Write On
Posted by Pete Robbins on Nov 3rd 2019
Early in my career as an outdoor writer I was fortunate to receive guidance from mentors including Alan Clemons, Terry Battisti, Steve Bowman and many others from the Bassmaster crew. Since then, I’ve made a concerted effort to pay it forward, and I haven’t had trouble finding potential mentees – over the past decade or so at least a dozen less-experienced writers have come to me for help.
Some of them have approached me humbly, asking for basic advice. Others have come convinced they were going to “revolutionize” the industry with their website, blog or brilliance. The former group tends to do a little better overall (in fact, I don’t think any of the latter group ever meaningfully pursued their projects), but of the dozen I can only think of three who are still writing about fishing in any capacity.
That saddens me, because I think most of them had something offer, but it no longer surprises me. Most would-be writers assume that they’ve been reading Bassmaster and Field & Stream so long that they can put out an equal or better product on their own. Most of them can’t, and even if they could several real-world factors preclude that from happening.
So how do you become a successful outdoor writer?
WRITE
EVERY
DAY
It doesn’t have to be for a massive audience. In fact, it doesn’t have to be for anyone but you. It can be a 10,000 word opus, or a blog entry, or even just a carefully-crafted social media post. If you are merely waiting for assignments in order to have a reason to write, then you’re doing it backwards. No one gets rich at this game – you have to love it enough that when the audience is small you put in as much time as if the audience is enormous – and if you’re not taking chances with formats and topics, you’re not growing.
I frequently say that the best investments I’ve ever made in myself were the trips I made to the Bassmaster Classics on my own dime between 2004 and 2009. They paved the way for just about every assignment I receive today, and have been reimbursed many times over. At the same time, the hundreds of hours I’ve spent on the computer, pecking away on topics big and small, has produced an equal dividend. The reason that I have more writing work today than I can handle in addition to a full time job is because I didn’t worry about audience size or compensation or producing the next Compleat Angler when I was starting out. I just wrote. If others realized the true payoff I probably wouldn’t have all of these gigs, but based on past experience I don’t see my workload going away.
