Advice for Young Writers

You won't like it. But some of you might thank me later

Recently, a talented young woman asked for advice on beginning a writing career. Implicitly, she meant: opinion journalism, maybe political. Did I have any tips for starting out? I told her the same thing I’ve told others who asked: I’m the worst possible source of such counsel, because I didn’t really set out to do this for a living. But supposing for a moment that I might have something helpful to offer aspiring writers in their twenties, it would go something like this.

Firstly, you need to assess your own character. Are you sociable, personable, and good at ascertaining the implicit mainstream consensus? If that’s you, and you have a good prose style and for some unfathomable reason want to make political writing your career, rather than some other more lucrative wordcel occupation such as law or consulting, I gather there’s a fairly well-trodden career path. It involves college magazines, newspaper internships and graduate schemes, maybe a Masters of some kind, plus moonlighting for think tanks, pitching “speaking as the voice of my generation” type pieces to the legacy press, all supplemented by Twitter engagment baiting, Substack articles, and appearances on the political podcast circuit.

You need to be able to synthesise the day’s talking points, turn decent copy out quickly, and be good at catching the prevailing mood of the day. Do this reliably, and the result of your dedication will, eventually, be annexation by the politics machine, plus or minus a regular writing column and maybe a podcast. It’s fun, your style will be breezy, and you’ll go for drinks a lot. You probably won’t make tons of money, but you’ll enjoy being an insider, and you might find your way into an occupation that will pay. It might even involve writing. As a bonus, if you’re female, right-of-centre, and tick all these boxes, you will find yourself swiftly in demand.

What if that’s not you, though? What if you have a strong prose style, but your interests are too eclectic and your intuitions too far outside the Overton window? What if you just aren’t clubbable? If you’d rather stick pins in your eyes than go to a think-tank pub with people in chinos? And what if despite all this the world of ideas is still your happy place, and inhabiting it is really the only thing you’re any good at?

If so, you’re part of a much smaller subset of people who would probably be scholars or literary eccentrics in any era. The people who, before modernity, might have taken refuge in a monastery, or become itinerant scholars. For people with this calling, the world has changed a lot even over my lifetime. Most of the older conventional refuges for this phenotype - such as a modest, genteel job, or an academic sinecure - are no longer available ,or have grown politically hostile. As a result, the wandering monks are, once again, on the move.

If this sounds like you, on no account try and join a think tank or a newspaper graduate scheme. You will hate it, and be bad at it, and it’ll ruin your confidence and perhaps also your prose. Even worse, you might end up over-exposed before you know much about the world, and get burned out as a “voice of youth” pundit. Instead, I recommend thinking practically about how to survive as an intellectual itinerant, and how to build a virtual, figurative monastery that allows you to make ends meet, while granting you time to read and think.

This is a very sideways approach to life, and very very un-PMC. The two governing idea are

1. Itinerant scholarship is a vocation, not a career path. Your strategy should be ordered not to making it pay, but to making it possible; and

2. If you’re just starting out in life, you don’t know much at all, about anything. On this basis you shouldn’t expect anyone to want to read your opinions at length. That doesn’t mean they never will, but you need to take the long view and focus on acquiring writing skill, life experience, intellectual breadth, and the wisdom necessary to complement the smarts and intellectual curiosity I assume you already have. When you bring all those pieces together, the eventual result will be formidable. But you should expect getting there to take well into your thirties.

If, despite these warnings, the life of a feral nerd is still the only one for you, here are my recommendations for how to pursue it, based on having followed something like this path myself by trial and error.