The Renegade Writer Blog

I’m reading a book by Lama Surya Das about Buddhist values, and there’s a lot of talk about the beginner’s mind. I also learned about this concept when I studied shorin ryu karate. The beginner’s mind is an attitude of openness and the belief that there’s always more to learn.

I think the beginner’s mind is the perfect attitude for a writer — especially in today’s economy, when we’re all looking for new ways to land writing gigs. In fact, The Renegade Writer is all about the beginner’s mind: Why not try this? Let’s see if that works. Instead of saying, “I’m an expert and I know how this works,” we can benefit by saying, “This has worked for me in the past, but maybe there’s something else that will work even better.”

For example, I’m a huge proponent of e-mailing queries — and I was even when all the magazines and books insisted that you had to snail mail them — but a couple of years ago, I wondered what would happen if I went back to my early days of querying and sent letters of introduction to custom publishers via mail. I mailed out around 25 packets with letters and clips, and had a lot of fun collating clips just like in the old days. One publisher held on to my clips for over a year, and surprised me with an assignment out of the blue. I can’t say my snail mail experiment fared any better than my usual e-mailing tactic, but it may have gotten me an assignment I wouldn’t otherwise have gotten.

Here are some ideas for harnessing the beginner’s mind in your writing:

1. Instead of dipping into your tried-and-true (read: overused) list of go-to sources, why not start from scratch and find someone with a fresh outlook on the subject?
2. Rather than churning out the usual bullet-pointed article or anecdotal lede, try new formats. Would your editor go for an illustration with call-outs or a clever chart?
3. If you always pitch magazines X, Y, and Z, try finding some new-to-you magazines to query. It’s always good to expand your client base.
4. Put together a beautiful snail mail package with a query, clips, and your business card. Maybe e-mail-overloaded editors will find your package refreshing.
5. Do something crazy. One writer, in our Comments section, mentioned that she uses a funny, self-deprecating subject line on her follow-up e-mails. My business cards say “My clients think I’m swell.” I once interviewed a writer who ends his queries with a joke. What can you do that no one has done before — but that might work?

What have you done lately that breaks out of your old, tried-and-true methods of working? What happened? I’d love to hear about it in the Comments below. [lf]

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