Rachel Hills – Emerging Writers Festival, 7 Enviable Lines

Liz — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 23:13:57 +0000

Rachel Hills was the third Ambassador to speak at the Emerging Writers Festival. Rachel’s a widely published journalist and editor. She’s also an awesome blogger (with many of her articles available to view) and posts interesting tweets linking to interesting articles. I wish I was half as retweetable as her. I was excited to finally meet her, having met her virtually years and years ago when she was working on a story about labiaplasty (now that’s a long story).

Rachel has in her fabulous blogging way put up a transcript of her full talk, you may find it interesting to see the difference between what I distilled and what she said. The distillery says:

It is about who you know and how you’re known; this doesn’t mean being a suckup, but consistently doing work. Become known for producing good work and hitting deadlines
Submit now. Don’t hold yourself back with artificial barriers or thinking you have to jump through unspoken hoops before submitting to a publication.
You need to work hard
Write for publications you enjoy reading and what you want to read
Know your mag. Read a publication before you submit to it. Know the voice of the publication and pitch a specific story and angle to a specific mag.
Learn to leverage what you’ve already done and know. Build on your strengths, you have some.
Getting where you want to be will take longer than you think.

Tomorrow – it’s Ambassador David Milroy.

Liz Argall » Rachel Hills

Rachel Hills – Emerging Writers Festival, 7 Enviable Lines