There’s no such thing as a free(lance) lunch: Lyndsie Bourgon

There’s no such thing as a free(lance) lunch is a series that asks professional freelancers the questions you want to ask them.  Think of it as having coffee with everyone at the same time. This week: Lyndsie Bourgon.

 

Who are you, what do you do? What’s your speciality?

I’m a freelance journalist and copy-editor. I mostly write for magazines and newspapers, and have a few corporate clients in copy-editing and ghost-blogging. I am a generalist in terms of my journalism work.

 How long have you been freelancing?

Full-time for close to three years, since August 2010.

How did you/What made you start freelancing?

I started freelancing when working a desk job at CIBC after college–mainly so that I felt that I wasn’t “quitting” journalism, because I wanted to keep writing, and eventually wanted to get back into the media world. I had taken a year off to travel, and it was harder coming back than I expected. I worked on a few pieces during my next job (at Yahoo) and then my ideas/assignments caught up with me and I felt like giving it a go full-time. Mainly because it has always been my priority to write/produce journalism of my own, not really as an editor and definitely not at a portal.

How did you sell your first piece/pitch your first job?

I applied for a job at Canadian Business magazine. The old editor there, Steve Maich, is really nice guy and got back to me saying that I wasn’t qualified, but that he liked my clips and I could pitch him. I spent the weekend reading basically everything I could and then pitched him on a story about brands dealing with bad Twitter press. That really got the ball rolling. I credit CB with a lot of my success and confidence.

What are the pros?

Writing what you want, most of the time. Time to travel. An opportunity to report more extensively than working at a newspaper or in an editorial role. I have a weird schedule so I can get work done when I like. I’m able to work from home and I adopted a dog, which was a priority for my personal life. I can work from anywhere, really–my family is scattered across the country and having only two weeks/year for vacation was just annoying on that end. Also I really love to write and read for hours on end.

What are the cons?

Money. Money. Money. Tracking down money. When clients cut their budgets or go out of business or stop publishing or choose a different editorial mandate. When a client doesn’t pay online and then their cheque is late or lost or whatever. One time I had to go to small claims court because a client wasn’t going to pay me.

Let’s talk networking. Some people think of it as a dirty word. What do you think about networking and how do you do it?

I haven’t found old-school networking to be that important. For instance I have gone to Press Pass and found it fun, but it didn’t further my career in any way. If anything, “networking” outside of journalism has resulted in better stories, assignments and I would argue has even improved my writing. I pretty much consider networking just hanging out with people, I guess, and these days I’m a bit removed from the media world’s networking.

I should add that I took David Hayes’ writing course at Ryerson–this helped improve my pitches a TON, and David had some great advice. Do you think that’s networking? I would say that editors open my emails and consider my pitches more now than in 2010, but that’s because of my clips and byline and not because they met me through someone, somehow. I do, however, think that networking works for many young freelancers, I just place an odd emphasis on weird story ideas over anything else. Like, maybe if you want to pitch a column to a newspaper, you’d place more emphasis on networking. I just don’t often pitch those kinds of things.

Is it really who you know when you freelance?

Yes and no. I didn’t know Steve at CB, but once he gave me a shot I also successfully pitched Maclean’s and Chatelaine using those clips. But Steve read my pitch because I dug around a lot on the Internet to find his personal email address rather than the “submissions @ whatevermagazine” address they posted online. I have so many editors who I have not met in real life. It’s more who you write for, and the only way to get into those “big names” is to do a ton of research before pitching, and then to follow through. I definitely think it’s “who you know” if you want an editorial job–there’s a really big difference between the two. If you want to start as an EA and move your way up, you should network with other editors like crazy.

What do you think about the ‘pick your brain over coffee’ invite? Do you do it?

I have plans to do it soon, with an editor, but I think it works better for me now than it would have at the beginning of my career. I have some hefty clips behind me now, and I’m also in a new city with fewer writers, so the editors are looking for writers at my level of experience, I think. I never tried this in Toronto–I think the days of the informational interview is dead, unless you’d like to be crushed by pessimism.

Do you think you have to have a certain personality to freelance?

Maybe not personality, but a certain work ethic for sure. You have to be organized. You have to be obsessive about everything from story ideas to laying out your invoice. You have to really, really, really love journalism (or whatever you do), because you’ll want to quit. I am the type of person who has a very hard time letting anything go–therefore I haven’t been able to justify moving away from freelancing. It was a decision I made, and thus I work hard at it. I’m just stubborn–at my high school graduation, my principal introduced me as “stubborn” and it remains true. It’s probably how I deal with so many idea rejection and edits.

What are your tips?

Pitch your brains out. When you first start out, always always make your deadline. I’m pretty sure CB and Maclean’s would shunt off short, kinda crappy assignments to me because they knew I would finish them in time and they could tidy them up from there. Try to find ideas that are really weird and interesting and not just “this fun club where people are doing something old-timey,” or whatever, things we often see in trend sections of newspapers. Read a ton. Once I started to treat reading time as work time, my writing improved. And when your writing improves, your assignments improve. Reading is the most important thing that I do every single day.

Do you think freelancing is a viable way of making a full-time living?

It is for me, at this point, but maybe not forever. I don’t have a lot of material ambitions–I pretty much just want to pay off my student loan and maybe one day have an extra bedroom that I can use as an office. But you can also make a lot of money freelancing, I just spend a lot of time on long-form journalism pitches that don’t often pay off. I have spent a lot of time thinking about this, actually–my ambition is to be a long-form reporter with a literary bent. There are basically no jobs with benefits and a bi-weekly pay cheque to do that in Canada. So I’m just doing it the only way I know how. I think it’s viable because it’s the way it’s done.

You can make up lost income doing other gigs, and learn how to budget so that your dry months aren’t so hard. I think it also works well if you have a beat and want to write columns and opinion on that topic. I often think that I should travel down this road, but it’s not really in my heart to do it. Freelancing is often really New Age-y in that sense. If you’re not totally behind it, you probably won’t be that good at it, so don’t embarrass yourself. “Follow your heart,” and whatnot (yuck, but true).

You can read Lyndsie Bourgon’s work at her website.

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Free(lance) lunch is a weekly series published every Monday. If you are a freelancer and want to be featured on Free(lance) lunch, please email [email protected].