ere it is, December 27, and I am smack-dab in the middle of a glorious week of vacation. In the Hepola household, we rock it Christmas-style every December 25, resulting in a handful of delightful gifts for me, including (but not limited to) a cheese slicer, sky-blue snuggle socks that I am currently wearing, and collection of Peter Biskind’s critical essays. Also, chocolate. I’ll give that to my boyfriend. I’m not so into the chocolate. I prefer blue cheese.

At some point, we should all reflect upon the previous year, 2007, before we dive into the next. But first, I have an order of business. In the past year, for whatever reason, I have received many emails from aspiring writer/journalists asking me how I came to do what I do. I used to respond to these emails, but I stopped, not because I’m just a dick but because I never found the time to answer the questions properly. (And sometimes? Kind of a dick.) I’ve decided to answer the most common questions here on the website, so that I might simply refer to this in the future, thus freeing up my schedule for watching more adorable cat videos. In summary? Thank you for your consideration. Happy holidays. May all your dreams come true.

How did you get your job? Or: How can I do what you do?
Good question. Let me give you a brief CV overview: I graduated from a state school with a double major in English and Liberal Arts. I figured I’d teach high school English, using the summer to scribble some sordid semi-autobiographical novel of ideas, but then, while I was at said college, I got involved in the daily newspaper. (If you are an aspiring writer who happens to attend the University of Texas, I cannot recommend working at the Daily Texan highly enough. If it was good enough for Walter Cronkite, it is good enough for you.) Journalism worked for me for the following reasons: It paid money, it enforced deadlines, and it gave me permission to ask anyone anything. I needed all of these things. And, turns out, I didn’t really have a sordid semi-autobiographical novel of ideas kicking around; I had a robust vocabulary, short attention span, and credit card bills to pay. I was too young to be a teacher. So I switched to newspaper writing.

How did I do that? Well, let me tell you. The summer after I graduated from college (the summer before I began teaching), I took an unpaid internship at The Austin Chronicle, a terrific independent alternative paper. The alt-weekly world was a good match for me, both temperamentally (cranky, artistic, hilariously bent staff) and topically (strong cultural coverage, emphasis on writer’s voice over classic journalist inverted-pyramid approach, just ignore this if it makes no sense). As an intern, I did such glamorous things as entering data, filing photos, entering more data, and occasionally picking up one of the editor’s dry cleaning. Part of me hated it; part of me was excited just to be breathing the air of a real live newspaper. I wish there were more paid entry-level positions at newspapers and magazines, but there aren’t, and this means that sometimes, the best way to get the attention of an editorial staff is to be the one who will pick up their lunch, answer their phones, and open their bins of mail. Is it humbling? Yes, and that’s not a bad thing. Writers, for all their bleeding insecurity, can have raging egos, and it’s important for all of us to remember that, at the end of the day, sometimes the best thing we can do is hunker down on the floor, open our mail, and try our best to recycle. It makes me angry when journalists feel above an unpaid internship. It is a personal peeve, nursed by several years of working with young writers, some of whom couldn’t be bothered to show up and some of whom were staggeringly talented and will likely fire me from some shrinking future enterprise when I am old and doddering and coasting on fumes.

And though my job as an intern was never glamorous, I did learn things. I learned what the newsroom looked like. I got to sit in on editorial meetings. I saw story pitches and galleys. I listened to editors massage a first draft with a new writer. I watched them pick up the paper when it arrived on Thursday, and cringe with self-hatred when they found a mistake, and bitch about the art department and the ad department and basically, every department that wasn’t editorial. When someone gave me an assignment, I took it—no matter what it was—and I turned it in on time, early if I could, and I did this as often and as capably as I could, so that when stories came up at the editorial meeting, and no one could figure out who should write them, mine was the first name floated. When a fulltime job came up, a rarity in our profession, the editors whose mail I opened went to bat for me, and when I cried in their office, telling them I couldn’t quit teaching this early, Margaret Moser (and I will always be thankful to her for this) said to me, calmly and while clicking away an email, “Teaching will always be there. This job won’t.” I quit my job at the high school, and that winter, I got a job at The Austin Chronicle, and it frankly changed my life.

Eventually, I developed the bad habits of an alt-weekly journalist: I drank too much, turned stories in perpetually late, agonized over the precious style of an opening paragraph meanwhile forgetting to fact-check the story, phoning in pieces instead of showing up for them in person, knocking on doors, getting dirty. But these cracks came over time. I earned them, frankly. And what shocks me is when new writers, green writers, think they can get away with this shit because the editors do. Don’t be an idiot. Save the best of yourself for your employers; save the worst of yourself for years later, when you’ve actually got job security. Do not underestimate how important it is to get a story in on time. In my profession, it is surprisingly quaint.

Wait a minute. Did you actually explain how I can get your job?
Well, no. Because I can’t. This is a tough profession, a competitive profession. Even after 10 years, when I apply for a job I am slugging it out with a dozen people just as qualified as I am. It sucks. It’s not fair to any of us. But that means I have to bring more than my qualifications to the table. I bring my enthusiasm. I bring my patience, and likeability. (I was not the first choice to be music editor at The Dallas Observer, where I worked from 2003-2005. The first choice lost the job after a dinner with the staff, whom he roundly offended. Nice work, first choice.) I bring my professional contacts, or my experience as a teacher, or whatever pretty glitter I think might dazzle at that moment. It helps that I am a decent writer, with a phone book of professional clips, but that has never, ever been enough.

So what is your advice for young writers?
In a word: Write. Jesus Christ, kid, write. Find work. Find a publication you like, that you might like to write for, and make yourself useful to them. No, make yourself indispensable. Figure out what they need (a blogger, a mail carrier, a sex columnist, a receptionist) and provide it for them. Alternately, if you are not so enterprising, develop email relationships with low-level editors, the only editors who will have time to even write you back (and might actually still be flattered by their power). Your persistence, if it is not creepy, will charm them. What you should NOT do is ask for their time and then disappear, come in late, fail to turn in a story, or otherwise flake. The only time I have ever gone off on an employee was when she bailed on an event she was covering in order to hang out in the bar with some dudes, because she figured I’d probably be cool with that. I was not cool with that. I embarrassed her in front of other people, and I wish I’d been patient enough to at least take her into another room before yelling at her, but I’m not perfect, either. I have had young writers ask to be my intern, show up so that I can take an hour of time to explain what I need and introduce them to staff, and they never return. I will never speak to these people again. Their bridge with me is burned, still flaming in fact, the embers flickering in the gray winter light.

Gosh, it makes me mad. Can you tell?

Oh, another idea. Blog. Do it, even if the verb feels funny. Write your stories and post them online, and maybe even develop an audience. Basically, there is no excuse for not having material to give to a potential employer who wants to read your clips. Do not send in your high school paper. Do not show up for an interview with a scrapbook made from construction paper, decorated with stickers, and with your clips pasted in the book like a goddamn cheesecake photo from Bop. This happened once. I didn’t know whether to laugh, or weep with pity for this girl. And she had the balls to write a letter to the editor (only a month prior) about my vast deficiencies as a music editor.

People are ridiculous. Know this. Otherwise, life can feel like a fucking tragedy.

How do I know if I’m a good writer?
The million-dollar question. No, the five-billion dollar question. Because if you can develop a robot that can properly answer this question, and you could sell this product (I suggest Sky Mall), then you would make five billion dollars. I would put up a good $50 of that. Man, I wish I knew how to answer this question. Even for myself. I can’t. I don’t know how. Here are a few possible guidelines that might help:

Ask experts. If you really want to know the answer to the question, “Do I have any talent?,” send your stories to someone whose opinion you trust (not me, no time) and ask. You will have to be braced for the answer. And crap, the answer might not even be right. But editors, the right editors, are straight shooters who can see good writing the way dogs can smell. Good writing fluouresces, it leaps from a page, even when it’s hiding underneath clunky furniture and wearing a drab gray. Also, editors are occasionally full of shit (good writing fluouresces? WHO AM I?), so now we’re back to square one.

Ask your friends. Ask your family. “Do you think this is any good? What’s good about it? What’s bad?” I, personally, would never do this (too sensitive, too frightened of rejection), so I hesitate to say it, because how can I give advice I would not even take? Perhaps you are brave and enterprising and brimming with confidence. In which case, how on earth did you become a writer? You are like the unicorn of writers. Congratulate yourself on your singularity. We’re all very envious of you, thank you very much.

This is my own prejudice, but I am skeptical of young writers who think they are good writers. They tend to have no clue what they still need to learn. Or, they tend to have no clue as to what good writing is. Then, I’d say every 20th person (maybe 200th, maybe 200,000th, I haven’t done the math), really can write, write like a bastard from hell, and you think, well, okay, at least you know. Now screw off already.

So where were we? What were we talking about? It’s freezing in here. My mother keeps her house roughly the temperature of a French castle in winter. So if you want to be a writer, you can start by lighting a fire and making me some hot tea. My freaking fingers are numb.

What publications do you suggest I read?
Read publications that are funny. Read publications that answer the questions you most want to ask. Read publications that answer questions you never even thought to ask but secretly always wondered about. Read publications who publish the writers you like, because you should support them. Read Us Weekly, if you must, but don’t let it be the only thing you read, in the same way you should not live on Whopper alone, and I don’t care how delicious you think that sandwich is.

Here are the publications I read: Salon, The Onion, New York Magazine, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Esquire, The Morning News, Slate, Nerve, The New York Times. You may find this list annoyingly self-promotional; I’ve written for six of the 10 titles. But I would submit that I wrote for them and sought them out and pursued publication there because I so admired them. (With the exception of The Morning News. They sought me out, because I didn’t know any better, and for that I am eternally grateful.) Oh, I also really, really like to look at CuteOverload.com, but I don’t know where that will get your career. It might just make your workday better, and that is a lot, actually.

What else?
Okay, I want to tell you something, and I don’t want to hurt your feelings. Ready?

Try not to jot off impulsive emails to writers asking them to tell you how to get their job. I know it seems small to you, that anyone should be able to take 15 minutes to write you back, but from my perspective it’s frustrating. I don’t know you. I don’t know what you want from your life. I don’t know what you want from me. In theory I want to help, but I already get a slew of queries and cold pitches at my day job, and logging onto my personal email at the end of a long day and finding these missives shot into the darkness – “found your website, pretty cool, how do I get your job?” – are weirdly frustrating. I think because there is a part of me (the old English teacher) who genuinely wants to help. But typing the same vague suggestions, over and over again, gets annoying for me, and I will start to grow pissy and dark, and then I will end up complaining to my boyfriend that night on the phone, when I really should be laughing about horse sex or whatever ridiculous topic we are currently discussing. Does that make sense? That I am flattered that you would even ask me, but I don’t have time to help you, even though I still wish you the best.

That said, you should not hesitate to write a thoughtful, considerate, even complimentary email to anyone, ever. You might not hear back. But doesn’t everyone like getting those?

I’m traveling to Austin soon. Where should I go while I’m there?
Ugh, another entry entirely. Have a breakfast taco. Go to Donn’s Depot. And have a Happy New Year.

See you soon. Buckle up, and call a cab should you need one.