Melinda Blau

I attribute my success to hard work, some luck of being in the right place with the right people, and good skills. The nice thing about writing is that your skills get better - it's one of the few things that does get better with age. A lot of fields, I guess, you age out of, but as long as I have my mind, then I can use my fingers, or I can dictate too. Writing is one of the things I think that you do get better at. I think it's probably psychologists get better at what they do, also. Experience helps.

The best career advice I ever received came from T. George Harris, who was a legendary editor at New York Magazine and my first editor there. I had never written for magazines before and had never even taken a course in journalism. I was very lucky to have him take a liking to me. After the third draft of my first article, he shouted at me: 'You skip through life. Why are you lumbering on paper?' In that one sentence, he really opened my eyes to what good writing was. It does skip off the page. That was probably the best advice I ever got.

First of all, the industry has changed so much now - it's not the same industry I entered. When I entered, there were a handful of magazines, a handful of publishers, and relative to the number of people trying to write today, a handful of writers. But the numbers have scaled up so dramatically because of the internet and because it's now a global market, not a local market. My advice would be to know your audience, who you're writing for. This is something that's true of the old world of writing and the new. You have to know who your audience is and imagine that one reader who's going to sit at your typewriter, or your computer, or whatever you compose at. Imagine your reader and who he or she is, and what would he or she need to hear. What would help her either make her smile, make her day better, make her more proficient at making her way through life. Know who you're writing for and why you're writing it. That hasn't changed with all the algorithms, and the websites, and the different things that the world of writing now has. The same principles apply, which is good writing. The cream comes to the top.

When I first started out, it was very hard to break into magazine writing. I lived in New York, and there were a handful of magazines. I was in educational publishing first, in the book business, and then I wanted to write for magazines, and that is very challenging to break in. There's just so many people who think they can write and want to write, so it's definitely a difficult thing to get a magazine to take you seriously, especially a major magazine. The first magazine I published with was New York Magazine, which was quite a feat, and that helped. After that, it was a lot of hustling - if an article was my idea, I'd have to write a pitch letter and think of the reader, the potential reader, and why the editor should assign me that particular piece. But oftentimes, an editor called me when they had a piece in mind. Now the industry has changed dramatically because of the internet and it's become a global market. The numbers have scaled up so much. But I have to say I'm not saying that it's bad, because I can write a piece on Substack now and 300 people could see it. I might have written an article for New York Magazine, and that was terrific, but it didn't get to as many people. The whole scale of everything has just changed everything for a writer.

The first value that's most important to me is authenticity. I try to write what I believe in, who I am, and not candy-coat things. Clarity is extremely important - people like to use a lot of words and a lot of big words, and nobody wants to read them. So I think clarity is important. Honesty is a corollary of authenticity. I also believe very much in responsibility - what you put out there, you have to know is going to be listened to by lots of different ears and taken in by lots of different kinds of people, and you have to be responsible for what you're putting out there and what you're saying, and be sensitive that not everybody's going to see it the same way you do. I also have a huge, tremendous value on connection. I really care about people. I like people. I talk to strangers during the day, and I have a dog, so that makes that easy. But I think connection is, to me, and I can tell you this at my age, the single most important thing. There's a lot of things that make for better aging, but certainly connection, and knowing people, and being able to pick up a phone, or to walk down the street, and just know that you're not the only person in the world, is a really vital life skill.