Mother Jones: "RIP Michael Hastings. Here's His Advice to Young Journalists"

Okay, here’s my advice to you (and young journalists in general):

1.) You basically have to be willing to devote your life to journalism if you want to break in. Treat it like it’s medical school or law school.

2.) When interviewing for a job, tell the editor how you love to report. How your passion is gathering information. Do not mention how you want to be a writer, use the word “prose,” or that deep down you have a sinking suspicion you are the next Norman Mailer.

3.) Be prepared to do a lot of things for free. This sucks, and it’s unfair, and it gives rich kids an edge. But it’s also the reality.

4.) When writing for a mass audience, put a fact in every sentence.

5.) Also, keep the stories simple and to the point, at least at first.

6.) You should have a blog and be following journalists you like on Twitter.

7.) If there’s a publication you want to work for or write for, cold call the editors and/or email them. This can work.

8.) By the second sentence of a pitch, the entirety of the story should be explained. (In other words, if you can’t come up with a rough headline for your story idea, it’s going to be a challenge to get it published.)

9.) Mainly you really have to love writing and reporting. Like it’s more important to you than anything else in your life—family, friends, social life, whatever.

10.) Learn to embrace rejection as part of the gig. Keep writing/pitching/reading.

Read more about Hastings and his incredible career over at Rolling Stone.

Dreamed You

“There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams – not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald

I’ve created fantasies of you
in my mind.
I’ve sculpted you in glass bottles
like sand art
adding layers of color and glitter
filled it up to the rim
and left no breathing space—
stopped you with a cork,
stuffed you in a crackerjack bag
and made you the prize.

Pitched a striped tent
around your figure
and made you the ringleader
of feathered elephants,
stilt-walking men,
trapeze artists,
tightrope walkers—
but I’ve fed you to the lions.

Dreamed you up of daises,
tied your stems together with blue ribbon;
but a bouquet never looks as good
as it does the moment picked.

I’ve drawn lines on the walls
of your parents’ home
above the last mark your mother made
measuring your height—
you will always fall short.

the grown-ups are afraid of us
the grown-ups say we’re an epidemic

we find them hiding
in their SUVs
or behind their TV trays
or under their desks at work
and they come out with their hands up
and their eyes sewn shut

they squirm and say
we’ve got it all wrong

there is too much passion
in our suicides
and too much ice
in our murders

we have no censor
and no off-button

we’re only going down
if we self-destruct

and it shouldn’t hurt to ask
but they rip our questions from our throats
like cheap necklaces
just to hang themselves with another lie

they don’t care enough to answer us

we have no home
and no family

we have no temperance
and no fear

we can’t live like they do
we can’t love like they do

the grown-ups are afraid of us

they should be