Writer and Blogger: Inspire Me

As part of our #UCLInspireMe series, Nicola Twilley, Writer and Blogger, talks to us about how she got started and shares some tips for UCL students who want to become Writers.   

What do you do?

I live in Brooklyn, and I am a writer, so I have to have a few different jobs in order to have a hope of paying the bills. I run a small event space in lower Manhattan for Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, which involves organising talks, conferences, exhibitions, workshops, and tours that fall within our mission of providing a platform for conversation about the future of the city. We’ve done smell walks, harbour dredging boat tours, talks about the design of abortion clinics, panel discussions on air rights, hologram workshops, and more. Then, the rest of the time, I write!

I just finished a long story for the New York Times Magazine that I travelled to China in January to report. As well as freelance assignments, I also maintain my own blog, and try to post there once a week, at least. I mostly cover stories related to agriculture, food, and design. Finally, I end up doing a lot of little paid gigs — to give you a sense, in the next month, I’ll be consulting with the Institute for the Future, working on a pavilion design for a UK trade expo, speaking at a MoMA event on slaughterhouse design, and lecturing at a university in Delft.

How did you get in to this role?

The question of how I got into any of these roles is a little trickier. I’m not quite sure myself. My BA is in English Lit. (Leeds) and then, just for added unemployability, I got a MA in Art History at the University of Chicago, which is where I met my American husband and ended up living over here. I wanted to be a writer always, but I wasn’t sure I had a novel in me (still not sure) and, when I was in University, it was pre-blogosphere, and you had to join your local paper and report about missing milk floats in order to get into journalism. I was much more shy then than I am now (this is what more than a decade of living in America will do for you!), so the thought of calling strangers for quotes made me have a panic attack. So, instead, I got into various random public programming jobs: organising stuff like a citywide autobiography competition to mark Ben Franklin’s 300th Birthday, etc.

As I got more experienced, I ended up putting together some things on my own, rather than doing them in a job — so, for example, a friend and I launched a multi-city event series called the Foodprint Project, and my husband and I created a 10 week workshop with artists, filmmakers, game designers, architects, and writers on the theme of quarantine, and then curated an exhibition of the resulting work at a gallery here in NYC. Those were fun, although finding funding is always a challenge. That sort of thing prepared me for the Columbia job, I suppose.

As far as writing goes, I started a blog. Pretty much all my freelance work has come out of that — sometimes editors read it and ask me to pitch them, and, at the very least, it’s a portfolio. The blog also ended up leading to all the other random stuff, like speaking gigs and making scratch-‘n-sniff maps of New York City, etc.

What are the best things about working in your role?

Well, right now I have a pretty great set-up, because I have a flexible job that gives me a reliable salary but also still gives me time to write and do all the other random things I like to do. The Columbia job has an expiry date, though, at which point I will end up looking for something to replace it — probably part-time, so I can still travel to report and write. I love so much about writing and reporting: researching odd things to find a story, interviewing fascinating people, having the chance to see things most people never see, whether it be a geologic tomb for nuclear waste or a dumpling factory in China, and even the writing part, as long as it’s going well! I also like curating events, although it is more frustrating — there’s always a couple of audience members I’d like to push off a cliff. But when a workshop or tour or panel conversation goes well, it’s brilliant — you’re learning and seeing new things, and you’re also on a high from seeing how enthusiastic and interested the audience is. Basically, the best part of both jobs is that I get to follow my curiosity and learn about all sorts of fantastically interesting things, all the time.

What are the biggest challenges you face in your work?

Earning a living. Without at least one steady, regular job to rely on, it’s hard to go from freelance gig to freelance gig. People take forever to pay, editors sit on stories for months, editors reject your pitches all the time, stories get killed because someone else just did something vaguely similar… and the gigs don’t even pay that well in the first place. There’s also wrestling with my extraordinary ability to procrastinate, and the inevitable panic attacks about whether my piece is any good or whether I just fluffed an interview with a really important person, etc. In short: lots of anxiety. And I have no work/life balance. Everything ends up being work or work-related, somehow.

Top tips

I would have said have a blog, but I don’t know — the world of online publishing is changing so fast. Single author blogs seem to be going extinct. Either way, write and publish as much as you can, and then make sure people can find all your writing on your own website. You have to write to be a writer, which sounds obvious, but took me a while….

On the programming side, it’s surprisingly easy to put things together if you don’t mind working for free and like a dog. Organise a mini-lecture series/quiz show in a pub back room. Curate an exhibition in a lift in your dorm. Lead walking tours of the chewing gum on London’s pavements. Etc. Oh — and the most important thing is to document these events. Make them look good, put the photos on your website, and it doesn’t matter that it was actually crap and everyone left after 10 minutes! This is cynical advice, but it really is worth thinking about your event in terms of how it’s going to look in photographs. A media outlet will cover a fizzle of an event based on amazing, weird photographs/video of people crouched on the pavement sniffing gum (or whatever), and not cover an amazing event that has dull or no images.

Two final things: You don’t have to study a specialised course for a thing to be able to do it. I didn’t go to journalism school, but learned how to write magazine pitches by looking it up on Google…. Also, who you know is really important (which I know is common wisdom), but you can find ways to get to know interesting people by sending them something that they might find useful or interviewing them for your blog or inviting them to speak at an event, etc. Just don’t invite them for coffee — have something concrete and appealing in mind. It’s more work, but it will work.

For more information on how to become a Writer, visit Careers Tagged.