Road Trip!
Post-Trip Review: So You Want to Write a Letter
Alakazam!
Note: This is the fourteenth in a series of posts describing my effort to get letters published in newspapers in every state and territory of the U.S.A. You can read the whole series here.
As you know if you have read all of my road trip posts, it took me a while to go from getting letters published in my local paper to getting ink in papers in other states. I went from a would-be columnist submitting lengthy, unpublishable essays, to a journeyman letter-writer submitting concise letters that, for the most part, went straight to print without modification. While I like to think I have a way with words, that is not enough. If you want to be published in a particular niche, you have to learn the ways of the inhabitants of that niche. Study editorial pages and learn each publication’s preferences. Study other peoples’ letters. Whether or not you like those letters, the fact that you are reading them in print means that that letter was published. What do their letters have that your letters lack?
You can figure it all out over time, but here I will summarize what worked for me.
Make it Easy for the Editor
Follow. The. Submission. Guidelines.
Every paper explains its guidelines clearly in the paper or on the website. That is actually the first step in the conversation that could result in their publishing your letter. It is not a mystery, so don’t blunder about and act like they haven’t told you exactly what they want (said the former blunderer).
Your submitted letter is your reply to their explanation of the guidelines. If your reply doesn’t respect the editors’ time, it will be ignored. Editors don’t have time to critique submissions or request rewrites or to point you to the guidelines. If you are lucky, a junior editor or a clerk whose job is to weed out the obviously bad submissions will clue you in to the guidelines. But hey, I’m doing that now, so don’t make work for them and don’t embarrass yourself by seeming clueless (I have done that so you don’t have to).
Do not exceed the word count limits. Those limits exist not only because physical space is limited—especially in the print-edition—but also because editors know that readers prefer a quick and easy read. Once I learned to adhere to the word limits, I often submitted letters that hit the limit exactly. My first draft might exceed the limit by 50% or more. Then I would cut out repetition, unnecessary introductory or concluding phrases, and other forms of fat. Sometimes I would have to make the painful choice to sacrifice a joke or a clever phrase for the sake of cutting just a few more words.
If you find yourself trying to hand-hold the reader too much, cut it out. For instance, you don’t need to say, “One of my main points is…” because if you structure your letter correctly, your main point is obvious and you don’t need to waste six words erecting a signpost. Likewise with secondary points. The fact that you are making a point is self-evident; do not preface it with a signpost like, “Another point that occurs to me is…”. I could give more examples, but now that I have called it a “signpost” I think I can just tell you to leave those things out. No one needs navigational aids in a 200-word letter made up of a dozen or so sentences. If a guide feels necessary, then simplify that letter.
Did you notice the little trick I played just then? The entire preceding paragraph is an elaboration on the idea of cutting out unnecessary phrases, which was concisely expressed in the paragraph before that. If this blog had a word limit, I would cut out the entire “signpost” elaboration paragraph. But it’s a handy way to show you what I mean about fat that could be cut.
Submit clean copy with nice formatting, correct grammar, and perfect spelling. If your letter makes the same points as someone else’s letter, but your letter would take several minutes of copy editing and the other letter comes in clean, guess which letter is going into the paper?
Don’t Include a Title
This one hurts. It is fun to write a title for your beloved letter. It’s the first thing readers will see, and by gosh you wrote the letter so you ought to be able to slap a zippy title on it, right? But editors want to do it themselves. It’s their paper. Let them do it.
I included titles for the first dozen or so letters I submitted. In every case, the editor discarded my title and wrote their own. I used to gripe about that in blog posts. It took me a while to realize the collaborative nature of the editorial page. As a reader, I thought of it as That Place Where Somebody Puts Editorials and Letters. It is that, but the “Somebody” is important. Good editors feel a sense of ownership of the entire paper, but especially of the one domain where they get to show some personality: the editorial page. They express themselves in their own columns, in their choice of other columns and cartoons, and in their letter selection. You may think you could write a much better title since you wrote the letter, and maybe you could. But the editor is in fact shepherding your words into print in his paper, and the titles and headlines are his prerogative. He has an opinion of the main point of your letter, and he will want to put that into the title. It’s not to stroke his own ego; it is to give the readers an idea of what they are about to read. Sometimes the editor’s title amounts to a massive spoiler of the punchline of your letter. But this is not The Comedy Cellar, and maybe the editor knows the readers better than you do, and maybe he thinks the punchline needs to be out front. Maybe he’s right, maybe he’s wrong.
Let it go. Never complain about this to editors. Just be grateful that they are publishing your letter. Enjoy the feeling of collaboration, even if you don’t like their title.
Also, by not including a title you make it easier to keep your letter under the word limit. If you are submitting your letter in a web form that enforces a 200-word limit, your pet 10-word title is part of that word count, and you have to make the body of your letter 190 words. But if you submit the full 200 words of letter text and leave the title to the editor as you should, the title doesn’t figure into your word count.
Be Topical
Early in my letter-writing effort, I tried submitting observational humor on random topics. This works every now and then (see this banana letter, and this one about a strange dream) but for the most part, letters are about current events or local doings. Hence the success of my issue-oriented letters but also my niceness bombs extolling the virtues of specific local communities. That said, if you are not going for volume and you want to try an offbeat letter just to see if you can get it published, knock yourself out. But do remember that editors have memories, and if you persist in sending them unpublishable stuff they may start to recognize your name and automatically reject your letters without reading them.
Be Similar to Other Writers
If your goal is just to get published, you can hardly go wrong by studying a paper for a week and then writing letters that closely resemble the tone and content of the letters they are publishing. Just as the submission guidelines tell you what the letter should look like, the recent letter choices tell you all you need to know about the editors’ preferences.
Be Different from Other Writers
What?! Didn’t I just tell you to be similar to other writers?
Yes, I did. So to sum up, be the same but be different. Easy!
This is where judgment and perhaps a bit of art—or at least craft—comes into play. You have guidelines, and you have examples of what they are publishing. You can try to mimic other letters exactly, but if you do that too well then your letters might fade into the slush pile and the editors will not feel compelled to choose yours.
So, by “be different” I mean you need to up your game, find a tone or a way of expressing your ideas that will make your letter stand out. Then, when confronted with five letters that express the same basic point, yours could be selected because of that extra something you put into it.
This can backfire, too. Some editors don’t want different. They want plain vanilla. But you will know this based on your reading of what they are publishing.
Be Funny
Once I started thinking of the people who would first see my letter—clerks, junior editors, senior editors—I began to imagine them liking my letters so much that they would read them aloud to the people seated near them. My fondest wish for each letter was for it to be published, but my second-fondest wish was for someone at the paper to stand up and announce, “Everyone, listen up! You gotta hear this letter!” And then I like to imagine the room erupting with laughter as the letter is read.
Probably never happened. But in addition to amusing yourself with that idea, think about entertaining the editor who has to go through a pile of letters. Based on what I see in print, most letters are pretty grim and I imagine the ones they don’t publish might be downright nasty. The ratio of serious to humorous letters is very much weighted on the serious side. But if they are going to publish one light-hearted letter every day or so, give them one to consider!
If you do like to imagine the editor reading your letter aloud, consider reading it aloud yourself before submitting it. Yes, you already know the jokes in your own letter. But try it out loud and see if it makes you laugh again upon hearing it. If it doesn’t, punch it up a bit.
Be Opinionated
If you are writing about an issue, take a side. No one wants to publish (or read) a letter that says everyone is right or that simply lists all sides of an issue. The editorial page is a forum for competing ideas. So pick a team and compete.
That said, if you are writing for a paper in a city other than your own, or about an issue that you don’t actually care about, please tread carefully. Don’t stoke fires of controversy—let the locals do that. See if you can find an angle that no one else has thought of, and make your point without inflicting wounds on anyone.
This might seem counterintuitive. How, you may ask, can you be opinionated without landing a blow on the other side? I do it by writing what I consider to be satirical opinions, which I trust editors and readers to recognize as outlandish ideas offered up for their amusement. Examples are my entering the debate over chicken and waffles, the pickle ball kerfuffle, and wind farm aesthetics. Yes, all of those letters weighed in on some genuine controversies, but I can’t imagine anyone took them seriously.
Having given you all this advice, I will admit that you can spend hours perfecting the craft and coming up with great letters, only to see your target newspapers print one poorly-written, poorly-thought-out letter after another, each one making some seemingly obvious point or simply ranting and raving. Try to remember that the best newspapers are on a mission to serve their communities, both by informing their readers and by giving them an outlet for expressing ideas and opinions. The editors and reporters and most of the other letter-writers out there are not engaged in a fun writing project as you might be. There are some readers out there who submit letters frequently, but many are first-time writers and they may not have put pen to paper in many years. You might be a far superior writer. It doesn’t matter. The other readers have as much right to the column inches as you do.
I like to think of my writing-project letters filling a different need than the genuine, deeply-felt opinion letters. If my letters are nothing more than good space-fillers on a slow day for news or opinions, then I’m quite happy with that.
Try to maintain perspective and respect the publications and their readers while also doing your own thing.
Boing!