Quirky Starts
by Julia Tagliere
The year was 1984: my hair was big; my bangles were many; and my pick for Pulitzer-prize winning book of the year was Duran Duran: The First Four Years of the Fab Five—by Neil Gaiman. Yes, that Neil Gaiman, and no, it didn’t win the Pulitzer (total rip-off).
Years have passed since that travesty. I have given up Aqua Net hairspray. (There may or may not have been a 12-step program involved.) Duran Duran is now just a random pop-up in my Pandora 80s channel, and Neil Gaiman, one of the biggest authors in the world today, now calls that wonderful little book, one of his earliest writing gigs, “the worst thing” he has ever written. (Ouch.)
Gaiman is not, of course, the only writer who got his start with a quirky or unusual project. Earning cash money for writing in the beginning is difficult, to say the least; it’s understandable that many writers will take virtually any paying gig, even if it’s a fluff piece about a boy band.
At a Baltimore Review staff meeting earlier this year, I happened to mention that I once wrote for Hay and Forage Grower magazine, a comment that was met with giggles and a round of “Wait, that’s a thing?” and “Like, you actually wrote about hay?” (Answer: yes and yes.) When fellow editor Seth Sawyers said, “You should write about that,” I decided he was right and began to dig into the quirky ways that fellow writers may have gotten their starts. Here are a few choice tidbits I gathered from some fellow writers:
Shanon Lee, journalist and activist: “My first paid gig was writing about celebrities for TheRichest.com, 1000-word articles for $50 a pop. I even did a piece on Satanic celebrities.”
Leslie Pietrzyk, winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize and author of several novels, including her just-released Silver Girl: “I wrote a kids series book about the history of the state of Maryland that STILL shows up in Amazon and Goodreads searches, even though I used a different last name! Drives me crazy.”
Food writer and author of the cookbook Farm to Table: Asian Secrets, Pat Tanumihardja, like Mr. Gaiman himself, also got her start writing about boy bands: “When I was working my first job out of college at a museum in Singapore, my friend asked if I wanted to write for a teen magazine on the side. I ended up writing about/interviewing teen celebrities, including a few popular Canto-pop bands I know many teenagers would have died to meet.”
Getting started in writing is tough and getting paid can be elusive. Naturally, writers are eager to take opportunities that can sustain them while they work on “their own writing,” which results in many of us having offbeat, delightful stories about the projects on which we first cut our teeth.
The good news is that those opportunities not only provide us with the financial stability we need to keep pursuing our own writing but also give us an opportunity to hone our skills. Who knows, someday, those quirky little sprouts may even turn out to be quite valuable: Today, avid collectors of Gaiman’s works (and not a few 
aging Duran Duran fans) reputedly pay up to $4,500 per copy for that early gem. In 2015, the little book he wanted to forget made an even bigger splash, when, after years of refusing to reprint it, Gaiman released a digital collector’s version via Humble Bundle. Proceeds of the sale went to benefit the Comic Book Defense Fund, which helps protect comic book creators and publishers over issues such as free speech, and The Moth, a non-profit group based in New York City dedicated to the art and craft of storytelling. (In case you’re wondering, yes, I bought a digital copy and I read it cover-to-cover the moment it arrived in my inbox; it was glorious.)
So what is the bottom line? I think it is this: We need to write, but we also need to eat. So quirk on, writing friends. You never know where it will take you.
Nice job, as always, Julia.
By Jane Hegstrom on Mar 12 2018