Recently I’ve been doing a lot of pitching. If you’re not already immersed up to your eyeballs with journospeak, this in the world of The Meejah means sending a paragraph or two explaining what you want to write about to the editor of some type of publication, with the hope that they might commission it and you might procure some moneyz. As a freelancer, you go through cycles of doing this more or less often, depending upon how fragile your mental state is at the time. But let me explain.
There’s something quite addictive about pitching, akin perhaps to a gambler’s high. You come up with an idea you really want to write about (this normally happens at about three in the morning so you have to get up and scribble it down so you don’t forget), then you think about it more the next day, how to present it in the best light, which publication it would work for. Then you send it, and wait. And go and do other stuff like feeding the cat, and trying not to check your email. And wait.
A new email pops us in your inbox while you’re on another tab and you click back, excited out of your mind, only to see it’s yet another advertising thingymabob redesigned as news from Topshop or Victoria’s Secret or some other company you gave your email address to once upon a time when you were probably slightly tipsy and thought that filling in a survey which asks questions like ‘Do you like grey writing on a pink background?’ in return for a discount code was an absolutely fantastic idea.
Anyway – your email is plain old marketing spam (or is that bacn?) and you are furious. You curse fucking Topshop and God forbid they do the same thing twice on the same day – that leads to getting blacklisted. ‘You know, you might actually want these emails you’re blocking one day?’ my boyfriend timidly suggests, but I tell him that right now, all the clothes in the world can go to hell. I just want a reply from an editor, and sometimes it arrives.
You see the email from [email protected] pop up in the inbox and your heart begins to race. You’re desperate to open it, but don’t want to at the same time. Sometimes you can see a tantalising bit of text next to the subject line, but not the whole thing, something like ‘Hi, I really like this…’
Then you open the email and it continues ‘…but I’m afraid it’s not one for us. Good luck.’ And you feel really shit for about half an hour and then you go and refine the pitch and wonder who you can send it to next.
Sometimes, however, and this is the magical one, the holy grail of emails – you get a reply saying ‘Sounds great. Can you file by x date. Try to keep it under 800 words’ and you’re like ‘Yasss! Score!’ literally punching the air and spinning round on your spinny chair which was created for moments such as this.
You may even feel generous enough to open the next goddamn marketing email which comes into your inbox. Then the fear kind of adrenaline kicks in: I have to write this thing. It’s amazing and frightening and OMG I have a commission. To write something. For people who’ll, you know, actually care about it. Sometimes they give you money as well and then you feel even more validated and able to pay the rent and stuff. Amazing.
Pitching is certainly my crack, not that I’ve ever tried crack, but it’s wonderful and awful, stressful but sometimes rewarding and you get like, the highest highs. It also has its horrible lows which involve scraping up the fragments of your ohmygodI’msuchafragileartist ego off the floor and then reconstituting them into a human being about ten minutes after so you can (in the words of Winston Churchill) Keep Buggering On.
So, where am I going with this? Well, the other day I was looking at pitching to The Awl – another editor had told me that my work might be a good fit on their site and it looked really awesome, like really really awesome, so I started to research who to email, etc etc. And this is what I found: How Men and Women Pitch Stories, A Disturbing Sampling.
In the piece, Choire Sicha, the Awl’s editor, looks at how women are strangely apologetic when sending in their work. It’s an interesting piece which reads humorously at first – one woman says ‘Here is my garbage. Sorry.’ But when you take a step back and think about it, you see that this is bloody awful. Women feel that they have to apologise for putting their ideas forward. Still.
I looked into this a little more and found a similar piece on The Toast by editor Mallory Ortberg, who says simply ‘a lot of women apologise for wanting to write’. In a nutshell, it was starting to seem like hardly any of us have mentally moved on from when Virginia Woolf famously stated: ‘Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.’
I find this disturbing as a woman and as a writer, but I also find it depressingly familiar because I recognise such a need to apologise for everything in myself and in my female friends. I wanted to write that I started wondering where this comes from, but that would be a lie. I know exactly where this comes from.
A while ago I got my first, paid, commissioned article. I was completely over the moon. I was working for Mslexia, writing about the concept of The Muse, and I told everybody. This was the first gig that was actually paying me for doing what I love. Lots of people were positive, congratulating me – but one guy memorably said, ‘You really like blowing your own trumpet, don’t you?’
This was a while ago and I was younger so instead of just saying, ‘Yes, yes I do actually, it’s a really pretty shiny trumpet and I think you should all hear it’, I went away and sat in my room and started feeling crap about myself for being so arrogant – for crowing, for not pre-emptively putting myself down so that others wouldn’t do it for me. It was clear, I thought, that I had failed to be suitably humble and had rightly been taken down a peg or two. It was only a small gig, after all, and why was I going on like I was so great in the first place?
This is only one example of a surprising amount of similar comments made about me during my writing career. The occasional, ‘Well, you have a high opinion of yourself’ has been enough to crush me on several occasions, to push me back into a place where I feel that maybe I shouldn’t speak, or maybe I should at least begin with an apology in case someone mistakenly thinks that I have a high opinion of myself and pulls me up on it.
Truth is, I don’t have a particularly high opinion of myself, but I do think I can write. I have had some success and I am proud of that. It’s difficult to say that too – I have, like many women, been conditioned to start off on a self-deprecating note. But this needs to stop.
I will keep on pitching and I will stop saying stuff like, ‘Sorry I’ve gone on too long’ or, ‘This might be really badly articulated, however…’ Instead, I will just say, ‘this is what I have. Please let me know if you’d like to publish it.’ Because we should all have the confidence, whatever our career, to present ourselves and our work the way it is, no apology needed. Who’s joining me?
-HW
This is great! Just what I needed to read. I have started writing more and I have found when talking about writing I brush it off easily in conversation, like my full time job has more worth than something that I love and inspires me. In writing if we don’t believe in ourselves, no one else will. Plus, your trumpet is exceptionally shiny..!
Damn. I’ve just applied for a job, and reading this has made me realise that in explaining what I have experience in etc. etc. I couched it very much in terms of things that have happened and I got experience in, rather than in an active way. There’s not nearly enough ‘I’m great at this’, ‘my writing is brilliant’, ‘I can explain science like a mofo’ or any of that. Why did I almost apologise for being qualified for and wanting that job…?
I really love this article, thank you for expressing how I often feel. As an academic, I have consciously tried to avoid apologising for myself when expressing opinions or talking about my work. But too often that feeling that I’m being arrogant or overbearing comes back, that in some way I’ve not been modest enough. But so much research shows the challenges women in academic jobs face in having their work published and in getting a job compared to their male counterparts that it’s probably time we started blowing our shiny trumpets too!
Oh hell, I do that too. Dammit. Thought I’d grown out of it but just looking back over the past 2 weeks, I can see 3 examples of where I haven’t. Sod.
From now on I shall have a high opinion of myself and I shall blow my own shiny trumpet and I will verbally cosh anyone who suggests I shouldn’t. Even myself.
Thank you so much for the lovely comments guys. I really think you should all blow your trumpets and be proud. Also cheers Melanie for your comment on my shiny trumpet. H xx
A bit ironic that the author signed off with a monogram considering the nature of her argument.
@James Brown, Most pieces on Vagenda are anonymous, and you know, that’s cool as I have work elsewhere which is under my name. x
All of this. When asked if I’m any good at guitar I usually say yeah, I’m okay, BUT….
Nah. I’ve been playing for over ten years. I’m fucking excellent with a guitar.
LOVE IT! Excellent piece, could totally relate xx
Every essay I send to my supervisor at college comes attached to an email saying, “Sorry I didn’t have enough time to develop my ideas…” or, “Sorry it’s not very well developed…” or, “Sorry it’s short.” Every single time I write one, I tell myself not to do the accompanying email and only to apologise if it’s late (that’s just common courtesy) but every week I find myself thinking it will be a waste of time for him to read my work. A waste of time? I’m paying for my education here – it’s not a waste of time, it’s his job.
This is not just about our careers or stuff we are good at. a lot of women appologize for every little thing we do. they put themselves down before other people can do it about everything. when you give them a compliment they tell you you’re wrong (which is pretty rude in my opinion) instead of saying thank you.i have stopped apologizing quite a while back now and it is fine. luckily, i haven’t had any nasty comments yet but when i do. i am not alone and i can hold my head up high. so thank you!
maybe the next time someone tells you you have high opinion of yourself our you are arrogant you should just say: “thank you” and move on, knowing they have just let you know that you have succeeded in not appologizing. which is pretty awesome and should qualify as a compliment in anyone’s book.
Nice work, Hope
This is 100% my favorite blog ever. I’d love for you to have a look at http://www.urbanette.com and let me know if you’d like to contribute. Shoot me an email at hilary @ urbanette.com xo!
I’m going to print this out and put it on my wall. I have SO much fear of pitching and now I just don’t even know why, let’s just do it! Thank you for this.
The trumpet shall sound! The trumpet shall sound! (Think of this to the tune of the chorus from Handel’s Messiah).
I’m all about trumpet blowing (but only if we actually have got something good to blow about – I don’t like it when folks are overblowing ‘cos they’re deluded about their mad skillz).
Great article
I’m relatively new to the freelance world and it’s given me the boost to enter another round of pitching…
Right on.