John Bresee

1. What skills are important to becoming a writer for any form of periodical?
   1. The most important skill is the confidence to pick up the phone to call an editor, introduce yourself and ask for some work.
   2. Clear and concise article queries…and many of them. An editor should have the ability to choose between a wide variety of article ideas that are topical to the magazine’s mission.
2. I have read that a portfolio is important to maintain to be able to get jobs writing. Do you agree with this assessment? What other tools do you suggest?
   1. The most important tool is patience and persistence. Anyone with reasonable writing skills can get published in a national magazine with enough hard work.
   2. Portfolio…yeah, it’s important to see where a person has been published.
3. How do you recommend that someone gets their start writing and getting published?
   1. Choose a local media in which you would like to get published, study the front of the book “news” sections and other very small segments. Look for areas of the book that have items with fewer than 200 words. Study this area until you feel you understand what the focus is, and then write many articles for this section.
   2. Call the magazine/newspaper and find out who the editor for that section is.
   3. Submit your articles. Ask them for feedback. Continue submitting until they publish.
   4. All submissions should be printed double spaced, edited VERY CAREFULLY. One spelling error and you’re toast.
   5. Include a cover letter that states that you are submitting these “spec” articles and would appreciate any feedback you can get.
   6. Include copies of these articles on a burned CDROM in Microsoft Word.
   7. Throw in a bag of M&Ms with your package…bribery works and should not be overlooked.
4. How do you feel about writing on the Internet? Is it different, similar, easier, etc.?
   1. The Internet is an endless maw of mediocre content. They’ll publish anything. It’s a good way to get started but don’t expect to get paid.
5. What other forms of publications have you written for?
   1. Newsweek (paid insert for US Ski Team)
   2. Powder
   3. Bike
   4. Skier’s Journal (bahaha, I owned this. It’s not a real publishing coup. )
   5. Outside (it was short but they put my name on it)
   6. Utah Outdoors
   7. And a bunch of other mags I can think of t the moment. Lots of gravity oriented things. Most of ‘em are dead now.
6. What tips have you acquired through your experience writing?
   1. See above
7. What resources do you recommend for writing?
   1. Strunk and White
   2. Dictionary.com
   3. McDonalds

1. Has a piece of your work ever been rejected? If so, how do you deal with this? Do you use rejection as an aid to help critique your work, or ignore it? DO you see any value in it?
   1. Not that I can think of.
   2. Lots of aggressive editing and that can be hard. Sometimes the editor just doesn’t understand what you are trying to do.
2. Is there anything else that you feel is important to writing for a publication?
   1. Edit, edit again, edit again…then start all over. Every item that I published was edited at a minimum of 10 different times after we received it. There’s nothing an editor likes more than someone who takes the time to do their hard work. The cleaner the copy, the more likely you are to get published.
   2. Editors will change your work…don’t assume it’s for the worse, talk to the editor and try to understand why they made the changes.

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