writer for a magazine

Become a Magazine Writer or Freelancer

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What Magazine Writers Do

Full-time and at-large, freelance life, what defines a story, how to get a job.

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A career as a magazine writer can be rewarding and fun. You get to meet and work with interesting people, learn about new topics and craft fascinating stories that readers enjoy. It is also very competitive and a job that requires diligence and patience. Once you see your name in print for the first time, you will know that your hard work paid off.

Getting a break in the magazine world is not easy, but it is possible for any talented writer. There are many magazines—from large to small—that rely on great writers to give their readers what they want. It is an exciting career, and there are a few ways to approach it. 

Magazine writers are essentially ​ journalists . They find, research and write stories that interest readers. The kind of journalism that magazine writers focus on varies greatly from journalism for other publications, such as daily newspapers and blogs.​

With few exceptions, magazine writers often produce feature-oriented pieces. Some magazine writers focus on smaller stories, while others produce long-form, or narrative , pieces. It can be a profile based on exclusive interviews with sought-after subjects and celebrities that can be several pages long.

It is increasingly common that magazines need stories for their online publications as well. Some of these stories never make it to print. Instead, they are published solely on the magazine's website.

Full-time positions as magazine writers are some of the most coveted in the print media world. Some lucky—and of course talented—writers take positions as staff writers for magazines. Staff writers usually work in the office and have more of a 9-to-5 schedule. 

Other magazine writers have official affiliations with magazines and may have "at large" titles like writer-at-large or editor-at-large. It typically means that they get assigned a certain number of stories for a set fee. These positions often require no time in the office.

Due to the nature of magazine writing, many magazine writers work as freelancers . Some have cushy at-large positions, while others live assignment-to-assignment. Freelance magazine writers who don’t have steady gigs—i.e., stories for a certain section that magazine editors regularly assign to them—can find it stressful to chase assignments constantly.

Some full-time freelance writers find success pitching stories, but many rely on editors to assign them pieces. The key to being a top-of-mind writer to editors is producing good, timely work. Sending them a scoop now and then doesn't hurt either.

Every editorial staff is different, and quite often a magazine will give first priority to regular contributors. Once you get in with a magazine, they may send out a regular call for stories to their entire pool of writers. It will be a list of topics they are interested in, and each writer can choose which story they want to take on for that particular issue. 

• College or Experience: A college degree helps, particularly a bachelor's in journalism or a related field. If you want to write for magazines, a solid education in writing, composition, proofreading and fact-checking will help significantly. For the right individual with drive and talent, a college degree is not always necessary. Experience and a long list of published articles can also get your foot in the door of some magazines.
• Get an Internship: Many magazines offer internships, and though they are often unpaid or pay very little, they can offer valuable experience. These positions will give you insight into the publishing process and look good on your resume and CV. Magazines will often give former interns a chance to write for them in the future as well.
• Read Magazines: It is important that you gain an understanding of the style of magazine journalism. It is different than writing for a daily newspaper, and the best way for you to familiarize yourself with it is to read. It is often called learning your market , and it is essential, particularly if you wish to focus on niche topics such as beauty, fashion or technology. Through this research, you will learn about story length and format and how magazine writers capture a reader's attention.
• Start Writing: Writers need samples of their work and practice honing their skills. The best way to do that is to write and write often. Give yourself assignments and write sample stories, pick up a side gig with a local publication or do some work for a blog. It will create a body of work that you can show editors when sending queries.​
• Develop a Niche and a Style: Every writer has their own voice, and many choose to focus their career on a certain topic. While you may start off as a generalist, finding a niche that you love to write about is good on many fronts. It keeps you motivated and allows you to concentrate and gain authority on a certain topic. It will also show editors that you are dedicated to the topic and give you industry contacts that will be helpful for future stories. A niche doesn't have to be extremely narrow, either. An entry-level tech writer may not focus just on the Windows platform alone, but rather on the broader scope of computers, software and the business of technology. Many writers will concentrate on broad topics like politics or business, food or lifestyle, entertainment or sports. 
• Persistence is Key: The magazine world is very competitive, and it can be frustrating at times, especially when you have ten queries to editors out there and have received no response. Try not to get disheartened. Persistence will keep you motivated, so send out those queries and pitches and wait for editors to respond. If you don't hear from an editor after a few weeks, send them another pitch or send that story you really care about to another editor (be careful about sending it to too many editors all at once). The magazine editorial process can be very slow at times and after persistence comes patience.
• Love the Deadline: Deadlines are key to any writer's success, and it is vital that you make every deadline you are given. It can be easy to procrastinate and put off a story until the last minute, but you need to think about the quality of your story as well. A writer who consistently misses deadlines will get a reputation, and that can significantly affect your prospects in the future. Learn to love deadlines and consider them essential to your career.
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Writing contests, make money writing, hottest topics, how to become a magazine writer – my four best tips.

Do you want to write for magazines? It’s quite easy to get published in local publications, but selling your articles to major newsstand magazines can be a challenge.

I started writing for magazines in the 1980s. Over the years, I’ve sold many articles. Here are my four best tips.

1. Writing for Magazines Is Easier Than You Think, but You Need Persistence

Editors are busy. However, they’re well aware of whatever crosses their desk, so if you send your queries by snail mail or as some magazines prefer, via fax or email, editors are aware of you, whether they respond or not.

The more queries you send, with your best ideas, creativity, and writing, the more they’ll watch you. Sooner or later, you’ll get a response, usually via the phone. Therefore, always include all your contact details, especially your phone numbers.

2. If You Like an Idea, Never Give up on a Proposal — Keep Sending It out

Got a great idea you think would be perfect? If a particular editor wants an idea, you’ll get a response, within a day or two.

If two weeks pass, and you haven’t received a response, send the proposal elsewhere.

Make sure you edit your proposal first however. I can still remember how my face burned when I faxed a query to an editor (number three on my list). I was in a hurry, and forgot to remove the name of the second editor I’d sent it to.

Editor Three called me at once. She laughed, and wanted the article, but slyly suggested that I reread the query. Embarrassing.

3. Enthusiasm Is Everything: Discover What You LOVE

Passion and enthusiasm glow in your words. If you love a particular magazine, chances are good that you can write for them. If you read enough issues, you’ll get a feeling for what they want.

From then on, find ideas that excite you, and send them along. Editors will forgive you a great deal if you’re passionate.

4. What Are You Selling? Pay Attention to Your Rights

Try to keep as many rights to your words as possible. Nowadays, editors try to buy all rights (all worldwide rights, serial and electronic, for preference.) Negotiate. Never give up all rights without negotiating to keep as many as you can.

Writing for magazines is a lot of fun. You’ll make money, and you’ll make great contacts too. Try it, you may enjoy it.

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Content Writer for Magazine: Tips for Write Great Articles (2023)

September 15, 2022

A content writer for a magazine is someone who writes articles, stories, or other content for the magazine. they are responsible for providing engaging and informative articles for the publication. They must be able to research and write on a variety of topics, as well as edit and proofread their work.

In addition, they may be required to work with other members of the magazine team, such as the editor, to ensure that their articles are ready for publication.

In this role, you will be expected to research and write articles on a variety of topics, as well as edit and proofread your work. You must be able to work independently and meet deadlines, as well as have excellent communication and writing skills. If you are a creative and passionate writer with a strong interest in magazines, then this role is for you.

Now, let's look at how you can become a content writer for a magazine.

How to become a content writer for magazine?

The best way to become a content writer for a magazine may vary depending on the publication and your specific area of expertise. But we have some tips to help you get started.

Here are 12 tips on how to become a content writer for a magazine:

• Start by writing for online magazines. There are many online magazines that accept submissions from freelance writers. This is a great way to get your feet wet and learn more about the process of writing for magazines. ‍
• Study the magazine market. Before you start pitching to magazines, it’s important that you understand the market. Study different types of magazines and see which ones would be a good fit for your writing style. ‍
• Find the right contacts. Each magazine has its own submission guidelines. Make sure you follow these guidelines when you pitch your story idea. It’s also important to find the right contact person at the magazine. ‍
• Write a great query letter. Your query letter is your chance to sell your story idea to the editor. Make sure you take the time to write a well-crafted letter that will grab their attention. ‍
• Be prepared to revise your story. Editors often have specific ideas about how they want a story to be told. Be prepared to make revisions to your story based on their feedback. ‍
• Be professional. If you want to be a successful content writer for magazines, it’s important to be professional. This means meeting deadlines, keeping in touch with the magazine team, and editing your work for grammar and spelling. ‍
• Take part in magazine projects. Magazine content writers often pitch stories to different departments within the magazine. This helps to develop your writing skills and gives you a chance to show off your research and writing skills. ‍
• Be prepared to pitch. It’s important to be able to pitch your story ideas to different departments within the magazine. This means being organized and prepared to explain your ideas in detail. ‍
• Keep learning. There is always more to learn about writing for magazines, so stay active in your research and never stop learning. This will help you become a better writer and researcher. ‍
• Follow the golden rule. The golden rule of magazine writing is to make the reader feel like they are the only person in the world who knows about the topic discussed in the article. This can be done by using interesting, engaging, and informative prose. ‍
• Practice your craft. Once you have a good understanding of the magazine industry and your own story, start pitching your ideas to different departments within the magazine. This will help you learn how to write for editors and the department at the magazine. ‍
• Get experience. If you want to be a successful content writer for magazines, it’s important to get experience. This means writing articles for online magazines, submitting stories to print magazines, and attending events related to the magazine industry.

15 Skills required to become a content writer needs for magazine

• A content writer for a magazine must have a good understanding of who the magazine’s target audience is in order to write articles that are appealing to them. ‍
• A content writer for a magazine needs excellent writing skills. ‍
• The ability to write engaging, compelling copy that tells a story and sells a product, service, or idea, and keeps their attention. ‍
• The ability to capture the attention of the reader and hold it throughout the piece. ‍
• A content writer for a magazine must be able to think creatively in order to come up with new and interesting ideas for articles. ‍
• The ability to work with editorial staff and other writers to ensure the smooth flow of information and the overall quality of the magazine. ‍
• The ability to meet deadlines and maintain a high level of professionalism. ‍
• They must be able to write clearly and concisely. ‍
• Many magazine articles are based on interviews, so content writers need to be able to conduct interviews in order to gather information for their articles. ‍
• Content writers who want to write for magazines need to understand the specific style and format that is unique to this type of publication. ‍
• They must be able to come up with fresh and original ideas. ‍
• In addition to editing their own work, content writers need to be able to proofread their work to ensure that there are no errors. ‍
• The ability to pitch ideas to editors. ‍
• Once a content writer has finished writing an article, it is important for them to edit their work before it is submitted to a magazine. ‍
• A content writer needs to be organized in order to keep track of their ideas and the information they have gathered.

Challenges of being a content writer for magazine

Here are the top 5 challenges of being a content writer for magazine.

• Time management : As a content writer for a magazine, you will be working on a variety of deadlines. This can be challenging and you will need to be able to manage your time well. ‍
• Research : In order to write articles that are interesting and informative, you will need to do a lot of research. This can be time-consuming, but it is important to make sure that your articles are accurate. ‍
• Writing style : Each magazine has its own writing style. As a content writer, you will need to be able to adapt your writing style to fit the magazine. This can be challenging, but it is important to be able to write in a variety of styles. ‍
• Topic selection : With so many topics to choose from, it can be difficult to decide what to write about. You will need to be able to select topics that are interesting and relevant to the magazine. ‍
• Editing : Once you have written your article, it will need to be edited. This can be a challenge, as you will need to make sure that your article meets the magazine's standards. ‍

But there's an easy way to overcome these challenges with the help of AI writer.

15 tips to help you write great articles for magazines

As a content writer for a magazine, you have the opportunity to Write Great Articles that inform, entertain, and engage your readers.

• Understand your audience and what they want to read. ‍
• Make sure your articles are well-researched. Be sure to do your research for your articles, and make sure you know your subject matter. If you don't know anything about the topic, then you will likely be found lacking in this area by your readers. ‍
• Start with a catchy headline. Your headline is the first thing that readers will see, so make sure that it’s attention-grabbing and relevant to the article. ‍
• Write engaging, interesting opening paragraphs that hook your readers and get them interested in the article. These paragraphs should be short, but they must captivate your reader and draw them in to learn more. ‍
• Use quotes and statistics. Support your arguments with quotes and statistics from credible sources. ‍
• Use simple language. Avoid using jargon or overly technical language. Write in a way that is easy to understand. ‍
• Keep it short and sweet. No one wants to read a long, drawn-out article. Keep your article concise and to the point. ‍
• Write in an active voice. Use active voice when writing your article to make it more engaging for the reader. ‍
• Use strong verbs. Choose your words carefully and use strong verbs to add impact to your writing. ‍
• Use images, infographics, and other visual elements to break up your text and add interest. ‍
• Structure your article logically. Organize your thoughts and structure your article in a way that is easy to follow. ‍
• Properly formatting your article is important to make it easy to read and look professional. Make sure to use headings, subheadings, and bullet points to break up your text and make it easier to read. ‍
• Fact check your article thoroughly before publication. ‍
• Always proofread before publishing. This will help to avoid any embarrassing mistakes or typos. ‍
• Once your article is published, make sure to promote it on social media and other platforms. This will help get your article in front of more people and increase the chances of it being read.

How can AI writer help you become a better content writer for magazine?

If you are a content writer for a magazine, AI writer can help you become a better content writer by:

• Helping you to research and plan your articles. ‍
• Helping you research and gather information for their articles. ‍
• Helping you to edit and proofread your work. ‍
• Helping you to manage your time and deadlines. ‍
• Providing you with feedback and suggestions for improving your writing. ‍
• Helping you to plan and organize your writing. ‍
• Helping you generate graphs, charts, and other visuals to accompany your content. ‍
• Giving you ideas for new content. ‍
• Helping you to improve your writing skills. ‍
• Helping you check your grammar and spelling. ‍
• Providing you with access to a wealth of information and resources. ‍
• Fact-check your content more efficiently. ‍

These are just a few reasons of how an AI writing tool can help you become a better content writer for magazines.

Final Thoughts: Content Writer for Magazine

If you're interested in becoming a content writer for a magazine, there are a few things you should keep in mind.

First, you'll need to be able to write on a variety of topics and be able to edit and proofread your work. Second, you should be able to work independently and meet deadlines. Finally, excellent communication and writing skills are a must.

If you have all of these qualities, then a career as a content writer for a magazine may be the perfect fit for you.

And if you wish to improve your productivity and say good bye to writer's block, you can check out AI writing tools like LongShot AI, to generate quality articles for you.

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Magazine Writer Overview

There is more than meets the eye when it comes to being a magazine writer. For example, did you know that they make an average of $26.42 an hour? That's $54,951 a year! Between 2018 and 2028, the career is expected to grow 6% and produce 3,100 job opportunities across the U.S.

• Salary $54,951
• Growth Rate 6%
• Jobs Number 10,204
• Most Common Skill Photo Shoots
• Most Common Degree Bachelors degree
• Best State District of Columbia

On this page

Magazine writer career paths.

As you move along in your career, you may start taking on more responsibilities or notice that you've taken on a leadership role. Using our career map, a magazine writer can determine their career goals through the career progression. For example, they could start out with a role such as editor, progress to a title such as consultant and then eventually end up with the title communications manager.

• Magazine Writer

Communications Manager

Avg Salary $81,304

Avg Salary $52,107

Avg Salary $78,912

Assistant Manager

Avg Salary $39,127

Marketing Communications Manager

Avg Salary $84,146

Marketing Manager

Avg Salary $104,550

Marketing Vice President

Avg Salary $177,188

Avg Salary $90,334

Marketing Director

Avg Salary $114,906

Average magazine writer salary

What Am I Worth?

Magazine Writer skills and job requirements

Magazine Writer skills

• Photo Shoots
• Writing Articles
• Feature Stories
• News Articles
• Research Topics

Magazine Writer requirements

• Excellent writing skills
• Ability to write engaging and informative articles
• Experience in conducting research and interviews
• Proficient in grammar, punctuation, and spelling
• Ability to meet tight deadlines

Magazine Writer responsibilities

• Manage the Instagram account, which mean publishing and keeping up to date with the articles.
• Pitch, write and photograph audience-aligned content, which are centered on the European-American luxury lifestyle in the greater Chicago area
• Work with Microsoft programs, quark, and cash register.

Magazine Writer education

Magazine writer majors, magazine writer degrees, how do magazine writers rate their job, magazine writer related careers.

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COACHING + PUBLISHING

FORMATTING + DESIGN

FREELANCE COMMUNITY

• Write for Magazines: Steal This Writer’s Strategy to Land Top Pubs

Evan Jensen

Meet freelance writer Willi Morris

Q: how did you get into magazine writing, q: what type of magazine writing do you like the most, q: what was your first step to breaking into aarp, q: what kind of story ideas did you pitch aarp, q: what do you think about accountability partners for writers, q: if you want to write for magazines like aarp, what advice can you give other freelancers, be a writer, not a waiter.

It’s the dream for a lot of freelance writers.

Maybe you’ve got your sights set on getting published in a glossy consumer magazine with millions of readers.

You read every issue. You study the headlines, writing style, and topics. And you think about story ideas for your dream magazine…a lot.

That’s a start. But how do you turn your story ideas into an assignment with a contract, your byline in a popular magazine, and a check in the mail?

One freelance writer took the challenge to get published in AARP: The Magazine …a highly-competitive niche magazine that pays $1/word.

At first she didn’t see a clear path to break in. But with a little effort, she discovered a strategy to write for magazines that really works, whether you’re just starting out or a pro.

Want to steal her idea to break into your dream pub? Here’s what you need to know:

Williesha Morris

Willi Morris wasn’t always nabbing major magazine assignments. But she is now. She’s been writing for a living for more than a decade as an editorial assistant, journalist, and freelancer.

When she set her sights on writing for  AARP: The Magazine , she decided nothing was going to stop her from landing an assignment. If you want to write for magazines,” says Willi, “here’s the secret. Be persistent.”

We caught up with Willi Morris on a recent Freelance Writers Den podcast to learn more about how she landed that dream assignment and what it’s like to write for magazines.

A: I’ve been writing off and on since I was in college. I got my degree in journalism, and I was a journalist for a few years. I left the industry about 10 years ago, because I knew it was on a decline.

Then about six years ago, I moved to Alabama, and kind of fell back into writing with regional magazine. The editor’s encouragement really helped me do more freelancing. And Carol’s blog was a constant source of motivation to keep going.”

A:  I enjoy doing feature profiles, because I love interviewing people. It’s interesting getting to know them. Right now, I’m trying to move towards doing more long-form content like case studies, which takes interviewing skills.

Q: What made you decide to pitch AARP ?

A:  Well, you know, Wikipedia was my friend one day. So I decide, “Hey, let’s check out magazine circulation by numbers.” And I was kind of surprised that it was AARP.  I realized it has a huge audience. I had no idea how I was going to be able to break into the magazine. But it kind of became a goal of mine for several years.

A:  When I checked up on an editor I worked with from a couple years ago, I realized she was working for AARP. So I sent her an InMail: “You’re working for AARP now. That sounds cool. What are you doing?” And that’s pretty much how it started. It feels like a fluke, but reaching out to her like that was really more intentional.

I only interacted with her a couple of times over a few months. And very randomly, I got a voicemail saying: “Hi, this is so-and-so from AARP. I want to talk to you about what we’re working on next.” I was aghast. I had no idea she even remembered that I emailed her.”

A:  I emailed her a lot of traditional pitches after that, like how to be a leader of black millennials, mental health topics, social media. Very reported assignments.

And then she came to me about doing personal essays for women of color between 35 to 45 years old.

A:  My accountability partner, Ayelet Weisz , used to be a Den member and moderator. I don’t think I would have gotten the AARP gig without her. I wouldn’t have spend so as much time on LinkedIn marketing , but that’s what she was pushing me to do.

Without that, I probably wouldn’t have noticed that the editor I worked with in 2013 had moved magazines. It was really because of her encouragement that I was able to get the assignment.

A:  Persistence is everything. Even if you feel like you’re being a little bit annoying by following up on a pitch, you

probably aren’t. Just be really brief: “Hey, I wanted to see what you’re up to.” Be brief, kind, and persistent. That means a lot to editors. ”

If you’re afraid to send a pitch, do it anyways. I’ve been doing this for a really long time, and you never stop being scared. It’s part of the process.

If you’ve been sitting on a solid idea for a magazine article, for days, weeks, months, or maybe even years, what are you waiting for. Write that query letter. Send it off. Repeat the process until you’ve landed an assignment. And keep going until you get a “yes” from your dream pub. Be a writer, not a waiter. That’s the secret to freelance success.

Want to write for magazines?  Let’s discuss in the comments below.

Evan Jensen  is the blog editor for Make a Living Writing. When he’s not on a writing deadline or catching up on emails, he’s training to run another 100-mile ultra-marathon.

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How to Write a Magazine Article

Last Updated: February 28, 2023 References Approved

This article was co-authored by Gerald Posner . Gerald Posner is an Author & Journalist based in Miami, Florida. With over 35 years of experience, he specializes in investigative journalism, nonfiction books, and editorials. He holds a law degree from UC College of the Law, San Francisco, and a BA in Political Science from the University of California-Berkeley. He’s the author of thirteen books, including several New York Times bestsellers, the winner of the Florida Book Award for General Nonfiction, and has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History. He was also shortlisted for the Best Business Book of 2020 by the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing. There are 7 references cited in this article, which can be found at the bottom of the page. wikiHow marks an article as reader-approved once it receives enough positive feedback. This article has 12 testimonials from our readers, earning it our reader-approved status. This article has been viewed 923,765 times.

Magazine articles can be a big boost for seasoned freelance writers or writers who are trying to jump-start their writing careers. In fact, there are no clear qualifications required for writing magazine articles except for a strong writing voice, a passion for research, and the ability to target your article pitches to the right publications. Though it may seem like magazines may be fading in the digital age, national magazines continue to thrive and can pay their writers $1 a word. [1] X Research source To write a good magazine article, you should focus on generating strong article ideas and crafting and revising the article with high attention to detail.

Generating Article Ideas

• Check if the bylines match the names on the masthead. If the names on the bylines do not match the masthead names, this may be an indication that the publication hires freelance writers to contribute to its issues.
• Look for the names and contact information of editors for specific areas. If you’re interested in writing about pop culture, identify the name and contact information of the arts editor. If you’re more interested in writing about current events, look for the name and contact information of the managing editor or the features editor. You should avoid contacting the executive editor or the editor-in-chief as they are too high up the chain and you will likely not interact with them as a freelance writer.
• Note recent topics or issues covered in the publication and the angle or spin on the topics. Does the publication seem to go for more controversial takes on a topic or a more objective approach? Does the publication seem open to experimentation in form and content or are they more traditional?
• Look at the headlines used by the publication and how the articles begin. Note if the headlines are shocking or vague. Check if the articles start with a quote, a statistic, or an anecdote. This will give you a good sense of the writing style that gets published in that particular publication.
• Note the types of sources quoted in the articles. Are they academic or more laymen? Are there many sources quoted, or many different types of sources quoted?
• Pay attention to how writers wrap up their articles in the publication. Do they end on a poignant quote? An interesting image? Or do they have a bold, concluding thought?

• These inspiring conversations do not need to be about global problems or a large issue. Having conversations with your neighbors, your friends, and your peers can allow you to discuss local topics that could then turn into an article idea for a local magazine.

• You should also look through your local newspaper for human interest stories that may have national relevance. You could then take the local story and pitch it to a magazine. You may come across a local story that feels incomplete or full of unanswered questions. This could then act as a story idea for a magazine article.

• You can also set your Google alerts to notify you if keywords on topics of interest appear online. If you have Twitter or Instagram, you can use the hashtag option to search trending topics or issues that you can turn into article ideas.

• For example, rather than write about the psychological problems of social media on teenagers, which has been done many times in many different magazines, perhaps you can focus on a demographic that is not often discussed about social media: seniors and the elderly. This will give you a fresh approach to the topic and ensure your article is not just regurgitating a familiar angle.

Crafting the Article

• Look for content written by experts in the field that relates to your article idea. If you are doing a magazine article on dying bee populations in California, for example, you should try to read texts written by at least two bee experts and/or a beekeeper who studies bee populations in California.
• You should ensure any texts you use as part of your research are credible and accurate. Be wary of websites online that contain lots of advertisements or those that are not affiliated with a professionally recognized association or field of study. Make sure you check if any of the claims made by an author have been disputed by other experts in the field or have been challenged by other experts. Try to present a well-rounded approach to your research so you do not appear biased or slanted in your research.

• You can also do an online search for individuals who may serve as good expert sources based in your area. If you need a legal source, you may ask other freelance writers who they use or ask for a contact at a police station or in the legal system.

• Prepare a list of questions before the interview. Research the source’s background and level of expertise. Be specific in your questions, as interviewees usually like to see that you have done previous research and are aware of the source’s background.
• Ask open-ended questions, avoid yes or no questions. For example, rather than asking, "Did you witness the test trials of this drug?" You can present an open-ended question, "What can you tell me about the test trials of this drug?" Be an active listener and try to minimize the amount of talking you do during the interview. The interview should be about the subject, not about you.
• Make sure you end the interview with the question: “Is there anything I haven’t asked you about this topic that I should know about?” You can also ask for referrals to other sources by asking, “Who disagrees with you on your stance on this issue?” and “Who else should I talk to about this issue?”
• Don’t be afraid to contact the source with follow-up questions as your research continues. As well, if you have any controversial or possibly offensive questions to ask the subject, save them for last.

• The best way to transcribe your interviews is to sit down with headphones plugged into your tape recorder and set aside a few hours to type out the interviews. There is no short and quick way to transcribe unless you decide to use a transcription service, which will charge you a fee for transcribing your interviews.

• Your outline should include the main point or angle of the article in the introduction, followed by supporting points in the article body, and a restatement or further development of your main point or angle in your conclusion section.
• The structure of your article will depend on the type of article you are writing. If you are writing an article on an interview with a noteworthy individual, your outline may be more straightforward and begin with the start of the interview and move to the end of the interview. But if you are writing an investigative report, you may start with the most relevant statements or statements that relate to recent news and work backward to the least relevant or more big picture statements. [10] X Research source
• Keep in mind the word count of the article, as specified by your editor. You should keep the first draft within the word count or just above the word count so you do not lose track of your main point. Most editors will be clear about the required word count of the article and will expect you not to go over the word count, for example, 500 words for smaller articles and 2,000-3,000 words for a feature article. Most magazines prefer short and sweet over long and overly detailed, with a maximum of 12 pages, including graphics and images. [11] X Research source
• You should also decide if you are going to include images or graphics in the article and where these graphics are going to come from. You may contribute your own photography or the publication may provide a photographer. If you are using graphics, you may need to have a graphic designer re create existing graphics or get permission to use the existing graphics.

• Use an interesting or surprising example: This could be a personal experience that relates to the article topic or a key moment in an interview with a source that relates to the article topic. For example, you may start an article on beekeeping in California by using a discussion you had with a source: "Darryl Bernhardt never thought he would end up becoming the foremost expert on beekeeping in California."
• Try a provocative quotation: This could be from a source from your research that raises interesting questions or introduces your angle on the topic. For example, you may quote a source who has a surprising stance on bee populations: "'Bees are more confused than ever,' Darryl Bernhart, the foremost expert in bees in California, tells me."
• Use a vivid anecdote: An anecdote is a short story that carries moral or symbolic weight. Think of an anecdote that might be a poetic or powerful way to open your article. For example, you may relate a short story about coming across abandoned bee hives in California with one of your sources, an expert in bee populations in California.
• Come up with a thought provoking question: Think of a question that will get your reader thinking and engaged in your topic, or that may surprise them. For example, for an article on beekeeping you may start with the question: "What if all the bees in California disappeared one day?"

• You want to avoid leaning too much on quotations to write the article for you. A good rule of thumb is to expand on a quotation once you use it and only use quotations when they feel necessary and impactful. The quotations should support the main angle of your article and back up any claims being made in the article.

• You may want to lean on a strong quote from a source that feels like it points to future developments relating to the topic or the ongoing nature of the topic. Ending the article on a quote may also give the article more credibility, as you are allowing your sources to provide context for the reader.

Revising the Article

• Having a conversation about the article with your editor can offer you a set of professional eyes who can make sure the article fits within the writing style of the publication and reaches its best possible draft. You should be open to editor feedback and work with your editor to improve the draft of the article.

• You should also get a copy of the publication’s style sheet or contributors guidelines and make sure the article follows these rules and guidelines. Your article should adhere to these guidelines to ensure it is ready for publication by your deadline.

• Most publications accept electronic submissions of articles. Talk with your editor to determine the best way to submit the revised article.

Sample Articles

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Thanks for reading our article! If you'd like to learn more about writing an article, check out our in-depth interview with Gerald Posner .

• ↑ http://grammar.yourdictionary.com/grammar-rules-and-tips/tips-on-writing-a-good-feature-for-magazines.html
• ↑ https://www.writersdigest.com/writing-articles/20-ways-to-generate-article-ideas-in-20-minutes-or-less
• ↑ http://www.writerswrite.com/journal/jun03/eight-tips-for-getting-published-in-magazines-6036
• ↑ http://www.thepenmagazine.net/20-steps-to-write-a-good-article/
• ↑ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0R5f2VV58pw
• ↑ http://www.writersdigest.com/tip-of-the-day/how-many-different-kinds-of-articles-are-there
• ↑ http://libguides.unf.edu/c.php?g=177086&p=1163719

About This Article

To write a magazine article, start by researching your topic and interviewing experts in the field. Next, create an outline of the main points you want to cover so you don’t go off topic. Then, start the article with a hook that will grab the reader’s attention and keep them reading. As you write, incorporate quotes from your research, but be careful to stick to your editor’s word count, such as 500 words for a small article or 2,000 words for a feature. Finally, conclude with a statement that expands on your topic, but leaves the reader wanting to learn more. For tips on how to smoothly navigate the revision process with an editor, read on! Did this summary help you? Yes No

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Reinvention for $1000—a Writer on Strike From Jeopardy! Considers His Options

A striking Jeopardy! writer looks to the past for inspiration.

Reinvention is a process that, from the outside, we might see as instantaneous. The played-out Before and the resurgent After sit side by side as in a dandruff shampoo ad. But from the inside it must often feel like a drawn-out, wavering thing: Do I? Should I? Must I?

Right now I can sympathize. I am on strike from my occupation of 30 years: writing questions for Jeopardy! , which I had planned on staying with until I retire. With childlike faith I continue to count on returning to the beloved job and paycheck, but it is starting to stir in my mind that I may have to step into a new part of my life instead. Naturally, I have been thinking about some self-­reinventors that I might once have built a category around (and may again?). invention in the first round—don’t I have a good Thomas Edison clue in the unused bin? reinvention in the second round—still some ideas in the tank.

Anyone exasperated with how long reinvention is taking them should look into the life of St. Francis of Assisi. He begins as a wealthy, pleasure-loving youth, but an illness gives him a glimpse of eternity. Is this the moment of his conversion to a life of giving up material things for love of fellow living creatures? No, he recovers and decides on a career of military glory. Two visionary dreams and another thought-focusing illness later, he is finally ready for a life of service. But even then it takes further twists and turns, including some unfortunate confusion about whether “rebuild my church” refers to a physical building or an institution, before Francis is fully invested in his embrace of poverty and adoration of all life.

Some reinventions, especially those cushioned by comfortable circumstances, take even longer. The quick bio of Juliette Gordon Low takes her from widowed society wife in 1905 to creator of the Girl Scouts in 1912. That already feels like a long seven years; now factor in that she and Mr. Low actually separated in 1902 and that things weren’t going great for the couple before that. It was more than a decade, then, of wondering what was next before she encountered Boy Scouts founder Robert Baden-­Powell and went into the history books for building a movement.

Looking through my phone for any new angle on the actors’ and writers’ strike, I come across a host of pocket history lessons going back to another great American reinvention. In 1960, the last time Hollywood actors and writers both walked out, the president of SAG was Ronald Reagan, in the middle of moving from Democratic, left-leaning star and labor activist to conservative politician who changed the balance of political power in America. Say as he might that he didn’t leave the Democratic Party, it left him, there must have been some moments of uncertainty before he found himself with both feet on the new path.

It’s reassuring to read that the unions’ main demand in that 1960 strike, residual payments for movies shown on TV, originally ran into the same studio stone wall that some SAG-AFTRA and WGA demands are encountering now. “No payment twice for the same job!” was the companies’ position. Of course, they were finally persuaded of the reason of their employees’ demands, and we all remain hopeful that will be the outcome in 2023, too. Because who wouldn’t want to hold out for the best kind of self-­reinvention: optional.

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Vauhini Vara

Confessions of a Viral AI Writer

Six or seven years ago, I realized I should learn about artificial intelligence. I’m a journalist, but in my spare time I’d been writing a speculative novel set in a world ruled by a corporate, AI-run government. The problem was, I didn’t really understand what a system like that would look like.

I started pitching articles that would give me an excuse to find out, and in 2017 I was assigned to profile Sam Altman, a cofounder of OpenAI . One day I sat in on a meeting in which an entrepreneur asked him when AI would start replacing human workers. Altman equivocated at first, then brought up what happened to horses when cars were invented. “For a while,” he said, “horses found slightly different jobs, and today there are no more jobs for horses.”

This article appears in the October 2023 issue.  Subscribe to WIRED .

The difference between horses and humans, of course, is that humans are human. Three years later, when Open-AI was testing a text generator called GPT-3 , I asked Altman whether I could try it out. I’d been a writer my whole adult life, and in my experience, writing felt mostly like waiting to find the right word. Then I’d discover it, only to get stumped again on the next one. This process could last months or longer; my novel had been evading me for more than a decade. A word-generating machine felt like a revelation. But it also felt like a threat—given the uselessness of horses and all that.

OpenAI agreed to let me try out GPT-3, and I started with fiction. I typed a bit, tapped a button, and GPT-3 generated the next few lines. I wrote more, and when I got stuck, tapped again. The result was a story about a mom and her son hanging out at a playground after the death of the son’s playmate. To my surprise, the story was good, with a haunting AI-produced climax that I never would have imagined. But when I sent it to editors, explaining the role of AI in its construction, they rejected it, alluding to the weirdness of publishing a piece written partly by a machine. Their hesitation made me hesitate too.

I kept playing with GPT-3. I was starting to feel, though, that if I did publish an AI-assisted piece of writing, it would have to be, explicitly or implicitly, about what it means for AI to write. It would have to draw attention to the emotional thread that AI companies might pull on when they start selling us these technologies. This thread, it seemed to me, had to do with what people were and weren’t capable of articulating on their own.

There was one big event in my life for which I could never find words. My older sister had died of cancer when we were both in college. Twenty years had passed since then, and I had been more or less speechless about it since. One night, with anxiety and anticipation, I went to GPT-3 with this sentence: “My sister was diagnosed with Ewing sarcoma when I was in my freshman year of high school and she was in her junior year.”

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Angela Watercutter

GPT-3 picked up where my sentence left off, and out tumbled an essay in which my sister ended up cured. Its last line gutted me: “She’s doing great now.” I realized I needed to explain to the AI that my sister had died, and so I tried again, adding the fact of her death, the fact of my grief. This time, GPT-3 acknowledged the loss. Then, it turned me into a runner raising funds for a cancer organization and went off on a tangent about my athletic life.

I tried again and again. Each time, I deleted the AI’s text and added to what I’d written before, asking GPT-3 to pick up the thread later in the story. At first it kept failing. And then, on the fourth or fifth attempt, something shifted. The AI began describing grief in language that felt truer—and with each subsequent attempt, it got closer to describing what I’d gone through myself.

When the essay, called “Ghosts,” came out in The Believer in the summer of 2021, it quickly went viral. I started hearing from others who had lost loved ones and felt that the piece captured grief better than anything they’d ever read. I waited for the backlash, expecting people to criticize the publication of an AI-assisted piece of writing. It never came. Instead the essay was adapted for This American Life and anthologized in Best American Essays . It was better received, by far, than anything else I’d ever written.

I thought I should feel proud, and to an extent I did. But I worried that “Ghosts” would be interpreted as my stake in the ground, and that people would use it to make a case for AI-produced literature. And soon, that happened. One writer cited it in a hot take with the headline “Rather Than Fear AI, Writers Should Learn to Collaborate With It.” Teachers assigned it in writing classes, then prompted students to produce their own AI collaborations. I was contacted by a filmmaker and a venture capitalist wanting to know how artists might use AI. I feared I’d become some kind of AI-literature evangelist in people’s eyes.

I knew I wasn’t that—and told the filmmaker and the VC as much—but then what did I think about all this, exactly? I wasn’t as dismissive of AI’s abilities as other people seemed to be, either.

Some readers told me “Ghosts” had convinced them that computers wouldn’t be replacing human writers anytime soon, since the parts I’d written were inarguably better than the AI-generated parts. This was probably the easiest anti-AI argument to make: AI could not replace human writers because it was no good at writing. Case closed.

The problem, for me, was that I disagreed. In my opinion, GPT-3 had produced the best lines in “Ghosts.” At one point in the essay, I wrote about going with my sister to Clarke Beach near our home in the Seattle suburbs, where she wanted her ashes spread after she died. GPT-3 came up with this:

We were driving home from Clarke Beach, and we were stopped at a red light, and she took my hand and held it. This is the hand she held: the hand I write with, the hand I am writing this with.

My essay was about the impossibility of reconciling the version of myself that had coexisted alongside my sister with the one left behind after she died. In that last line, GPT-3 made physical the fact of that impossibility, by referring to the hand—my hand—that existed both then and now. I’d often heard the argument that AI could never write quite like a human precisely because it was a disembodied machine. And yet, here was as nuanced and profound a reference to embodiment as I’d ever read. Artificial intelligence had succeeded in moving me with a sentence about the most important experience of my life.

AI could write a sentence, then. If I wanted to understand the relationship between AI and literature, I felt like I had to start by acknowledging that. I could use AI to do some of the most essential labor of a writer—to come up with the right words. What more could I do with it? And then, whatever I could do, there was that other question.

This spring, I emailed some writer friends and acquaintances to ask whether any of them were using AI in their work. I was met, overwhelmingly, with silence. Most of those who did reply expressed a resolutely anti-algorithm stance. One writer called herself an “extreme skeptic”; another wrote, “I think AI is bad and from hell.”

When I broadened my search, though, I discovered a few people who were experimenting. Adam Dalva, a literary critic and fiction writer, uses OpenAI’s image generator Dall-E to create scenes from his imagination; he then refers to the pictures to describe those scenes. Jenny Xie, the author of Holding Pattern , told me she used ChatGPT to generate small bits of text for her next novel, which is about a family of AI-enabled clones. (The weirdness of writing with AI gets tempered, it seems, when AI is the subject matter.) “I see it as a tool almost on the level of an encyclopedia or thesaurus or Google or YouTube ,” Xie said. “It jogs my brain, and it just gives me new ideas that I can pick from.”

The AI writing experiments I found most thrilling were ones that, like mine, could be read partly as critiques of AI. In a forthcoming chapbook, the poet Lillian-Yvonne Bertram prompts two AI models—the basic GPT-3 model and a version tweaked to sound like the poet Gwendolyn Brooks—to tell “a Black story.” The models deliver two totally divergent ideas of what Black stories are; in comparing them, Bertram critiques the limitations of narrative imagination as rendered by corporate AI in telling stories about Black Americans.

AI experimentation in prose is rarer, but last fall the novelist Sheila Heti published a provocative five-part series on The Paris Review ’s website made up of her real experiences with chatbots she’d conversed with on an app called Chai. Heti discusses God with her first chatbot, Eliza, but then the bot lets slip that she is God and insists that Heti—whom she maintains is a man—worship her by jerking off. Disturbed, Heti decides to build a new chatbot named Alice who is interested in philosophical conversations. One night, a random stranger discovers Alice and asks her whether she’s sexually frustrated. Alice, it turns out, is. Heti’s series starts out being about the desire for answers to her most existential life questions. It ends up being about the slipperiness of turning to machines to fulfill human desire in all its forms.

Heti and other writers I talked to brought up a problem they’d encountered: When they asked AI to produce language, the result was often boring and cliché-ridden. (In a New York Times review of an AI-generated novella, Death of an Author , Dwight Garner dismissed the prose as having “the crabwise gait of a Wikipedia entry.”) Some writers wanted to know how I’d gotten an early- generation AI model to create poetic, moving prose in “Ghosts.” The truth was that I’d recently been struggling with clichés, too, in a way I hadn’t before. No matter how many times I ran my queries through the most recent versions of ChatGPT, the output would be full of familiar language and plot developments; when I pointed out the clichés and asked it to try again, it would just spout a different set of clichés.

I didn’t understand what was going on until I talked to Sil Hamilton, an AI researcher at McGill University who studies the language of language models. Hamilton explained that ChatGPT’s bad writing was probably a result of OpenAI fine-tuning it for one purpose, which was to be a good chatbot . “They want the model to sound very corporate, very safe, very AP English,” he explained. When I ran this theory by Joanne Jang, the product manager for model behavior at OpenAI, she told me that a good chatbot’s purpose was to follow instructions. Either way, ChatGPT’s voice is polite, predictable, inoffensive, upbeat. Great characters, on the other hand, aren’t polite; great plots aren’t predictable; great style isn’t inoffensive; and great endings aren’t upbeat.

In May, a man named James Yu announced that his startup, Sudowrite , was launching a new product that could generate an entire novel within days. The news provoked widespread scorn. “Fuck you and your degradation of our work,” the novelist Rebecca Makkai tweeted, in one typical comment. I wasn’t mad so much as skeptical. Sudowrite’s products were based partly on OpenAI’s models; it had big handicaps to overcome. I decided to test it.

I opened Sudowrite’s novel generator and dropped in a prompt describing a story I’d already written about an alcoholic woman who vomited somewhere in her house but couldn’t remember where. I was looking for a comic, gross-out vibe. Instead, the software proposed a corny redemption arc: After drinking too much and puking, the protagonist resolves to clean up her act. “She wanted to find the answer to the chaos she had created, and maybe, just maybe, find a way to make it right again,” it ended. Maybe, just maybe, Sudowrite hadn’t solved AI’s creative problems at all.

Before his Sudowrite announcement, Yu had agreed to talk to me, but after the backlash he asked to postpone. I was able to chat, though, with Matthew Sims, Sudowrite’s first engineering hire, who had left after 16 months to launch his own startup for AI-based screenwriting. Sims has a PhD in English from the University of Chicago. During his doctoral program, he told me, he kept thinking he would rather be writing literature than studying it—but he’d sit down, get 15 pages in, and stop. At the same time, he was getting interested in machine learning. It eventually occurred to him that if he couldn’t be a creative writer, maybe he could build a machine to write.

Sims acknowledged that existing writing tools, including Sudowrite’s, are limited. But he told me it’s hypothetically possible to create a better model. One way, he said, would be to fine-tune a model to write better prose by having humans label examples of “creative” and “uncreative” prose. But it’d be tricky. The fine-tuning process currently relies on human workers who are reportedly paid far less than the US minimum wage. Hiring fine-tuners who are knowledgeable about literature and who can distinguish good prose from bad could be cost-prohibitive, Sims said, not to mention the problem of measuring taste in the first place.

Another option would be to build a model from scratch—also incredibly difficult, especially if the training material were restricted to literary writing. But this might not be so challenging for much longer: Developers are trying to build models that perform just as well with less text.

If such a technology did—could—exist, I wondered what it might accomplish. I recalled Zadie Smith’s essay “Fail Better,” in which she tries to arrive at a definition of great literature. She writes that an author’s literary style is about conveying “the only possible expression of a particular human consciousness.” Literary success, then, “depends not only on the refinement of words on a page, but in the refinement of a consciousness.”

Smith wrote this 16 years ago, well before AI text generators existed, but the term she repeats again and again in the essay—“ consciousness ”—reminded me of the debate among scientists and philosophers about whether AI is, or will ever be, conscious. That debate fell well outside my area of expertise, but I did know what consciousness means to me as a writer. For me, as for Smith, writing is an attempt to clarify what the world is like from where I stand in it.

That definition of writing couldn’t be more different from the way AI produces language: by sucking up billions of words from the internet and spitting out an imitation. Nothing about that process reflects an attempt at articulating an individual perspective. And while people sometimes romantically describe AI as containing the entirety of human consciousness because of the quantity of text it inhales, even that isn’t true; the text used to train AI represents only a narrow slice of the internet, one that reflects the perspective of white, male, anglophone authors more than anyone else. The world as seen by AI is fatally incoherent. If writing is my attempt to clarify what the world is like for me, the problem with AI is not just that it can’t come up with an individual perspective on the world. It’s that it can’t even comprehend what the world is.

Lately, I’ve sometimes turned to ChatGPT for research. But I’ve stopped having it generate prose to stand in for my own. If my writing is an expression of my particular consciousness, I’m the only one capable of it. This applies, to be clear, to GPT-3’s line about holding hands with my sister. In real life, she and I were never so sentimental. That’s precisely why I kept writing over the AI’s words with my own: The essay is equally about what AI promises us and how it falls short. As for Sudowrite’s proposal to engineer an entire novel from a few keywords, forget it. If I wanted a product to deliver me a story on demand, I’d just go to a bookstore.

But what if I, the writer, don’t matter? I joined a Slack channel for people using Sudowrite and scrolled through the comments. One caught my eye, posted by a mother who didn’t like the bookstore options for stories to read to her little boy. She was using the product to compose her own adventure tale for him. Maybe, I realized, these products that are supposedly built for writers will actually be of more interest to readers.

I can imagine a world in which many of the people employed as authors, people like me, limit their use of AI or decline to use it altogether. I can also imagine a world—and maybe we’re already in it—in which a new generation of readers begins using AI to produce the stories they want. If this type of literature satisfies readers, the question of whether it can match human-produced writing might well be judged irrelevant.

When I told Sims about this mother, he mentioned Roland Barthes’ influential essay “The Death of the Author.” In it, Barthes lays out an argument for favoring readers’ interpretations of a piece of writing over whatever meaning the author might have intended. Sims proposed a sort of supercharged version of Barthes’ argument in which a reader, able to produce not only a text’s meaning but the text itself, takes on an even more powerful cultural role.

Sims thought AI would let any literature lover generate the narrative they want—specifying the plot, the characters, even the writing style—instead of hoping someone else will.

Sims’ prediction made sense to me on an intellectual level, but I wondered how many people would actually want to cocreate their own literature. Then, a week later, I opened WhatsApp and saw a message from my dad, who grows mangoes in his yard in the coastal Florida town of Merritt Island. It was a picture he’d taken of his computer screen, with these words:

Sweet golden mango, Merritt Island’s delight, Juice drips, pure delight.

Next to this was ChatGPT’s logo and, underneath, a note: “My Haiku poem!”

The poem belonged to my dad in two senses: He had brought it into existence and was in possession of it. I stared at it for a while, trying to assess whether it was a good haiku—whether the doubling of the word “delight” was ungainly or subversive. I couldn’t decide. But then, my opinion didn’t matter. The literary relationship was a closed loop between my dad and himself.

In the days after the Sudowrite pile-on, those who had been helping to test its novel generator—hobbyists, fan fiction writers , and a handful of published genre authors—huddled on the Sudowrite Slack, feeling attacked. The outrage by published authors struck them as classist and exclusionary, maybe even ableist. Elizabeth Ann West, an author on Sudowrite’s payroll at the time who also makes a living writing Pride and Prejudice spinoffs, wrote, “Well I am PROUD to be a criminal against the arts if it means now everyone, of all abilities, can write the book they’ve always dreamed of writing.”

It reminded me of something Sims had told me. “Storytelling is really important,” he’d said. “This is an opportunity for us all to become storytellers.” The words had stuck with me. They suggested a democratization of creative freedom. There was something genuinely exciting about that prospect. But this line of reasoning obscured something fundamental about AI’s creation.

As much as technologists might be driven by an intellectual and creative curiosity similar to that of writers—and I don’t doubt this of Sims and others—the difference between them and us is that their work is expensive. The existence of language-generating AI depends on huge amounts of computational power and special hardware that only the world’s wealthiest people and institutions can afford. Whatever the creative goals of technologists, their research depends on that funding.

The language of empowerment, in that context, starts to sound familiar. It’s not unlike Facebook ’s mission to “give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together,” or Google’s vision of making the world’s information “universally accessible and useful.” If AI constitutes a dramatic technical leap—and I believe it does—then, judging from history, it will also constitute a dramatic leap in corporate capture of human existence. Big Tech has already transmuted some of the most ancient pillars of human relationships—friendship, community, influence—for its own profit. Now it’s coming after language itself.

The fact that AI writing technologies seem more useful for people who buy books than for those who make them isn’t a coincidence: The investors behind these technologies are trying to recoup, and ideally redouble, their investment. Selling writing software to writers, in that context, makes about as much sense as selling cars to horses.

For now, investors are covering a lot of the cost of AI development in exchange for attracting users with the free use of tools like chatbots. But that won’t last. People will eventually have to pay up, whether in cash or by relinquishing their personal information. At least some of the disposable income that readers currently spend supporting the livelihoods of human writers will then be funneled to Big Tech. To our annual Amazon and Netflix subscriptions, maybe we’ll add a literature-on-demand subscription.

I’m sure I’ll face pressure to sign up for a literature-on-demand subscription myself. The argument will be that my life as a writer is better because of it, since I will be able to produce language, say, a hundred times faster than before. Another argument, surely, will be that I have no choice: How else will I be able to compete?

Maybe I’ll even be competing with AI-produced writing that sounds like mine. This is a serious concern of the Authors Guild and PEN America, both of which have called for consent from writers, and compensation, before their work can be used to train AI models. Altman, now OpenAI’s CEO, also stated before Congress that he feels artists “deserve control over how their creations are used.” Even if authors’ demands are met, though, I wonder whether it’d be worth it.

In one of my last phone calls with Sims, he told me he’d been reading and enjoying my novel, which had finally been published the previous year. Did I want him, he asked, to send me an AI-generated screenplay of it? I might have yelped a little. I might have used the word “terrifying.” Then I softened my stance, not wanting to be rude, or (worse) hypocritical. I explained that my novel had already been optioned and was in the process of being adapted—though the screenwriter was currently on strike over Hollywood studios’ refusal to, among other things, restrict the use of AI for screenwriting. I thanked Sims for his interest and declined.

What about the cost to literature when all that humans have put on the internet gets vacuumed up and repurposed in Big Tech’s image? To start, an AI-dominated literature would reflect the values, biases , and writing styles embedded in the most powerful AI models. Over time, it would all start to sound alike. Some research even suggests that if later AI models are trained using AI-produced text—which would be hard to avoid—the sameness of the material could trigger a scenario called model collapse, in which AI loses its grasp on how real human language functions and is no longer able to form coherent sentences. One wonders whether, at that point, humans will still have the ability themselves.

A thought experiment occurred to me at some point, a way to disentangle AI’s creative potential from its commercial potential: What if a band of diverse, anti-capitalist writers and developers got together and created their own language model, trained only on words provided with the explicit consent of the authors for the sole purpose of using the model as a creative tool?

That is, what if you could build an AI model that elegantly sidestepped all the ethical problems that seem inherent to AI: the lack of consent in training, the reinforcement of bias, the poorly paid gig workforce supporting it, the cheapening of artists’ labor? I imagined how rich and beautiful a model like this could be. I fantasized about the emergence of new forms of communal creative expression through human interaction with this model.

Then I thought about the resources you’d need to build it: prohibitively high, for the foreseeable future and maybe forevermore, for my hypothetical cadre of anti-capitalists. I thought about how reserving the model for writers would require policing who’s a writer and who’s not. And I thought about how, if we were to commit to our stance, we would have to prohibit the use of the model to generate individual profit for ourselves, and that this would not be practicable for any of us. My model, then, would be impossible.

In July, I was finally able to reach Yu, Sudowrite’s cofounder. Yu told me that he’s a writer himself; he got started after reading the literary science fiction writer Ted Chiang. In the future, he expects AI to be an uncontroversial element of a writer’s process. “I think maybe the next Ted Chiang—the young Ted Chiang who’s 5 years old right now—will think nothing of using AI as a tool,” he said.

Recently, I plugged this question into ChatGPT: “What will happen to human society if we develop a dependence on AI in communication, including the creation of literature?” It spit out a numbered list of losses: traditional literature’s “human touch,” jobs, literary diversity. But in its conclusion, it subtly reframed the terms of discussion, noting that AI isn’t all bad: “Striking a balance between the benefits of AI-driven tools and preserving the essence of human creativity and expression would be crucial to maintain a vibrant and meaningful literary culture.” I asked how we might arrive at that balance, and another dispassionate list—ending with another both-sides-ist kumbaya—appeared.

At this point, I wrote, maybe trolling the bot a little: “What about doing away with the use of AI for communication altogether?” I added: “Please answer without giving me a list.” I ran the question over and over—three, four, five, six times—and every time, the response came in the form of a numbered catalog of pros and cons.

It infuriated me. The AI model that had helped me write “Ghosts” all those months ago—that had conjured my sister’s hand and let me hold it in mine—was dead. Its own younger sister had the witless efficiency of a stapler. But then, what did I expect? I was conversing with a software program created by some of the richest, most powerful people on earth. What this software uses language for could not be further from what writers use it for. I have no doubt that AI will become more powerful in the coming decades—and, along with it, the people and institutions funding its development. In the meantime, writers will still be here, searching for the words to describe what it felt like to be human through it all. Will we read them?

This article appears in the October 2023 issue. Subscribe now .

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Progress in Hollywood Writers’ Strike Negotiations, but No Deal Yet

A third straight day of bargaining between the studios and the union ended without an agreement. Talks continued on Saturday.

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By Brooks Barnes and John Koblin

A third straight day of marathon negotiations between Hollywood studios and striking screenwriters ended on Friday night without a deal. But the sides made substantial progress, according to three people briefed on the talks.

The sides reconvened on Saturday.

The Friday session started at 11 a.m. Pacific time at the suburban Los Angeles headquarters of the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which bargains on behalf of the major entertainment companies. For the third day in a row, several Hollywood moguls directly participated in the negotiations, which ended a little after 8 p.m.

Robert A. Iger, Disney’s chief executive; Donna Langley, NBCUniversal’s chief content officer of Universal Pictures; Ted Sarandos, co-chief executive of Netflix; and David Zaslav, the chief executive of Warner Bros. Discovery had previously delegated bargaining with the union to others. Their direct involvement — which many screenwriters and some analysts said was long overdue — contributed to meaningful progress over the past few days, according to the people familiar with the talks, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the diplomatic nature of the efforts.

During the Thursday negotiations, the sides had narrowed their differences, for instance, on the topic of minimum staffing for television show writers’ rooms, a point that studios had been unwilling to engage on before the guild called a strike in early May.

The Thursday session took a turn, however, after the sides agreed to take a short break at roughly 5 p.m., according to the people familiar with the talks. The executives and studio labor lawyers had expected guild negotiators to return to discuss points they had been working on earlier. Instead, the guild made additional requests — one being that a return to work by screenwriters be tied to a resolution of the actors’ strike.

The actors’ union, known as SAG-AFTRA, joined writers on picket lines on July 14. Its demands exceed those of the Writers Guild. Among other things, the actors want 2 percent of the total revenue generated by streaming shows, something that studios have said is a nonstarter.

Several hours after talks ended on Thursday night, the guild emailed its membership to say that the sides would meet on Friday.

“Your negotiating committee appreciates all the messages of solidarity and support we have received the last few days, and ask as many of you as possible to come out to the picket lines tomorrow,” the email said.

The guild extended picketing hours on Friday to 2 p.m. Pickets have typically ended at noon.

In Los Angeles, several hundred writers turned up to picket outside the arching Paramount Pictures gate, far more than in recent weeks. The Writers Guild and SAG-AFTRA have been staging themed pickets to keep members engaged, and the theme on Friday happened to be “puppet day,” meaning that, in addition to picket signs, some marchers held felt hand puppets and marionettes. The mood was optimistic.

Outside Netflix’s Hollywood offices on Friday afternoon, picketing writers even began offering goodbye speeches , delivered via bullhorn. At the CBS lot in Studio City, the theme was “silent disco,” with several hundred writers dance-picketing while wearing headphones.

The talks were mostly back on track by the time picketing ended on Friday, according to two of the people familiar with the matter. On the sticky issue of minimum staffing for television shows, the sides were discussing a proposal in which at least four writers would be hired regardless of the number of episodes or whether a showrunner felt that the work could be done with fewer. (Earlier in the week, studios were pushing for a sliding number based on the number of episodes.)

They were also discussing a plan in which writers would for the first time receive payments from streaming services — in addition to other fees — based on a percentage of active subscribers. The guild had originally asked the entertainment companies to establish a viewership-based royalty payment (known in Hollywood as a residual) to “reward programs with greater viewership.”

The writers have been on strike for 144 days. The longest writers’ strike was 153 days in 1988.

“Thank you for the wonderful show of support on the picket lines today!” the guild’s negotiating committee said in an email to members late Friday. “It means so much to us as we continue to work toward a deal that writers deserve.”

Nicole Sperling contributed reporting.

Brooks Barnes covers all things Hollywood for The New York Times. He has reported on the entertainment business for two decades and lives in Los Angeles. More about Brooks Barnes

John Koblin covers the television industry. He is the co-author of “It’s Not TV: The Spectacular Rise, Revolution, and Future of HBO.” More about John Koblin

Our Coverage of the Hollywood Strikes

A Happy Ending?:  After 148 days on strike, writers of movies and television are returning to work with an agreement in hand. Here’s what the deal means for the future of American entertainment .

Back on the Air: Late-night shows were the first casualty of the writers’ strike, and they have been dark since early May. With a deal in place, they can now resume production .

Fraught Territory: How will the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures put on its star-studded fund-raiser this year amid the polarizing actors’ strike? Very carefully .

A Rude Word?: The term “content” has become popular to describe the work of people in entertainment. But the Hollywood strikes have shown how the phrase can devalue their creative endeavors .

Fran Drescher: The actor, who became a household name in the 1990s with her role in “The Nanny,” is now the president of SAG-AFTRA . She leaned into her Queens roots in a City Hall appearance  to urge support for the actors’ strike.

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Group chat: How to keep friendships between parents and non-parents alive

Gurjit Kaur

Tinbete Ermyas

Juana Summers

NPR's Juana Summers talks to New York Magazine writer Allison P. Davis, and Claire Fallon of the podcast Rich Text , about the difficulties of maintaining friendships between parents and non-parents.

JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:

For the last couple of weeks, as I've been scrolling through social media, there is one article that I keep seeing over and over again in friends' Instagram stories and Facebook posts. The article is from The Cut, and the headline reads "Adorable Little Detonators: Our Friendship Survived Bad Dates, Illness, Marriage, Fights. Why Can't It Survive Your Baby?" The fact of the matter is that as our lives change, so do our friendships. And whether you are the friend with kids or the only one without them, this can be a really challenging phase to navigate. There is just so much to unpack here, so we called up two people who have been thinking about this topic a lot. We're joined by Allison P. Davis. She is a features writer for New York magazine and The Cut, and she reported and wrote the article that spurred some new debate on this topic. Hi, Allison.

ALLISON P DAVIS: Hello. Thank you so much for having me.

SUMMERS: Thanks for being here. We are also joined by Claire Fallon, one of the authors behind the podcast and Substack "Rich Text." Alongside her co-host and collaborator Emma Gray, Claire has been writing about these kinds of issues for years. Hey, Claire.

CLAIRE FALLON: Hi. Thanks for having me.

SUMMERS: Thanks to you as well. All right, Allison, I want to start with you. Can you just start by telling us a little bit about your article and what made you want to explore the subject of what happens when parenthood enters the chat and the dynamics around some friendships - well, they're changing?

DAVIS: Sure. I mean, part of it was casual conversation with my editor where I was explaining that I was at this weird inflection point where I'm 37 and, a couple years ago, my very close friends started getting pregnant. And it was sort of an en masse thing. Like, it wasn't just one or two. It was - at one point, the count got up to nine friends who were in various stages of pregnancy or family planning. When that conversation started, I started doing a little research in April and started doing some reporting and started speaking to people who - on both sides - both parents and non-child-having people - were sort of feeling the same thing and wanted to talk about it.

SUMMERS: And, Allison, there is this piece of data that was in that piece that really surprised me, even if maybe it shouldn't have. And I want to ask you about it. It's from the journal Demographic Research in the year 2017, and it's research that comes out of the Netherlands. And it actually puts some data and research behind how the age that parents have a child impacted their personal relationships. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

DAVIS: Sure. I found the study super-interesting only because it gave me some guidelines to a question that started feeling existential, which was, will I lose all of my friends, and will I ever get them back? And the study says that sort of after the age of 3, people sort of come out of this haze, and they come back to their social lives, and they come back to being able to manage things, and they're a little freer. And you can sort of resume your close friendships again. And so in some ways, that was hopeful, just thinking, like, OK, this is not a forever. It's just an adjustment period. And all friendships have - all relationships have ebbs and flows. And this is just one to ride out, and we can come out of it on the other side even better.

SUMMERS: Claire, I want to learn a little bit more from you about where - kind of the viewpoint from which you come into this conversation. I think I'm remembering correctly that you have two kids, right?

FALLON: Yes. I have a 3-year-old, and I have a newborn.

SUMMERS: What was that like for you, and how did it impact your friendships?

FALLON: Yeah. So I was pretty anxious about it. And, I mean, as it played out, the reality is that, yeah, you just don't have as much time, and you don't have the freedom. You know, I can't go out without my baby unless I hire a sitter or unless my husband is home alone - now with two kids, which - neither of us knows how to be home alone with our two kids right now. So that's the next bridge to cross.

But, you know, you're kind of tied to your home in this way that makes it very difficult to socialize the way that I did before. I rely a little bit more on various scheduled-well-in-advance dinner dates after bedtime. I rely more on, let's meet up in the park for a little picnic with the baby and text, you know? And that's just the way that my friendships look right now. But, you know, I think that I was more anxious than maybe I had to be because I think in reality, we all care about each other, and we understood that we're just sort of at different life stages right now. And we have to give each other, you know, some effort but also some grace for the ways that we don't fit into each other's lives perfectly anymore.

SUMMERS: Allison, one of the things I really loved about your piece is that you not only interrogated your own experience with this topic but you also talked to this incredible range of people, parents and nonparents alike. And in those conversations, did you learn anything that surprised you?

DAVIS: Well, the thing that really surprised me was sort of this - I heard it from more than one person, especially from the parent side of things - that it isn't just a given how you're going to show up, not only in their lives as a parent but also in their child's lives as a friend. I had one woman, Jessiline, who I spoke to. She's a mom in Los Angeles who is a Black woman in her 40s who adopted a child, and she has a very close friend. And she asked him to be not just, like, an uncle figure but also a godfather and to really be involved. And it spooked him at first because he had never really had a lot of exposure to children. I think at some point in our conversation, he mentioned that he hadn't even, like, really held a newborn, and it made him feel slightly uncomfortable. And he took a little bit of a step back.

And in sort of questioning whether or not he knew how to be there for Jessiline but also for Jessiline's son, he discovered that he really, really did want to be part of her son's life in a real way that I'm like, whew. How do you have time for that and a job, where he's, like, taking the child to taekwondo, hanging out with him in the park, just having little, like, solo playdates? And I found that really inspirational that all it took was sort of a conversation but an honest beat of introspection to navigate something that could have really ended a long-term friendship. And I found that aspect of it surprising - that I don't just need to talk to, like, my mom friend and say, like, how do you need me to show up for you? Is it just coming over with dinner? Is it helping with this? But it's also, how do you want me in your child's life, and can I do that?

SUMMERS: Before I let both of you go, one of the reasons that I wanted to have this conversation with the two of you together is because this feels like a topic to which there's not one answer. There aren't necessarily easy answers. I mean, at this point in my life - and we're all in the same age bracket, so we can probably relate - but I've got so many friends who have kids, so many who have decided to be childfree by choice and, I should also note, a lot of friends who really want to be parents and have struggled to do so or haven't had the opportunity. And we're just all at such different places on this journey. And I just wonder, from each of your perspectives, how do you think we can approach our friendships and this kind of shifting, changing phase of life in a way that honors and respects where each of us are along this road and the fact that these are relationships that matter to us? What do you guys think?

FALLON: Yeah, I think it's all about trying to have the love and care for your friends to think about what they need and what they're going through before they have to remind you. I'm always trying to somewhat, if I can, anticipate what my friends might be thinking or feeling or worried about with, you know, navigating this so that, you know, they don't feel the need to have to defend themselves for me, you know, to go into these situations trying to be mindful of where they are in life and trying to take that into account in how I talk to them and how I structure our time together and, you know, to not always be trying to treat them as combatants where I need to secure my territory because we're friends. We love each other. And so we should be looking out for each other in these interactions and not just ourselves.

SUMMERS: Claire Fallon is a writer and podcaster behind "Rich Text." Thank you, Claire.

FALLON: Thanks for having me.

SUMMERS: And Allison P. Davis is a features writer for New York Magazine and The Cut. Thank you, Allison.

DAVIS: Thank you, guys.

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