Richard Morgan recently found a new measure of fame writing about writing, with his funny/terrifying piece “Seven Years as a Freelance Writer, or, How to Make Vitamin Soup.” Though Morgan’s work has appeared in some of the best-known outlets in print journalism – from New York magazine to Wired and The New York Times – his essay details the chronic humiliations of scrambling to make ends meet. We caught up with him by phone this week, as he prepared to leave freelancing for a post at The Commercial Appeal in Memphis. In these excerpts from our chat, he dishes on the unexpected blessings of kill fees, explains how to distill a story down to two sentences and recounts an unsettling encounter with a pineapple.
I recently heard “The Liars’ Club” author Mary Karr talking about how memoir shouldn’t be about payback. When you were writing “Seven Years,” were you thinking about payback, or was it something else?
There was a story that The Awl had done about a week before written by a woman who had been in New York for five years. It was a story about “What I’ve learned in five years of being in New York,” or something like that. I know Choire Sicha, the editor of The Awl; we’re friends. And I said, “Hey, I’m leaving.”
People always ask me about freelancing. I do this stuff where I go to Columbia and I give talks, and people ask me for help with editors and help with pitches. And so I said, “Why don’t I just write about my experience in the last seven years?” And he actually said that normally he would not be up for that, but he knew that a lot of my anecdotes were really crazy, and so he said yes.
It’s the kind of thing that I wrote in my head mostly, and then I just sort of poured it out the way I would a late night email to a boyfriend, or a letter from summer camp. So it wasn’t really payback.
I’m not suggesting your piece is payback, but Karr was saying that a lot of people write first-person pieces imagining that they’re going to pay back people who treated them badly. Her point was that the best first-person pieces really don’t do that.
I definitely was aware as a journalist that people would comb through it and try to decipher it. People do that for everything, with Stephen Glass’ memoirs, or Michael Finkel, or “The Devil Wears Prada,” or Toby Young. Those are a lot more payback and a lot more like, “I got inside, and here’s what it’s like.”
One of the things that I did want to do – which is not really payback – I wanted to relate the normalcy of these situations. There are so many people who would give their kidney to have a story in The New York Times, or a story in GQ. Once you’re inside it, and you see how the sausage is made, it’s not so fascinating. And also it’s not like you get made; it’s not like you’re a made man.
One of the most telling moments in New York was that a friend was a Harper’s intern, which was this already-storied position to be in – so many great people have gone through that role. He related that he had to deal with writers who would be calling and asking desperately about their paychecks. The takeaway wasn’t that Harper’s is financially in trouble or anything like that. The takeaway for us was that you could be someone who gets to do 8,000 words at Harper’s, and you’re still fretting about money, that it’s still this juggling act, this vaudevillian situation of catch as catch can.
