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www.landscapeirrigation.com Landscape and Irrigation October 2014 11 Work may not rush in as an immediate response to your column or features — but the benefits do come over time, and sometimes obliquely. For example, you may be talking with a potential client, and mention that you write for a newspaper or magazine, and offer to send them a link to your stories. This adds to their perception of you as a true professional, and can help sway them to hire you. GettInG your boot In the door If you lack a body of work, how do you get started? Find a colleague who is already publishing, and ask him or her to co- author a piece on a topic you know a good deal about. Tell them the writer's fee (if any) will be all theirs. Then do the majority of the work yourself, accommodate your more experienced co- author in the extreme, and when your work gets published, buy them a bottle of wine. If co-authorship isn't for you, perhaps the easiest way to get started is to volunteer to write for your regional professional newsletters. Or consider starting a public blog, which will foster in you a discipline of regular writing, and is something concrete to which you can refer editors. Be sure to have beautiful photos in your blog. Good photos are really, really important in our visual culture. I did a series of unpaid posts for an online magazine produced in WordPress. For a volunteer gig, it seemed like a lot to figure out at first. But learning how to navigate WordPress paid off later when I was asked to submit a proposal to an urban forestry council to create a blog for them. I felt confident when I said, "This is the blogging tool you want, and I know how to use it." In Shimonski's case with the Biscayne Times, getting in the door came about eight years ago when he was asked to write an article on hurricane preparedness for what was then a very small local monthly newspaper. "I jumped at the opportunity, and have been writing a monthly garden column for them ever since," he said. "It has been a great ongoing relationship." Now the newspaper is one of the most popular in Miami, with more than 75,000 readers. When you query editors, summarize your topic in one sentence, be brief and specify what makes you qualified to write the piece. Be brief and refer to the high-quality photos you presumably have to go with the story. Did I mention be brief? A lengthy query is less likely to be considered than one that is one tight paragraph. When you query concisely, you demonstrate your ability to write concisely. Also, ask for, and read, their Writers' Guidelines before you query the editor. Study their publication to make sure you are offering something that fits their style and content and that hasn't been written about recently. Be like a woodpecker in your persistence, but also be prepared for your fair share of rejection. Sometimes your article really is a gem, but it just hasn't yet found its right home. Keep shopping it around. Stay open and don't get discouraged — opportunities will present themselves in unexpected ways. Be open to even the most modest outlets when you are getting started. happy edItor, happy wrIter, happy reader "The main truism I soon found out was that the editor for the magazine or newspaper that I was attempting to write for was in absolute charge," said Shimonski. "I had to be open to their revisions or being asked to revise." • The Chicago Manual of Style On Writing Well by William Zinzer (right) • The Elements of Style by Strunk and White • Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg • The Elephants of Style and Lapsing into a Comma by Bill Walsh — By Michelle Sutton My Favorite Writing Resources