'Do the kind of writing that you want to do. Do it now. Don’t be safe, don’t wait.'

A discussion with freelance writer and editor Camille Bromley

The beginning of freelance journalist Camille Bromley’s New York Times Magazine cover story, “Do Our Dogs Have Something to Tell the World?” invites readers to consider this very question in a reported essay-style opening, as Bromley brings home Ellie, a “black-eyed, bat-eared German shepherd puppy,” which she and her partner hope can develop more self-confidence. This leads Bromley to delve into the world of dog buttons, which involve an animal “stepping on multicolored plastic buttons on the floor, each disc emitting a word.”

What follows is a delightful 5,000-word story steered by Bromley’s curiosity. She starts out exploring the buttons and their popularity with pet owners, whose dogs put together toddler-like phrases: “BED LATER” and “WANT OUTSIDE NOW.”

But what makes this piece work beautifully as a longform story is where it goes next—Bromley dives into the Victorian age, Charles Darwin’s ideas about animal minds, and a long history of at-home animal experiments. We spend just enough time in history before meeting Federico Rossano, an associate professor of cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego, who is studying the dog buttons, but also worries this work could “destroy” his academic career.

The layering of elements make for a multidimensional and thought-provoking piece. A first-person exploration of a trend (and the people who are obsessed with it) braided with brief digressions into history, circling back to today’s science as experienced through a conflicted and controversial researcher. It is also just a fun read, even for those of us who are not dog people.

I really enjoyed talking to Bromley recently about her career, how she landed this story, and how she thinks about longform editing. She grew up in Central Illinois and attended the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana (as I did). She moved to New York to launch her magazine career later in life, becoming an editor and now also a freelance writer.

Bromley’s work has been published in the New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Wired, The New Republic, and National Geographic, among other outlets. She has worked as a features editor for Wired, The Believer, Harper’s, and the Columbia Journalism Review. Stories she has edited have been finalists for the National Magazine Award, anthologized in the Best American series, and adapted for This American Life and other media.

Before we get into our Q&A, I want to congratulate the Institute for Independent Journalists for pulling off another incredible conference, which took place virtually last week. So many A+ speakers with inspiring insights from folks like

Sari Botton

,

Jeffrey Yamaguchi

, Celeste Headlee, and Gina Chua, and pitching advice from an array of top editors. If you missed the live event,

The IIJ

virtual recordings are available until March 31st.

Also, I am occasionally interviewing editors and writers for the IIJ’s Freelance Journalism Podcast, and here is one I did recently with the legendary freelance journalist and writer Gil Asakawa, who writes about music, pop culture, and Japanese American and Asian American communities. He offers advice from his long and successful career about following your passions and the stories that excite you.

Lastly, there are limited spots left in

Kerra Bolton

’s five-week The Art and Ethics of Writing Travel Memoir class at

Narratively

Academy, also featuring

Brendan Spiegel

on how to pitch travel articles to top publications. These are two real pros with a such a depth of knowledge of their craft, and this will surely be a fantastic class.

Here is my Q&A with Camille Bromley, which has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Freelance journalist Camille Bromley, a former features editor for Wired, The Believer, Harper’s, and the Columbia Journalism Review.

Congrats on your recent cover story at the New York Times Magazine. You’ve been freelancing for less than a year, and this was such a fun story to read, so different from the darker stories we tend to see published.

I’ve been a freelance editor before. But this was my first year really jumping into primarily freelance writing, and my first goal was to write something fun. Something that was 100% for me. A story that only I would do, and some staff writer at a magazine is not going to necessarily think of.

So you were establishing your voice immediately, and the kind of writer you want to be.

Yeah. It's funny, someone asked me after the piece ran: “What's your next piece going to be about? Are you going to write about dogs again?” And I said: “Absolutely not.” I can't wait to never write about dogs again. I do not want to be labeled as “the dog writer.”

I love that you had the intention behind the story. The strategic thinking in how you're going to begin to define your freelance writing career. Can you talk about how this story came together?

I've had a lifelong interest in animals, and in particular the strange ways humans treat animals. Our relationships with animals are complicated and contradictory. There was a period when I read every book on animal cognition that was available. I had a huge amount of background knowledge about this subject. I was just naturally interested in it. So, I investigated the buttons.

I read the Christina Hunger memoir, “How Stella Learned to Talk.” It was interesting. She's coming from a place of scientific expertise in teaching non-vocal humans, or human children with autism. She has her method, being a speech language pathologist, and she applied that to dogs. I thought that was fascinating, and it mirrored a lot of experiments that went on in the Victorian era.

I was at Wired at the time and I thought: I'll just call up these scientists who work on dog buttons, and talk to them. I ended up leaving Wired, so I didn't publish the story there. But I was able to sell it to the New York Times Magazine later.

As a magazine idea, a social media trend itself is not a story. It might be an interesting thing to witness, but at the same time the social media aspect can repel a lot of readers or make readers inherently skeptical. No one trusts a social media trend, and no one trusts influencers. But what made this a story for me was when I talked to the scientist leading the study of the dog buttons.

First of all, he was just a great talker. He's very open. A lot of scientists are so careful with their wording. They hedge at every opportunity. Scientists and academics, although they're experts, often they make for terrible interviews. And he was not like that. Also, he was very frank about the fact that he's doing this dog button study, but he doesn't know if it's a good idea for him, because all the other scientists hate it. People disagreed with him, and they had pretty strong feelings that not only are the buttons stupid, but they are bad for the dogs. The stakes are still pretty small, of course — but it's just enough conflict to get a story moving.

I notice that when you're thinking about longform, you're also sort of thinking about it as an editor. I remember talking to Kevin Nguyen, features editor at The Verge, a couple months ago, and he talked about how sometimes the best stories are the ones that have clear stakes—but the stakes are actually pretty low.

Definitely. When I sat down to write the pitch, I wrote a version with the scientist and also the founder of a pet tech company. But I have a writing group that is enormously helpful. One of my friends in the writing group read this pitch, and she said: “It's a fun subject about dogs, but your pitch is all quotes from men talking.” So I cut that second guy totally out. And then the story became very clearly about the scientist’s quest to study these buttons.

Is your writing group made up of journalists?

No, they're actually fiction writers. Sometimes I totally feel like the odd one out, because I don't write fiction.

Which editor did you work with?

Sheila Glaser was the story editor. It got assigned because I mentioned the idea to Bill Wasik, and he actually knew about the buttons already. He's written a couple books about animals in society. So I think he could see the complexity in it. To be honest, I did not expect that this story would be one that would interest the New York Times Magazine. But it was interesting to one editor, and that was enough.

When you think of the science stories that you're drawn to, they are also stories that teach us something about ourselves, in a way. I'm always interested in the ones that explore psychology and behavior. Is that similar for you?

Definitely. These stories I'm interested in about animals are never actually about the animals. They're always about the humans. Humans projecting onto animals, or humans seeking things from animals.

It also feels like there's crossover there in the same themes we encounter when writing about AI. I know you edited that story by Vauhini Vara, “Ghosts,” which was in Best American Essays 2022 and adapted for This American Life.

It's interesting to look at “Ghosts” now, when AI is here, firmly present, and we recognize its capabilities. When that story was published, it was 2021. At that time, Chat GPT was not yet open to the public. There were some early versions of it, and you could get permission to use them. And Vauhini had done an early profile of Sam Altman. She was plugged into what was happening.

She sent me this pitch when I was an editor at The Believer. She had sent it around to a few editors, I believe. But I just happened to be pretty AI-curious. Language production by machine—that's interesting to me. How a non-human entity might produce or replicate language, and then how humans might respond. I thought what she did was so clever, in that she wrote the prompt—which was a story, not a question—and then had the AI generate sections. Her story got longer, and the AI story got shorter. You could see how the two played off each other.

It worked because she had a specific question she was trying to answer with the essay. It wasn't just “let's see what happens” or “let’s see how good or bad the AI writing is.” She had a real motivation: I don't know how to write about my sister's death, so can this machine do it for me? The reaction to that piece was so overwhelming. People were so affected by it.

I think we've seen a number of stories come out since then about AI chatbots mediating grief in humans. I can think of several magazine stories that were published later about people using chatbots to grieve the deaths of loved ones, But I feel this piece was at the forefront.

You went to the University of Illinois in Champaign, where I also went, but I majored in journalism. You didn't go to its journalism school?

I didn’t even know they had a big journalism school there. I was not interested in journalism. I was not really aware of what journalism was. I mean, that sounds crazy. But in my family, we didn't watch the news or read the paper. I didn't engage with journalism, but I read a lot of books. So, when I went to college, in defiance of my parents, I majored in English. I lived abroad for a number of years, teaching English, then I eventually moved back home, and I didn’t know what to do. I loved magazines, so I thought: Why don't I try to work in magazines? I had no idea what that meant. I think if I actually knew what it meant, and how hard it was, I probably would have been too scared to do it.

I just fumbled around trying to get internships. I was into food blogs at that time. It was peak food blog era, 2012. So I got an internship at Saveur magazine, which was my favorite food magazine. I was 28, doing unpaid internships, but I loved it because I was learning so much. And then I was lucky and got freelance fact-checking and proofing work right away so I was able to stick around in the industry.

So you were learning editing as you go?

It's not intuitive, actually. At least I didn't find it intuitive. I didn't arrive, and think: “I know what a good story is.” Not at all. It took many years to get to that point.

My first editing job was at Harper's. Each place has its own character and challenges, but I credit Harper's for giving me a super rigorous foundation, just setting a very high bar for writing. I put in a ton of work to learn how to edit, what makes a piece of writing tick. I started as a fact-checker. When you do fact-checking, you're seeing the reporting process, the behind-the-scenes. That was really useful for knowing how much work a good piece of writing is. You see the difference between what’s just ok and what’s truly good.

Harper's attracts very high-quality writers, so I just watched how they worked. One of the earliest pieces that I assigned was by Abe Streep, a story, “The Last Best Place: A Syrian refugee family’s search for home,” about a Syrian family that went to Missoula, Montana and resettled there. That was one of the very first feature pieces I edited. I knew how to clean up a sentence, but I certainly didn't know much about structure or framing. So honestly I was mostly learning from him.

And Streep’s piece won an American Mosaic Journalism Prize. I really believe we learn from each other in many ways, and we learn by reading other writers, dissecting their stories, and talking about how they did it. In your career, you've worked with Vauhina Vara, Abe Streep, Sarah Aziza, Mitchell Jackson. That's just a few. Stories you’ve edited have been a finalist for or won the National Magazine Award. Now you're on the writing side. What do you think you learned from working with these great writers?

What I'm not seeing is their writing process. How they arrived at the first draft. That's honestly where the majority of the work happens. Once you arrive at a draft, I feel like the biggest hill has been surmounted. People say: “Oh, you're a great editor.” I'm grateful, but writing is way harder than editing. We do need good editing, of course. It does make a difference. But the success of a great piece ultimately comes from the writer, not the editor. We always used to say: “An editor can turn a B piece into an A minus. But they can't turn a D into an A.”

What I learned from the good reporters is how much work goes into reporting, how many people they are calling, just the old-fashioned doggedness. To get one useful new fact in a sentence, you might reach out to 100 people, that's not an exaggeration. Early on as an editor, I am seeing this is what it takes to produce a fantastic piece.

Another editing question, as you looked at drafts, how did you think about structure and flow? How did you begin to think about structure, how a story—especially a long story—can be a compelling read throughout? Did you learn any tricks?

Yeah, there are certain tricks. There are certain formulas. The classic formula is 4-1-2-3-5, structure.

I don't think I've heard that one.

But you'll recognize it. Let's say you have a 5,000-word classic, old-school monthly magazine style story. Each section is 1,000 words, give or take. So, you have five sections, and you organize it chronologically from one to five, except you take out the penultimate part, the most exciting part, and you put it at the beginning. And that creates a sense of drama.

Oh yes, my editor called that “The Nine” because he thought of it as a chronology that began in media res and looped back, like a 9. We all have a different terminology, for the same thing,

You start with the best part, and then you hook the reader at that lead section, and then you step back in time to the beginning of the narrative, and then it unspools chronologically from there. That's a very classic way of ordering a magazine narrative.

But of course, each story is different. Each story is its own animal. There's no one formula that you can just apply and it works. And obviously, a lot of the pleasure in reading good writing is when writing mixes things up and it does things in an unexpected way.

What is a story? There are 1,000 answers to that question, and I think every writer, how they define it internally to themselves would look a little bit different from every other writer. Often, we say it has a beginning, middle and end. A true crime story seems relatively straightforward: Maybe you start with the crime, then the story moves through the investigation, and at the end, the mystery is revealed. But if it's more of a topic or exploring an issue, it's a lot less clear where the beginning or the end might be. So you have to, as the writer, make it up. You choose a time to begin, and you choose a time to end.

Do you think most writers figure out their structure the first time around? I know I have to rethink my structure many times, it's the hardest part.

It's very common for a writer to turn in a fully written first draft, and I say: “Your story actually starts with this character,” or we have to shift the balance of things. Let's expand this. Let's cut this whole other section.

Sometimes it again comes back to framing. You might think this seems like the most dramatic moment. Let me start there. But maybe that dramatic point is getting away from the point of the frame.

What I admire in good magazine editors is the ability to frame a story clearly and compellingly. That means knowing the parameters of the story, and the question you're asking at the outset. A good editor also has an intuitive sense for finding a unique angle. The other thing that a good editor knows how to do is they know how to sell the story, and that is so important. How do you convince a reader to pick up this piece?

For writers, craft is important to find your voice and to know how to structure a story, etc. But you also, crucially, need to know how to be a salesperson for your own work.

When you say salesperson, it's essentially setting up “here is why this needs to be a story.”

Yeah. Why this one? In the magazine world, nothing is obligatory. Each story is pretty optional. So when you write your lede, you must be convincing. You must be entertaining. Your story might be very smart and dutifully reported, but if it’s also boring, it’s over for you.

As you are thinking through your own pitches, how do you take yourself through the process of doing that—the selling part—convincing the editors that this is the story that needs to be told? What are you trying to check off for the more ambitious pieces?

There's certain buzzwords that editors like to use — we like a story that feels “surprising” or that has “stakes.” But I think what that really means is: Will the reader care? Personally, I’ve always liked stories that smartly identify something new in the zeitgeist. A cultural phenomenon or a cultural shift that's been happening and you can identify it and point to the historical causes behind it. Also, stories that tell us about what weird things other humans are up to in the world. What is riling some guy up in Iowa. Those make for interesting magazine stories.

As you are now in your freelance writing career, what is your goal right now, do you still want to edit or do you want to do both?

I like editing. I like working with writers. I like working on a team. I find it stimulating. I also like doing my own writing. When you're a features editor, you're assigning pieces that you personally enjoy, there is that freedom. But it never belongs to you. When you're a writer, you have much less power. But you're writing things that are meaningful to you. You can ask yourself: Do I want to spend three months doing this? There's just a gut response. Yes, I do. Or no, absolutely not. So it’s nice to be able to pay attention to my own sensibility.

What makes it fun for you on this side, as opposed to the editing side?

The doing of it is fun. You're not only sitting in front of a computer, looking at words. I don't have to wake up and get on Slack. That's fantastic. I get up and I think: Okay, what do I want to do today? I'm completely self-determined. So having that freedom, it's sort of irreplaceable.

Do you have advice on how to make that life work for others?

I would love to hear other people's advice! But I know for a fact that you need to figure out pitching if you want to make freelancing work, because it takes so much time. I honestly think writing a pitch is 30 to 40% of the total work of a piece. So, if you are putting together pitches and then not selling them, that is just such a huge time suck. Being able to develop relationships with editors where you have a sense of what they want, what they're likely to say yes to, what excites them, and then matching that with your own interests—that is kind of a crucial part of the equation. I feel my pitching is very targeted.

And then, I have been doing contract editing and that just pays so much better than writing. I'm just figuring it out, too, though. It's a scramble. You kind of feel overwhelmed all the time. That took some getting used to.

Again, I learn from the writers I’ve worked with. There's a huge difference between freelancers who are making it work — which is very rare, by the way — and freelancers who struggle. A successful freelancer doesn't waste their time. A successful freelancer is not breaking their head against the system, complaining about it. At least not in a way that's visible to me, the editor. Successful freelancers that I see identify the job, they do the job, and then they move on.

At the end of the day, you have to perform the job to get more work. And you can also have the power to not work for somebody if you feel like the relationship is not good.

Another point of advice that I try to remember for myself is when you enter into a freelance assignment, you're setting yourself up for success if you have a very clear idea of what the finished product will be. This goes back to knowing how to write pitches. The good writers know what the final outcome will look like, and they just do that until it's done, and then they file it. Maybe the less experienced people who have trouble with time management are kind of flip-flopping between: Should I do this? Or should I do that? I should also say an editor needs to also set clear expectations. I often find when a piece is not really working out, it's because there is either some miscommunication about what the final product would look like, or both the editor and the writer made the mistake of not making that clear at the beginning.

For the person who wants to up their game—they've done great work, they're solid, but they want to get to that next level with a piece that everybody remembers—what advice do you have to work on craft and overall skills?

Each writer has things they are naturally good at, and things that are more of a challenge for them. Some are fantastic reporters, but they cannot write a sentence without a cliche. Maybe someone is writing really lovely small essays, and they lack the confidence to take on something that has more stakes.

I would say to my younger self—or maybe my best piece of advice to emerging writers—is to do the kind of writing that you want to do. Do it now. Don’t be safe, don’t wait. I often see advice from features editors who say: “Don't try to write a feature right away. Write a 1,000-word article first. Pitch me a book review first.” I actually don't agree with that. As a features editor, someone's ability to write a book review or to write a 1,000-word article is zero indication of whether they can write a narrative feature.

If there's a real story in your pitch and you write it up compellingly, then as an editor I think there is probably something here. There’s enough for you to start, and I'll help you fill in the gaps. But if you haven't arrived at that story yet, then I can't really help you.

All writing is so hard, so time-consuming, even the seemingly small pieces. So don’t waste your effort on things that don’t feel meaningful. Surround yourself with generous people who give you confidence, and who you can learn from. And then go out and try to do the thing you want to do.