by Michelle Sutton, NYSUFC Editor
Our beloved field of Urban and Community Forestry (UCF) needs more advocacy and visibility, in all forms. I have an MS in Urban Horticulture and have been writing and editing in the UCF arena since 1998. I have some thoughts to share based on my familiarity with UCF and with both sides of the writer-editor exchange.
If you don’t feel confident about your writing but are motivated to get better, I suggest taking a technical writing course to help bring you up to speed. Better writing will benefit your work (and personal!) life tremendously, and editors will be more keen to work with you.
If you lack a body of work, how do you get started? Find a colleague who is already publishing and ask them 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, send them a little gift.
Volunteer to write for a regional urban forestry publication (like our Council blog), or start your own public blog, which will foster in you a discipline of regular writing and is something concrete you can refer editors to. Be sure to have beautiful photos in your blog. In this era when visual culture is everything, I’m amazed at how many poor quality photos people send me. And yes, blogs are considered passé by some, but if our Council blog views total last year (more than 41,000) is any indication, people are still reading them. (That number took years to build, by the way; don’t worry about viewer stats or commenting frequency when you start out. Focus on the writing practice and the aesthetics.)
When you query editors, summarize your topic in one sentence and specify what makes you qualified to write the piece. Refer to the high-quality photos you presumably have to go with the story. Be brief. A lengthy query is less likely to be considered than a tight single paragraph. When you query concisely, you demonstrate your ability to write concisely. Before writing your query, study the intended publication to make sure you are offering something that fits their style and content and that hasn’t been written about recently. Also note the level of technical knowledge of the readership. If they are urban and community foresters, they don’t need an opening summary about the ecosystem benefits of trees; however, if they’re lay folks, that summary is important.
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.
My colleague, Consulting Arborist Jeff Shimonski says, “I soon found out that the editor for the magazine or newspaper that I was attempting to write for was in charge. I had to be open to their revisions or being asked to revise.”
Indeed, editors like to work with writers who are flexible and not overly attached to minutiae. Busy editors also enjoy the ease and efficiency of ongoing relationships with writers, especially those who write well or are at least open to improvement. Have a friend who has copy editing skills look over your piece before you send it in. Get practiced at coming up with clever titles, but don’t get too attached to them. Sometimes the editor will change your title in a way that better fits their publication.
About the writing process and subject matter: SavATree Consulting Group Director Mike Galvin, makes a helpful analogy. He says, “If you want to build a house, you don’t start at one corner and construct everything as you move from one end to the other; you build the structure first and then add items that can be supported from coarser to finer until you’re done. It’s better to pick a few main points to communicate and tie together logically than to start with a thought and follow the thread wherever it leads you.” When you get more experienced at crafting pieces, the outline of a story may take shape in your head or emerge as you write. But for now, lean hard on that structure.
Jeff Shimonski says that for the first couple of years of writing his column for a Florida newspaper, he was very concerned about running out of subjects to write about and making that monthly deadline. “There are only so many times you can write about coconut palms and mango trees,” he says, “but then I learned to look at my column from a broader point of view. I have grown hundreds of species of plants and I can write about my experiences with them but I also write articles about trees and zoning issues, edible plants and recipes, how to deal with landscape contractors, and many other subjects.”
The more I write, the more story ideas I have. One of life’s greatest pleasures is hearing and telling stories … we all have them in abundance! We can share them creatively in service to our business and to our industry.
Lastly, an important note about collaboration. If you are writing about urban forestry issues or events specific to your town, be sure to involve your city municipal forester (or your tree commission, if you are the city forester). Ideally, the city forester would coauthor the article with you. You at least want to give them the chance the review the piece, comment, and correct any potential inaccuracies. Likewise, if you’re involved with a nonprofit, be sure to bring in the agency’s director or the PR person to review your piece. In general, especially in the beginning, it’s good to have as many different stakeholders as possible look over your writing before it gets published.
My Favorite Writing Resources
The Chicago Manual of Style
On Writing Well by William Zinzer
The Elements of Style by Strunk and White
Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg
Writing Alone and with Others by Pat Schneider
The Elephants of Style and Lapsing into a Comma by Bill Walsh