure, but our lack of access from the get-go does, too. We don’t have much inhibiting us from saying what we want to say and showing what we want to show. That’s an important aspect to Deadspin’s charm, no matter where its posts are coming from.

We want to provide Deadspin viewers with the Olympics from a local, street-level perspective. That means we’ll be doing stories that people who are up-to-date with the news from China won’t see anywhere else. We definitely get a lot of good stories from established news providers, but these are stories that do away with the cliché themes — like how China’s booming cities are a boiling point for Eastern and Western values or pollution, for that matter. Pollution is definitely a newsworthy thing to write about, considering China promised to have its air cleaned up for the games, but everyone knows about China’s struggle with the environment. And God knows China’s government did stress over this and put a lot of effort into fixing it. I would like for the games to go smoothly, believe it or not. This doesn’t mean that I want our stories to be soft or without the grime, though.

What do you think of the Western media’s coverage so far? Do any of them have a clue about China? Are they making an earnest effort to acclimate?
“Bureau Chief”: There are some great correspondents doing work out here — Evan Osnos of the Chicago Tribune comes to mind. And there are some clueless ones, too. Here’s a hint: They’re staying at hotels right now. I think most writers make an earnest attempt to get to know the place, but some recently arrived correspondents — and we aren’t exempt from this group; we’ve only been here a year — kind of botch it. A quick vignette: We were walking around last night and were approached by a Pakistani-born journalist from the Times of Oman. He had just arrived that morning and was accompanied by a frazzled and bored-looking Chinese security guard. The “Oman in Beijing” as his business card read, asked us desperately where he could buy some bread to go with the barbeque he just managed to get his security guard sidekick to purchase. What the hell is a guy like him, who just arrived that day and could barely feed himself, going to write about? And he told us (for longer than we cared to listen) that he had covered four Olympics.

A writer for The Beijinger, an expat mag here, had a great piece last week about the cliché stories to expect in the next three weeks from newly arrived journalists skimming the, admittedly fascinating, surface.

“Correspondent #2”: Western media coverage has been all over the map. We think people have realized you can only write so many articles complaining about pollution and Internet censorship. Granted Beijing has gone against its word on several promises made in order to get the Olympics, and this is certainly newsworthy, but the more interesting stories are about social change in China and especially what’s going to happen next month when the circus is over. Will the security lockdown remain? Will foreign journalists lose their freedom to travel and interview? I guess we’ll have to see.

What would you like to happen at the Games? A confrontation? A major disruption? Do you intend to cover the protests and/or any crackdowns on day-to-day life in Beijing?
“Bureau Chief”: Personally, I don’t have any expectations for the Games. That is to say, I guess, that I think anything could happen. No one wants something terrible to happen, but our instincts definitely have us excited for the possibility of a major incident to cover.

“Correspondent #1”: Nobody wants to see anything terrible happen at the Olympics. With that said, it’d be a lot easier to root for a hiccup-free two weeks if China had made good on its promises. The attitude towards foreigners has noticeably shifted in the past few months with more crackdowns and restrictions. The city feels incredibly secure right now, so if anything goes down it’ll probably be isolated and contained quickly before most press would get wind of it. As for protests, they have to be confined to special protest zones set up far from the Olympic venues. They’ll most likely be small and full of non-Chinese, as any Chinese person would most likely be monitored and potentially harassed after the fact. It just wouldn’t be worth it for them.

Are you worried at all that the government is looking for you? Or do they have better things to do? I figured there’s a reason this interview is anonymous…
“Correspondent #1”: We’re not too worried about our coverage getting us in any trouble. We’re pretty under the radar and we plan to stay that way. Even if something big breaks, acting like a tourist and speaking a bit of Mandarin goes a long way. There are always tricks to getting around Internet censors though you really never know. We think there are bigger concerns than a few sarcastic freelance sports writers.

“Bureau Chief”: The 50,000 members of the Beijing Olympic Security Team definitely have better (read: East Turkestan Islamic Movement) to worry about than we three.

What are your post-Games plans, and what do you realistically hope to accomplish, both in terms of coverage and potential career advancement?
“Bureau Chief”: We’ll go back to our normal jobs after the Olympics are over. I’d love to do creative work in China in the future. None of us came here solely for the Olympics.

It’s hard to say what we hope to accomplish at Deadspin, but I will say it has been cool to observe the reactions to our pieces as we’ve gone along the last few months. For instance, in our “Beyond Beijing” piece, I imagine it was the first time most readers ever heard of some of the cities (Tianjin, Shenyang, Qinhuangdao) we mentioned. And hell, we just graduated. We’re writing about whatever we want for a site we really like, and people actually read (some even enjoy!) the stuff we write. It’s pretty cool.

“Correspondent #1”: At a minimum, we hope that readers have gained a bit of perspective, understanding, and even appreciation of Chinese culture. We get a few comments that make us cringe on each post, but we also get encouraging emails from readers who say they’ve learned something from our coverage.

We didn’t just come to China for the Olympics. We’re actually hoping that things calm down a bit after the games are over. We really enjoy it here and we’ll probably spend another year out here before returning to the States. The experience has been great. Writing with six hands on the keyboards isn’t always the easiest thing, but we’ve had fun doing it and I’m sure we’ll look back on it fondly.

Greg Lindsay is a frequent contributor to mediabistro.com.

On the first weekend of New York Fashion Week, the rather staid Wall Street Journal unveiled its glossier side in the form of new luxury magazine WSJ. It appears at a rather delicate moment in the histories of newspapers, magazines, and The Wall Street Journal itself. Newspapers are tanking, and magazines are struggling to drum up ad pages, but magazines published by newspapers — especially slick tomes devoted to the luxe life — are doing gangbusters, the best example The New York Times‘ style magazine, T. This genre-within-a-genre is by now old hat in London, where the Financial Times‘s How To Spend It and the Times of London’s Luxx have scooped up ad pages for years. That the Journal would choose to launch its own magazine in their molds at this moment is a reflection of the paper’s new direction under owner Rupert Murdoch and his deputy, managing editor Robert Thomson. And so is their choice to edit the magazine, Tina Gaudoin.

Gaudoin was editing Luxx in London when she was offered the job at WSJ. Planning for a glossy was already underway when her hiring was announced, but the Journal insider widely expected to conceive and edit it was unceremoniously taken off the project. For the last eight months, she has been prepping for her editor-in-chief debut on American shoes, tapping a handful of luxury and lifestyle editors who might otherwise have never been on the paper’s radar. Mediabistro spoke with Gaudoin on the eve of the magazine’s launch about the culture of the Journal, her tiny staff, and an autobiographical roman a clef — Not Just Prada: Real Life Adventures In Magazines — she’s proposed but hasn’t sold or written about (you guessed it) her adventures in the magazine business.

Name: Tina Gaudoin
Position: Editor-in-chief, WSJ.
Resume: Began as Tatler beauty editor, worked for Liz Tilberis as beauty editor on relaunch of Harper’s Bazaar, senior writer at American Vogue, presenter Q2, deputy editor of Tatler, founding editor Frank magazine, feature writer The Times, editorial director iVillage UK, style director of Saturday Times magazine, launch editor Luxx which brings us here…
Birthday: January 4
Hometown: Norwich, Norfolk, England
Education: BA honors in English literature from Lancaster University
Marital status: Married to Ford Ennals
First section of the Sunday Times: Page one, then Vows: “I love backstories”
Favorite television shows: Grey’s Anatomy and re-runs of Black Adder
Guilty pleasure: Raisinets and Flipz
Last book read: The Size of the World by Joan Sibler

How “British” is WSJ., in the sense that it borrows from the editorial sensibility of Luxx or How To Spend It? How do those magazines compare against luxury titles in the United States, and did you set out to give your magazine that accent?

I was very aware I was coming to a huge brand, and a hugely respected brand. I’ve tried to be very careful with that, and I’ve tried to be respectful of the Journal reader, who is intelligent, opinionated, and not afraid to share their opinions. The Journal reader is very discerning not only about what they consume in terms of words, but what they consume in terms of product. I have been very careful of that, and I have been very respectful of the Journal‘s American roots, because I think it would be a mistake to make anything too anglicized. So, no, this is not an anglicized magazine. Does it have an arch sense of humor in some places? Yes it does, which might be slightly more surprising to an American reader who is used to consuming general interest magazines. But no, it is not an Anglophile’s magazine.

Were you surprised by the lack of humor in American magazines, and how Americans approach luxury?

I can’t speak for anyone else, but my perspective is that if you are spending money or living a particular lifestyle you have worked very hard to achieve, you want to have some fun with it. You want to have fun spending your money and living your life, and that’s what we have tried to inject into this magazine. Do I think a sense of humor in Americans is missing? No, I do not. I think it’s a different sense of humor. It might be less arch, but it’s certainly apparent in some magazines.

What’s your favorite story in the first issue, or what story is most representative of what you’re trying to do?

What we tried to do was use people we think Journal readers would be interested in who exemplify the way they might want to live their life. So, for example, I have a piece about a trial lawyer who changed his life entirely and became a chocolate maker. I have a “Humorous Review of the Mundane,” and starting off we’re doing a review of airline safety videos. I have a bigger piece about competition, which is called “The Competition,” knowing full well a lot of Journal readers are in business and that their whole mindset is in doing better or succeeding. I have a piece about [Oracle chief executive] Larry Ellison and [aerospace engineer Ernesto] Bertarelli going head-to-head for the America’s Cup. And I have a piece about collecting, and why American folk art is the new collectible.

How did you go about assembling your staff? Your masthead is notable in the sense that you built a team from scratch from Men’s Vogue, Travel + Leisure, Tatler, and House & Garden. Was it your decision to bring in so many outsiders to create this magazine, or were you yourself part of that decision?

From the outside, it looks different than what it really is. I knew I was going to be using a lot of Journal staffers for reporting and some editing, so what I looked for was what the Journal reporters didn’t have experience in — and that was working in a magazine environment. What we tried to do was compliment the staff we already had with some “outsourced” luxury magazine people, if you like.

How does your staff here compare with your resources running Luxx, and with the famous British magazine model, with much smaller staffs. If I recall correctly, you ran Luxx with six people.

There are eight people running this magazine. The model there is much more lean, definitely, and yes, I have brought that with me from Europe. But in the same way that I ran Luxx with a stable of staff, I had the outsourcing at hand with the Times [of London] reporters I used, so the principle remains the same. I have a small staff here, but then I outsource a lot to general reporters. The resources I need are there, but I don’t need a big staff to run a magazine. (I might regret that quote later; don’t use that.)

What’s the strategic role of WSJ. within the paper and within Dow Jones? One of great ironies of both magazines and newspapers at the moment is that while neither medium seems to be doing particularly well at the moment, lifestyle magazines published by newspapers are advertising magnets. Is your job to create a vehicle for doing the same?

To bring you back to what The Wall Street Journal stands for — it has a very strong separation between church and state. I can’t speak for other luxury magazines, but I can say that there is definitely a clear line drawn between advertising and editorial — if that is what you are getting at.

Then, if you’re asking me, “Do I feel embarrassed about the fact that this is a luxury advertising vehicle?” the answer to your question is: I would be, if it were, but it’s not. And I’ll tell you why it’s not. Our readers are so discerning and so vocal that it is not something they would accept. I didn’t set out to create a catalogue of luxury goods that people could buy. I set out to create a magazine about a lifestyle that people might want to participate in.

Why did you accept this assignment, and why were you seemingly the first choice to do it? (If there were other names floated, none were ever leaked to the press.)

I had always wanted to work back in the States. I had lived and worked here before [as a junior member of Liz Tilberis’ team at Harper’s Bazaar], and I had worked very closely with Robert [Thomson, the Journal‘s now-managing editor] at the Times [of London] for five-and-a-half years, and Robert was coming here and it was that segue that led me here. It took me five minutes to make up my mind.

A practical question: how should freelancers approach WSJ.? Between your own staffers, the Journal reporters available, and your own openness to freelancers, what should they be pitching you? What percentage of the magazine will be freelance-driven?

We’re still working it out because this is our first issue, but I think ultimately we’ll probably take about 30 percent freelance. The way that works is that people will contact my senior editor Janelle Carrigan or my deputy editor Owen Phillips and talk to them about ideas for stories. What am I looking for? I’m looking for curious, intelligent reporting, and I’m looking for the story-behind-the-story, because I feel so much that you can understand a lot about the product or a person generally through general media. What readers are really looking for is more information and a different story. How do you get product? How did they get to where they were? What do we know about them that we didn’t know already? It’s just a different angle — a more questioning angle, really.

How does this experience compare with your stint at Liz Tilberis’ Harper’s Bazaar?

Look, that was just the most amazing experience. Working with Elizabeth Tilberis… she’s a genius. Fabien Baron, he’s equally a genius. It was a very intense, glossy magazine experience working with amazing photographers — those sorts of opportunities do not happen every day. That was then, this is now, as you know and I have described to you. This experience is very different. I was much more junior when I was at Harper’s Bazaar, but I did have a great time, I’ve got to tell you.

The weight of launching something like this is quite considerable given the brand, given the expectations, and given the readership. This is a tricky job, it’s an enjoyable job, but I knew this wasn’t going to be easy.

Do you think that your experience at Harper’s Bazaar — the enormous budgets, the stop-at-nothing pursuit of luxury and glamour — is a thing of the past? Is the essence of editing a magazine today doing more with less?

Listen, I don’t know what people spend anymore because I’ve been in the newspaper world for quite some time now. But I think it’s a lot and you just can’t justify those budgets any more, certainly from where I’m sitting — they might have very different things to say at Conde Nast and those magazines — but from where I’m sitting there’s no space for that.

Please pardon me if I’ve mistaken you for a different Tina Gaudoin, but Amazon U.K. contains a listing for a book entitled
Not Just Prada: Real Life Adventures in Magazines, by one Tina Gaudoin. Is that you, and if so, what exactly is the book about? Based on the publisher’s description, it appears to be a novel about a “Tina” working in magazines.

I’ve got to tell you that, that is indeed me. I have in fact written a book, but I haven’t signed a contract, so I’m kind of curious as to where that’s coming from. It exists, but I have no idea when I’m going to publish it. You can tell I’m really surprised that it’s there, so I’ll have to go and take a look. But that’s all I can say right now about that.

Greg Lindsay is a frequent contributor to mediabistro.com.

Andrea Fella can legitimately say that design runs in her blood. It’s just that she won’t unless cornered. Fella, 35, is the art director of Nylon, the messy chic fashion magazine for girls who worship Marc Jacobs and spend their rent checks at Bumble & Bumble achieving the perfect bedhead look. Fella took over the magazine’s day-to-day design duties a little more than a year ago at the behest of Patrick Mitchell, the former Fast Company designer-turned-consultant hired to conduct a redesign. At the time, Fella was considering ditching the field completely. In her brief career, she’d already bounced from startup design shops to jobs at I.D. and The New York Times Magazine. But she found she couldn’t walk away—from the Nylon job or from design. Part of that may have to do with her father, Ed Fella, a commercial artist and typographer who worked in obscurity for 30 years before he was hailed a readymade genius by the avant design crowd. Andrea Fella isn’t just an art director struggling to produce a magazine every month—in her world, she’s also stuck being celebrity offspring.

Mediabistro: So, how are you enjoying Nylon? Do you find the relative lack of overhead invigorating, or is designing a fashion magazine on a miniscule budget one long exercise in troubleshooting?

Fella: I love it. I love it because you have to work with certain obstructions in any job, and for me, financial ones always push creativity. That said, there are limitations—”This photographer just won’t do it for this price. Damn.” But what happens then, is you have the room to do it yourself, which is pretty amazing. I shoot [photography] for the magazine under both my name and a pen name. The photo director shoots stuff. [Editor/owner] Marvin [Scott Jarrett] has always shot for the magazine. I love that, because half my interests are in photography and it’s so satisfying to be that involved and not just the middle man. Instead of “I’m going to commission this, and then lay it out here” you just commission yourself and say, “How would I do this?” You get that feeling all the time as a designer, especially when you are working in a situation like The New York Times Magazine, where everything you do has to go to a big person. You have to have a certain name in terms of an illustrator or photographer. It’s just frustrating, because you know what you want, and sometimes you can do it yourself.

Mediabistro: That sounds like the complete opposite of how you felt about design when you offered this job. You had started a two-person studio with Chris Dixon, who joined New York magazine after you left for Nylon, but you weren’t really working on much.

Fella: I think I took about eight months off, and just focused on other things. And also realized at that point I had to decide whether I was going to stay in magazine design. Because it felt like I ended up there, but I thought I’d be in interactive design, or I thought I’d actually be a writer, and I just kept going with it instead and I wasn’t sure whether that was my calling.

Mediabistro: And it was at that point that Patrick Mitchell found you?

Fella: Yeah, he did.

Mediabistro: And you needed him to bring you back?

Fella: Well yeah, I kind of did, in a weird way. The time off kind of did it for me. I missed it. And I realized I really liked it. I really did like design. But I wasn’t sure about magazines, though. I really wasn’t. But Patrick helped me out. It was funny; he called me about his magazine opportunity, and I was like, “Oh, that sounds good.” Because we had spoken once or twice when I was at the Times about Fast Company, but I wasn’t moving to Boston. So, we met up and I was like, “Oh, I hope it’s anything but fashion, I don’t want to do that.” And sure enough, it’s Nylon.

I had interviewed for an idea of Nylon before it became reality. In that case, it was fashion, but also “real life.” What do real people wear? Real girls and no models. And it was under a different editor. It was Marvin’s idea, but other people were involved. And I was very excited about it. It was the first thing I was excited about while I was at The New York Times Magazine, and I had interviewed for a couple of other things, but this one sounded good. Then it all changed and it became what it became. I think it was great in the beginning, and then it just kind of got messy—I think it wasn’t sure of what it was doing, maybe. But when Patrick called me, I just thought “I don’t want to do this.” But then I had dinner with Patrick and I just realized I really wanted to work with him. And Marvin is smart, he is open-minded, he is rare. He is definitely rare in the magazine world. And I realized I would definitely redesign it, and I would agree to do three issues for Patrick and then move on.

Mediabistro: But you didn’t

Fella: But I loved it.

You know, we went through a sort of second redesign once we’d done the first. Once I sort of worked with the people there, I figured it out that we had gone in a direction that was a little too uptight, a little too perfect. And Marvin was like, “Fuck it up a little. I just needed something looser, organic.”

Mediabistro: Speaking of organic, how have you grown into your role at Nylon? You’re obviously not a typical art director if you’re shooting spreads yourself. How does the process work there?

Fella: We give each other space to create, and people overlap roles all the time. And I love that. It happens, and I don’t worry too much about how it happens—whether I’m involved in everything. I think the people are great. The photo director and the fashion director are wonderful. Sometimes they can create something, and it’ll just be done. Other times, we discuss it and I want to be more involved, and they just let me be interested in what I’m interested in. Some things you want to be involved in, but then, when you are designing them, it’s also good to step back. It’s good to be handed something where you don’t know every step involved.

That’s how The New York Times Magazine would work. You would just be handed stuff because there were so many people involved—photo editors and directors—that you barely had a say, if you had any say. And then you would have a fresh take on the material. You are not concerned. I get very concerned with all of the details and pleasing everyone, and sometimes that goes too far—”Oh, well, she really wanted this person to look this way, or this really has to be…” You’ve got all of that in your head, and it can be hard then, to just make it look the best it can, and to tell the story in the way that the audience is going to see it and not just the way it looks in your own head.

Mediabisto: Well, what is the role of personal style, then? Do you try to avoid having one? Is that how you were able to go from the Times to Nylon?

Fella: I think you just figure it out. I don’t have a strong personal philosophy, per se. There are certain personal constraints designers have, and therefore it makes them have a very personal style, whereas I know what I like. I know how I see balance, how I see form. I know how I want to respond to both the narrative of the story and the imagery of the photos that I’m up against. It kind of comes out of the material itself, and in doing so I guess you just form a personal style. It’s hard for me to see. People on the outside seem able to see it, but it’s not what I’m trying to do. I think it’s a weird combination of my entire design history. It just comes through. There is an openness, almost a naiveté, about things, and the different schools of thought I’ve experienced—whether it was the early ’90s in Los Angeles, or The New York Times Magazine—all sort of come together in what comes out.

Mediabistro: And how much of it is familial? Considering you consciously decided in college not to become a designer, yet did so anyway, then nearly left the field, but came back, how did growing up with Ed Fella shape you as a designer? And do you think that designers are perhaps born and not made, i.e. do you feel you have an innate visual sense, or learned design at a very early age by simply being near your father while he worked?

Fella: Yeah, I think that’s something you can’t avoid. Looking back, even though I didn’t know what he was doing (I was playing in the next room) he was around me for most of my growing up because he was a single father, and therefore we were just with him during work, play, whatever. It was much more intense than, say, somebody who goes off to work and then comes home.

But it’s much more about the way he sees the world. I mean, that’s the influence. How to look at things, how to be open-minded, how to see that the vernacular is beautiful. It was how to just relate to design more than anything did, or what he was doing, because I was not conscious of it at all growing up. Nor was he. He went back to college when he was 40, and I was in high school. It just sort of ended when I graduated from high school. He left to go teach at CalArts, and I had to decide whether to go to college, whether to work in a gas station, whatever.

He didn’t have any notoriety until I was at least three years into college—when the first article on him came out—and I was kind of stunned. I knew he’d been working toward this his whole life, but finally he got noticed, he was influencing things.

But I sort of turned away from that, obviously. I was like, “That’s intimidating. I’m going to think about something else, whether it be two-dimensional design, or interactive, or whatever…”

As for born versus made, I don’t know. But I can say to you that my mother was an artist and a graphic designer, and the same with my dad. So, yeah. It’s in my blood for sure, but there was absolutely no formal design training going on at all growing up. I think there are certain qualities you need as a designer, and if you don’t have those qualities it’s just really difficult. If you are not detail-oriented and you just don’t look at certain things it’s hard, but maybe it means, “Ok, well, maybe this person is creative in a way that means they can be a creative director some day, and that would suit them because they like the ideas and they like the over all big picture.” But when it comes right down to it, they just aren’t paying attention.

I am detail-oriented and always have been, and I love that. I want to be hands-on, and that’s all I think I do know. I do not want to be in meetings all day telling other people what I think they should do. That will just never suit me, or at least I don’t think it will. You never know about the future, but at this point with Nylon, I’m hands-on everything, and that’s meaningful, and I spend as much time color-correcting at pre-press as I do designing the story. And that’s really important to me.

Mediabistro: Considering how you’ve bounced around and experienced a crisis of faith, how important is it to you to hang out with other designers? For example, I know you through a friend who was the art director at a magazine I worked at, and you’re friends with Emily Crawford at Travel + Leisure, who you know through Patrick Mitchell, and so on. Do you think it’s important for designers to hang out with other designers to vet ideas and learn from each other through osmosis? I mean, all magazine editors seem to do is hang out with other magazine editors.

Fella: I highly recommend getting out of that world entirely if that’s all you have. I definitely when through a period of several years when I was much more involved in the design community, and then I dropped out. When Chris [Dixon] and I were working together in our own studio, we had all kinds of people coming through, designers and illustrators, but there was a period when I stepped out of that and it felt really good to meet people who were not at all in design, who didn’t know what the hell I was doing.

They see Nylon and they don’t judge it. But at the same time I just met up with [famed designer and typographer] Barry Deck. He’s my friend, and I asked him to give me his opinion of Nylon and critique it. And it was fascinating because, “Wow! That’s what he’s seeing when he looks at this.” And he is not the audience, so that’s good too, because you are designing for both your actual audience and your design peers.

But I think you can get too caught up in just your design peers—”What are they doing? What am I doing, and should I be doing this?” And I think that can really hinder you in feeling good about what you’re doing communicating to an audience outside of that.

At this point I feel free of that, and as I said, during that period when I decided, “Yes, I do love design, I do want to do it,” I also let go of the idea that I was going to make history like my father. I never wanted to, but I had that weight over me, as I’m sure as a lot of children of famous or successful people do. And you know, it’s my path and I have to do this. And my design is very different, it’s much more about collaboration and the people I work with and what comes out of that, rather than my mark on history, or my mark in any of that.

Greg Lindsay a freelance writer in Brooklyn, has covered media for Inside.com and Women’s Wear Daily

This is the last dispatch you’ll see from me for a while, because it’s time I bunkered down to write. It feels as if I’ve written more to date about the writing process than I have for the actual book, even though I’m almost 25,000 words in. So what if I haven’t finished two chapters yet? (And so much for writing more efficiently.)

More frustrating is that I’m still seeking a groove. Self-help books and collegial advice aside, I’m struggling with the typical self-doubt and procrastination on top of the fact that my work routine keeps veering all over the road. Just to give two examples: whereas I started out on this project with a typed outline and a daily start time of 8 a.m., I’m currently working off index cards John McPhee-style and I find myself only beginning to write around 3 p.m. (I keep going until I’m too tired to think clearly anymore). Both seem to work… for now.

I keep waiting to hit a point where the writing process will feel like an assembly line — the smooth production of polished prose — and I’m beginning to wonder if I ever will. By now I’m far enough up the mountain in terms of word count that a major fall would kill me (or at least my timetable) even though I’m seemingly no closer to the peak.

These days, I wear the same ragged pair of jeans and comfy cardigan and runs errands looking as if I just fell out of bed. Some mornings I run into a friend who looks the same way, Jeff Howe, except the look in his eyes is even more frantic, because he’s just about finished with his book, Crowdsourcing. Jeff’s been six months ahead of me the entire way, and he warned me at the outset “guard your headspace” against all distractions. I complained to him the other day that I was scared about the middle frames of the process, and he just sighed.

“The middle was the hardest time, and I’m facing the second-hardest time now, which is getting ready to go into edits,” he said. “I had busted my ass, but it sill felt as abstract as it did in the beginning, like I was filling a bottomless hole. The middle part is maybe when my internal deadlines were most useful for me. I made checklists of everything I needed to do each day, and some days I wouldn’t write anything at all, because I was reporting that day.” And it was the reporting that carried him through, because “I would find myself on roads I hadn’t planned to travel, but it often turned out that those were the most fortuitous routes. And that really saved me, because it no longer felt like I was working on a book or a chapter, but was working on sections of a narrative.”

That’s one lesson I’ve thoroughly learned. While in Bangkok this summer, I was saved from a hopelessly tangled narrative by an introduction to someone working in a field that touches directly upon the themes of the book. I can’t say what or who, only that I’ve successfully pitched Fast Company a long feature on the subject, meaning that one of the toughest and most confusing chapters will now pay for itself and have a SWAT team of editors work it over before I pass it along to my own. What I like even more is that it now feels like a discrete thing, a task that’s manageable and within my powers to master and polish to a high gloss.

On past occasions when I’d bumped into Jeff, we’d talked about what it meant to be magazine writers working on books. We each had an ear and an understanding for how a feature should sound and read — the overall sense of compression and the telegraphing of intent early on, high up in the nut graf. I still haven’t acclimated to the long narrative lines, and it took him forever, too. Finally, after some advice from his editor, he’d figured out where to plant signposts in the narrative to point the way forward without letting the line go slack. That’s something I still have to learn.

Jeff had one more piece of advice: keep the difference between “strategy” and “tactics” clear in my head. Have a strategic vision for where you’re going with the book, but the metaphorical war is, in fact, won in the trenches — the daily writing to make word count and hit self-imposed deadlines. “My days are more or less spent working for tactical victory, not strategic victory,” he said, and by that he really meant the daily grind.

So this column is going on hiatus until sometime in the spring, once I have some major news (and hopefully some major insights) to report. In in the meantime I’ll be in my office, writing.

1. Don’t be afraid to keep changing your writing tactics if what you’re doing isn’t working.
After pooh-poohing the McPhee index card method one month, I was using it the next because I need an organizational method that was more fluid than Microsoft Word, yet I didn’t want to take the time to learn project management software. And it seems to work, so I’m sticking with it. (For now, at least.)
2. Dump all distractions (like this column).
Another piece of advice Jeff Howe gave me in the early going: “Guard your headspace.” He meant I should protect myself against anyone or anything wanting a piece of my time or attention. Stephen Pressfield makes the same point in the War of Art: They may be noble, and they may be necessary, but any distraction is a form of Resistance, and need to be dealt with somehow.
3. Come to terms with the fact that you’re not writing a story.
The pace you’re used to as a magazine writer is unsustainable over a book. A runner who’s trained all of his or her whole life to run 1600m can’t make the jump to marathon distances without re-learning how to run the race. I’m still trying to build up my stamina.

Greg Lindsay is a frequent contributor to mediabistro.com.

In our new AG series, freelancer Greg Lindsay discusses writing his first book. He’s filing monthly dispatches detailing the struggles and successes of writing the first draft of Aerotropolis, due this spring. In this third installment, he attempts to return to work after his wedding interrupted his flow.

I haven’t learned much since my last column, because I haven’t been writing much, either. But I did do one extremely fun thing in that span that I hope I will never do again, especially while writing a book: get married.

And not only did I get married (on November 3rd), which will stop any writing project or attempts to do work of any kind cold, but the wedding itself was followed by a week of sitting on the beach and navigating the frozen streets of Montreal, neither of which was conducive to writing. Not that it didn’t gnaw at me, however. By the end of our stay in Cananda, I was fidgety, distracted, and angry at myself for not working. It wasn’t as if I was about to sit down in our hotel room and start plugging away at the end of our pre-honeymoon (the real thing is two weeks in Tokyo next spring, near the end of the book … I hope), but I knew that was where I should be right that moment, and it was killing me that I wasn’t.

When I finally made it back to my desk the following Monday, however, the opposite had happened. I was too fidgety and distracted to settle in and get to work. Part of it had to do with the fact that I wasn’t prepared — I didn’t have an outline yet for the next chapter, and I was waiting for more material from my co-author — but mostly it was because I was scared. The material had gotten away from me, and I couldn’t psyche myself up enough to chase it. It didn’t help that I essentially had a second wedding bearing down on me, or at least a second reception back at home in Illinois over Thanksgiving. Even if I got back into a rhythm, the holiday trip would knock me off again.

I was still in this sad state last week when I slipped out of work early to attend a party at Fast Company‘s offices. I had just arrived when I was warmly greeted by Jeff Gordinier, an editor-at-large at Details who I knew in passing but hadn’t seen in years. Jeff has the job most magazine writers dream about — he’s the star writer at a general interest men’s magazine, filing long dispatches and think pieces about whatever catches his eye. He’d spent the past year or so expanding one of those pieces — a rallying cry for now-overlooked “Generation X” — into a book coming out next March, entitled X Saves The World.

It came out quickly in the course of small talk that I was frustrated and miserable, to which Jeff nodded sagely. “The trail goes cold,” he said. He described his own exasperations in trying to write his book, which were made worse by the demands of being a father to two young children, ages five and two. But he’d discovered a secret weapon that had sharpened his focus, removed his self-doubt, and allowed him to plunge ahead to the finish line, and he was going to share with it me. (And no, it wasn’t Adderall.)

It was a self-help book. And its name was The War of Art. Written by novelist/screenwriter Steven Pressfield (who’s most famous for The Legend of Bagger Vance), it’s a thin slip of a book, written as a series of exhortations aimed at anyone who would undertake an epic creative endeavor or personal transformation. I bought a copy the next day.

Pressfield’s organizing principle is the concept of “Resistance,” which stands in for all the forces internal and (seemingly) external that holds one back from creation. Maybe the most common form of Resistance is the endless procrastination only made easier by the Web, while other forms manifest themselves as a fear of failure, or a fear of success, or of obligations to family, friends, and other work. Throughout the book, Pressfield urges the reader to become “a pro,” to put in the work every day and focus one’s energies to the utmost during that time. When we give into Resistance, he says, that’s when writers, artists, et. al are at their most miserable and depressed, lashing out at the people around them because they’re failing to put in the work and they know it (which is exactly how I felt in Montreal).

It was invigorating as hell. “Over the past few weeks I’ve found myself cheesily and annoyingly recommending The War of Art to friends and acquaintances,” including a number of magazine writers and editor struggling with their own books, Jeff wrote the next day via email. “I feel like Joel Osteen.”

“Ironically, though, I didn’t come across The War of Art until I was already finished with the first draft of my own book. D’oh. But when I looked at it, I realized in retrospect that I had fallen prey to pretty much every single one of the bullshit procrastination tricks that Pressfield sheds a glaring light on. Sometimes I wonder how many brilliant books are not being written because of the irresistible magic of YouTube.”

“Magazine writers tend to be hopelessly ADD,” he added in another email. “They’re wired to jump from one topic to another. I mean, over just the past few months at Details I’ve written about a Vietnam War reenactment in the woods of Mississippi, a conference in Texas for people with obsessive-compulsive disorder, a Marine from my hometown who was killed in Iraq, the Olly Girls from Sunset Tan, and John Lydon of the Sex Pistols and Public Image Ltd. You get used to that pace, and that only makes it harder to stay focused on a book manuscript for months on end”

“You’ll occasionally hear magazine writers complaining about the pace of their work — ‘man, I just wish things would slow down,’ but then a book deal arrives and the pace does settle down and the writer has no idea what to do.”

After reading Pressfield’s book and talking to Jeff, at least I know what to do next, and that’s sit down, close the browser window containing my fantasy football team (my procrastination aid par excellance), and put in the work. It’s time to stare down my Resistance.

Tips on staying focused:
1. Focus on productive hours Once again, it’s not about the quantity of work or clockwatching, but stringing together uninterrupted hours for unbroken concentration. I’ve given up on hitting a word quota-for-quota’s sake, but spending eight hours at my desk and wasting three of them reading blogs isn’t the solution, either.
2. Respond to distractions What I took away from Pressfield’s book and from talking to Jeff is the realization that how I react to interruptions (like my wedding or the holidays) is ultimately more important than seeking to sequester myself for the duration of writing the book. It’s easy to make excuses and get angry (with my wife or myself) that there isn’t enough time in the day; it’s a lot hard to just sit down and do it.
3. Use your ADD effectively Jeff also mentioned in subsequent emails that a few of his more constructive procrastination aids (i.e. assignments for Details and other reporting) actually resulted in great material for the book. Magazine writers burning to scratch their ADD itch might want to pitch stories that can be repurposed later for the book. I intend to do the same thing next month in a possible assignment for Fast Company.

Greg Lindsay is a frequent contributor to mediabistro.com and other publications. He’s working on his first book.

In our new AG series, freelancer Greg Lindsay discusses writing his first book. He’s filing monthly dispatches detailing the struggles and successes of writing the first draft of Aerotropolis, due this spring. In this second installment, he describes the “growing pains” he feels transitioning from magazine-speak to book-length prose.

Keep on keepin’ on

The words “Day 23” are dutifully taped to the wall above my desk, as Charles Fishman advised, but I wouldn’t have guessed those words would look so recriminatory so early in writing my book.

Just to quickly recap: I started writing Aerotropolis on October 1, starting from Chapter 2, which is set in and around the FedEx and UPS package sorting hubs in Memphis and Louisville, respectively. I budgeted two weeks and 10,000 words for the chapter, assuming I could churn out a thousand respectable words worth keeping each day.

That assumption was wrong on several counts. I am 12,000 words in, and there is still no end in sight. (I have an outline, but I’m afraid it’s an outline for a 20,000-word chapter). I’ve struggled to hit my self-imposed daily deadlines. That’s in spite of the fact that I’ve become a zealot about word count, if you define a zealot as “one who redoubles his efforts while losing sight of the goal.” Writing 1,000 words a day (a la Anthony Burgess, who could write twice as much before the pubs opened) has become a goal unto itself on some days, and that’s usually the copy I throw out the next day because I veered off the outline and stopped paying attention to the greater goal.

I’d like to think I’m experiencing the same growing pains that every magazine writer feels the first time he or she sits down to write a book. The rhythms are all different; there is no self-imposed tone by the editor or publication, and the “luxury” of so much white space is very deceiving. And so I find myself adopting different tones midway through the chapter; the John McPhee-style lead now seems self-indulgent and overwrought, and I’m refusing to cut the chapter down myself because I recognize the impulse to chop it into a 3,000-word feature with easy nut grafs up front.

I have made some good decisions. For example, I roped my research assistant into spending several days in my living room transcribing the first portion of my notebooks, which has proven to be invaluable for shaking loose quotes and nuggets of information I would have otherwise forgotten. I can’t wait until he finishes the rest.

Battling bad habits

But the bad habits outweigh the good ones for now. The worst I’ve picked up is my compulsive writing and rewriting of prose that I will probably throw out now that the overall shape of the chapter is finally coming into view. There are certain sentences and paragraphs that essentially make my brain itch, and so I scratch them, over and over, with niggling little tweaks that I’ve only just realized are a waste of time.

This past Monday (October 22nd) was my best day of writing yet, because I had used to the weekend to hole up in a Dean & Deluca with my notes and two large iced lattes, which provided the fuel for extensive paper-and-pen outlining. Armed with that on Monday morning, I just dumped words onto the page from 9 a.m. until 3:30 p.m., followed by an hour of errands and emailing, and then another hour of revising for quality. That produced 1,800 words worth keeping and, more important, some propulsive momentum. Can I keep up that pace, or will my writing inevitably suffer for it?

Pacing is everything

To answer that question, I called Will Leitch. Will is the author of three books, including the forthcoming God Save The Fan, which he wrote when he wasn’t blogging at Deadspin. I have seen Will write at twice the speed of Burgess in settings in which I would find it impossible to work — while listening to music in a beach house filled with eight other people, for example. I’ve pooh-poohed his speed in the past, but now I wish I could emulate it. But I wondered whether all the time he saves writing with a fire hose is then spent on rewriting and editing.

“The rewriting is never that heavy,” Leitch says. “I know exactly what I’m going to write, and how long it should be. Once I have an idea of what I’m shooting for, I know whether I can go long on some parts, while recognizing that I’m wasting too much time on others and need to wrap those sections up. For the Fan book, because it was broken up into segments [it’s a series of original essays], I had a clear finishing point in each case. If it was going to be 3,000 words, I knew I needed to keep writing to hit that figure, and I knew I needed to stop not long after I reached it. With Catch, [his second book, a novel] I knew it would be 70,000-80,000 words total, and I have broken it up into three sections, so each one had to be 25,000 words.”

By focusing relentlessly on his word count maximums and minimums, Leitch was able to keep a much tighter grip over the shape of his narratives than I have so far. But I still couldn’t believe that he rewrites as little as he does. “Certainly, I have self-doubt about it,” he says, “but one thing about writing for the Web that has really helped me is that editors tend to like me — and online writers in general — because they are not divas, and because they are so used to putting up their writing immediately. They don’t agonize about other ways to tell the story. If it feels wrong, I’ll change it. If it doesn’t, I won’t.”

A lot of my first chapter feels wrong right now, but I’m not yet inclined to blow it up and start over. That’s what editors are for, and I’m meeting with him later this week. We’ll see how much survives.

Tips on keeping the words flowing:
1. Don’t narrow your focus to daily word counts. Hitting your self-imposed quota doesn’t matter if you’ve failed to move the story forward that day. If churning out raw copy is all that matters, then you’ll never end up cutting anything. And there’s probably a lot that needs cutting.
2. Find a healthy balance between fixing mistakes immediately and scratching an itch just to feel productive. I already wish I could have all the hours I’ve spent making tweaks back. Until you’re certain you’re keeping that prose in its current form, more or less, there is no need to tweak at the sentence level.
3. Don’t luxuriate in the space you’ve been given. At first blush, 120,000 words looks like an enormous amount of room. But here I am, a tenth of the way there, and I haven’t finished telling even a piece of the story yet. Just because it’s hard to blow your word count doesn’t mean your readers (and editor) won’t be bored while you prattle on forever.

Greg Lindsay is a frequent contributor to mediabistro.com and other publications. He’s working on his first book.